Client Experience Innovation

When clients hire a professional services’ firm they are buying more than just a great outcome and a professional job; they are also buying a journey over time. If the client journey is painful and not value conferring beyond coming up with the right technical answer, the “whole product” is not delivered. As a result, the firm’s competitive advantage is lost or diminished.

Edge International’s Client Experience Innovation (“CEI”) practice puts firms in a position to understand and deliver the many ways a client can experience value during the course of an engagement. We help our CEI clients answer the following questions:

• What are the sources of highly differentiated technical legal value we deliver?
• What are the sources of other (often more important!) non-legal value we deliver?
• What is it about the way we produce our client work that uniquely benefits our clients?
• How can we work with each other internally to enhance our team member collaboration and align it with the external client experience we want to deliver?

CEI sources of value that go beyond doing a technically professional job can be unique work product generating processes, professional development trainings, structural features of the firm like its cost structure and leverage model, the way clients benefit from the firm’s relationship base, etc. We help our clients think expansively and develop new competencies to support a signature experience that is different in kind.

Differentiated client experiences are “innovative” client experiences (see “Law Firm Differentiation and Delivering a Signature Client Experience” for further insight).

We at Edge aim to deliver a similar experience for our own CEI clients through the following process:

• Inventory what your firm is doing today to confer compelling value to clients.
• Define other sources of experiential, business, and legal value your firm could support.
• Define how your internal team members and lawyers could venture and work together to support the many sources of client value your firm would like to deliver.
• Create a Signature Experience Playbook, and other deliverables documenting your firm’s whole product, and the manner in which you need to work together to provide it.
• Train your lawyers and staff on your firm’s unique CEI principles.