Let’s face it, it’s inevitable! Law firms as hard as they try, like every other business will at some time have a disgruntled client.
However, with the advent of “online” the disgruntled client now has a megaphone at their disposal through the use of review platforms and of course, social media.
At Fast Firms, in the context of reviews, our methodology is that you should always have enough of great reviews in the bank that in the event that one comes across the bow, they’re not an imminent threat. That’s why we’re doing everything in our power to ensure that your firm has enough credits when an unexpected withdrawal occurs.
Fundamentally, you must have a system in place to drive positive reviews, but it needs to coincide with technology that minimises the risk of one of those reviews being unexpectedly bad.
At Fast Firms, our FirmRanker software that most of our clients are using is seeing great results. It makes it easy to get great reviews whilst also minimising the risk of getting bad ones.
On the Facebook front, like Google reviews, bad comments or reviews can sneak in without you being prepared for them. We’ve fielded plenty of support requests from firms on a Friday afternoon or Saturday morning aghast that an unhappy client has vented their spleen on a most recent post, or worse, every post (we’re helping a law firm deal with this very issue.)
In this regard, what we do is run our sentiment analysis software that upon each comment being posted it looks for words that are invariably associated with bad reviews then hides those comments. The difference between hiding and removing is that by hiding, only the person who has posted the comment continues to see it. At times, deleting posts completely can further infuriate the angry client and edge them towards other channels where it can be inherently difficult to have bad reviews removed.
One important feature of the software is that we can add a person’s name to the “negative” sentiment list which in effect will hide the person’s post immediately. For this to occur we need to be notified of this person.
Take Home Message
Start today insulating your law firm from bad reviews by actively seeking good ones. If you’re a client of Fast Firms, the best place to start is to have us integrate our software. It’s free!
After we have done this for you, the next step is to hard-baked into your file close process an email with the single objective of seeking a review. Don’t do what some firms have and have multiple objectives in this email. It needs to be a simple email with a link to the review form that our software, FirmRanker will generate for you.
In relation to Facebook, talk with us about our sentiment analysis software (though if you’re a client of Fast Firms, oblivious to you, we will have this running for you in the background).
This all said, importantly, keep us abreast of any potential threats we should be aware of in assisting your firm manage social channels. This allows us to set up some precautionary steps to manage the potential risk.