Your Time Is Just As Valuable As Mine
When speaking with clients and friends alike, it’s a common complaint that professionals like doctors and lawyers seem to think their time is more valuable than the people to whom they provide services.
Doesn’t that drive you nuts? When someone thinks they’re more important than you because they have a piece of paper on the wall that says they went to medical or law school? When some dermatologist keeps you waiting for nineteen minutes in his exam room because he has “other patients” he’s helping while he should be helping you?
It makes zero sense to me. Just because I went to law school and I provide a specialized service doesn’t mean my time is any more valuable than my clients’ time, which is exactly why I keep my calendar wide open when I have a client appointment. As soon as I hear the receptionist announce my visitors have arrived, I stop what I’m doing and head straight to the front of the office with a handshake and a smile.
Why? Because it’s easy to do, it doesn’t cost me anything, I think it makes a good first, second, or third impression, and it doesn’t make sense not to do it.
What I never do is what other attorneys do, especially those whom I’ve hired for my own legal needs: tell clients that I’m not going to have the time to get to their case because I have other things to do. Believe it or not, I’ve actually had colleagues who I’ve hired to help me with basic transactional matters say that to me: “I’m not going to have the time to get to it today, blah, blah, blah.”
There are many reasons why some attorneys will never rise above the realm of solo practice and they will never have an empire of a law firm that they can one day sell if they want to retire. One of those reasons is telling clients that they have other client matters they have to handle and/or they’re too busy to get to it right away.
Can you imagine placing an order with Amazon.com and then receiving an email that stated, “While we’d love to fulfill your order right away, we have a lot of other orders that came in before yours, so we’re going to ship your order as soon as we ship the other ten million orders that came in before your order. This could take a few weeks. Please be patient.”
Are you kidding me? Even if an attorney has other matters he or she has to handle and he or she is not going to have the time to immediately work on your case, the last thing he or she should do is to tell you that he or she is too busy for your case. Instead, he or she should explain, in so many words, “Your case is a priority. Before I move forward, though, I want to make sure I’ve got all of my legal research ducks in a row and spend a few more minutes making sure there isn’t anything I’m possibly overlooking. That said, you should hear from me within a day or so. If anything comes up between now and then, don’t hesitate to contact me, preferably by email. But most importantly, I wanted to make sure that you knew that I haven’t forgotten about you and I’ll be working hard on your case.”
It seems so simple but the attorneys who know nothing about customer service, they take a retainer, put the case on the back-burner because the manner in which they conduct their practice is nowhere within driving distance of efficient, and then they leave a client in the dark for days, if not weeks. When the client eventually calls to find out what’s going on, the response is, “I’m not going to have the time to get to it today.”
(I even had a contractor in my home recently and, when I passed by the room in which his helper was working, I heard the guy complain, “I wanna go home!” If going home to hang out is more important than doing the job, then that is one contractor who I’m never going to work with again.)
There’s no place for that any more, especially not in the digital age of online reviews and ratings, and especially when almost every neighborhood has more than one doctor or lawyer who can address a patient’s or client’s needs. Of course, not being a doctor myself, I can’t speak to how a doctor should run a practice, but when it comes to lawyers, clients should ask upfront, “When will I hear from you after I give you all of this money to handle this problem for me? Can I email you when I have a question? How long does it take you to respond? Will I hear from you or am I going to be bounced around from one legal assistant to another?”
Every professional in the world should do everything in their power to make a positive impression on their clients. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what that involves. If you’re a lawyer, Google “most common client complaints,” and make sure you never do any of the things on that list.