Are you looking for a secret formula to maximize your firm’s potential? If your 2023 goals are to:
- Improve client satisfaction
- Increase employee productivity
- Sign up for more cases
- Get higher case values
Then welcome to the age of Digital First.
Employees are your number one asset and your number one liability. Think about your staff. When you started your firm, you focused on client satisfaction and maximizing your case values. These goals are easy to manage when you only have a handful of clients and a few employees. But as your firm grew, these core values become impossible to manage. You have little control over how an employee is treating clients, medical providers, or insurance agents. You don’t have the technology to see what everyone is saying. You really don’t have the time to understand how far out of whack things have gotten. The only measurements you currently have are internet reviews, “how are we doing” surveys, and sadly enough a decline in cases.
Your employees make many decisions every day. Most of these decisions are based on time and prioritizing who needs the attention first. In making those decisions amount of effort plays a big role. What does this mean for your clients? Most get pushed aside and made to wait. The many channels of communication can also cloud the priority process. Your team have slowly become prisoners to their phone. Simple client calls looking for an update quickly turn into 10 minutes of lost time for your employees. Have that happen 20-30 times a day and you are quickly looking at upwards of 4 hours a day spent chasing phone calls. Not much time to add value to a firm when all you are doing is chasing phone calls.
So, what is the answer? Firms everywhere are looking at AI solutions to speed up wait times for receiving records, bills, and other documents quickly. In addition, firms are looking for new CRM and intake programs to systems to retire their aged systems. But this is for the firm to benefit from efficiencies. You still have employees who are overworked and clients that are under-served.
What is Digital First?
What if I could show you how a Digital First environment could make every employee a productive powerhouse?
Digital first represents a fundamental shift in providing service. It’s a strategy where firms put a human-like digital agent, armed with Conversational AI and Intelligent Automation, on the front lines of their client service and intake centers to resolve virtually at first touch calls and inquiries, with the same levels of completeness and personalization that would be provided by human agents.
This is not designed with the intent of putting human clients and customers in an endless IVR loop with a basic chat bot. It is about taking the majority of the burden of work off of human agents. Allow the digital agent, let’s call her Amelia, to attempt to solve 100% of inbound requests. Of that 100% of requests or inquiries, maybe Amelia can handle 75-80%. With Amelia handling the bulk and the low hanging fruit she has now freed your human employees up to make sure that the additional 20-25% of requests can be handled by a human who has time to give that request their full attention.
As you can see, this shift if not to downplay or eliminate the essential role that humans play in customer service delivery, it is actually quite the opposite. With the extra time to focus on the calls that digital agents can’t, your humans will be even better positioned to perform the higher-value support and jobs that build customer loyalty and retention. Conversational AI is the ability to open your humans up for creative thinking.
Allow Amelia to gather basic information on every single potential new client. Ensuring that your humans only speak to someone who has been prequalified as a hot lead. Your PNCs will receive such fast resolution that they will not even have time to consider another firm. Your case managers will now only have to handle emergencies that are actually emergencies. Your clients will never again feel in the dark about what is happening with their case.
Albert Einstein once said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” For your firm to continue to compete in your market you will need to be as efficient and scalable as possible. Digital First is going to be your firm’s ability to kickstart your progress towards growth in a digital economy.