I’ve been involved in our color coding process for the last couple of days, and it occurred to me that we haven’t talked about that here lately.
Well, there’s no time like the present, so let’s talk.
Our color coding process is an early warning system that gives our attorneys a heads-up when things are amiss in a particular client relationship.
We code our clients every 30 days. A staff member calls each client and asks how things are going. The client usually says things are fine. On occasion, the client identifies a problem. Typically, the problem relates to phone calls or e-mails not being returned.
We code the client as “green,” “yellow,” or “red” based on the response. There’s a little subjectivity to the coding, but we’re pretty good at distinguishing between “happy,” “getting kind of unhappy,” and “psycho mad.”
We code the clients so that our attorneys will know about an upset as early as possible so they can address it and repair the relationship. To an extent, our attorneys are compensated based on our clients’ happiness, and we want the attorneys to have a chance to patch things up when the engagement isn’t going as well as our clients expected.
Why don’t we just have the attorney make the judgment call about how the client is doing? After all, the attorney is speaking to the client regularly. Shouldn’t the attorney know when things aren’t going well?
Well, have you ever been sitting with your spouse at a nice restaurant and talking about how this place isn’t as good as you had hoped? You’d heard that it was great, but so far, you were only mildly satisfied. The service was slow, the food was nothing special, and the atmosphere was so-so.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, the chef walks over. “How is everything?” he asks. You find yourself saying, “Great, everything is very good,” while shaking hands with him. He wanders off with a smug little smile on his face, and you wonder why you just said what you said.
I’m not here to explain why you said it. I don’t really understand it, even though I’ve done it many times myself. What’s really odd—to me anyway—is that I’m usually willing to tell the waitperson when things aren’t right. For some reason, however, I won’t tell the chef.
Our clients do the exact same thing. They say they’re happy when they aren’t, especially when speaking to the attorney working on their case.
Our clients won’t tell their attorneys how they feel about the representation until they reach the breaking point. Once they’re at that “psycho mad” point, they’ll be happy to tell you how they feel. They’ll also be in a place from which it is very hard to return. They have reached and exceeded the breaking point.
The staff people making the color coding calls get a different kind of feedback. They often get this mysterious thing called “the truth.” Knowing the truth before the case is finished allows us to go into recovery mode when things aren’t going as planned. If we don’t know the truth, we can’t fix the problem.
Our color coding process heads off lots of problems: it alerts us to issues, and, most importantly, it allows our attorneys to end cases with happy clients who can go out in the community and say nice things about the work we did and the smart decision they made in hiring us to do it.
