Professional firms know they must depend on reliable, consistent and frequent communication with their clients, or fall peril to changeable loyalties and eventual loss of client and associated fee revenue. To effectively communicate with their markets, firms need to work with the modes of communication used by their target clients.

While new ways of contact are evolving at an increasing pace, today the most common method is still in the written form. Since communication across many stages of the client/matter life cycle is paper-based, communication with clients has traditionally also remained as paper-based content.

The components of professional services delivery – especially for what might be described as “volume” matters can be summarised in terms of workflow, a matter (or practice) management system capturing matter related details, a reference data library, a document output solution and an intranet site. These are all components familiar to tech savvy clients yet often missing in “less than tech savvy” professional firms.

And it is here that we have the disconnect: clients look for answers to their queries using a vast array of technologies and media … while traditional professional firms still communicate with their markets primarily through the paper-based document. Clearly, many professional firms are missing out on critical client interaction scenarios!

Having the ability to communicate with clients through the media they prefer (phone, fax, print, email, web, SMS, mobile communications, social networking etc.) is a critical success factor for firms expecting to engender long term loyalty and lifetime value from the client. Professional firms that want to stay in step with their clients have started the transition of legacy environments to allow their staff to support multi-channel communications.