When you’re first starting your divorce financial planning practice, it’s very common to focus all of your energies on marketing and efforts to get your name out into the community. This is a very reasonable strategy considering that if you don’t have clients you don’t have a business. However I often find that my clients focus so much energy on marketing they forget that once they have clients they need to have a system in place to provide them with very high level of service to ensure future referrals and a stellar customer service experience.

Ask yourself what would happen if two clients hired you today. Do you have an onboarding system in place? Do you have a group of documents that you know you need to provide to get their engagement up and running? Do you have a retainer agreement ready? Do you have a document list prepared? Perhaps most importantly, do you have a follow-up system in place?

Follow Up With Your Clients

Keep in mind that when the clients hire you for your assistance in their divorce case, they are typically deep in “divorce brain”. They will often only digest about 10% of what you tell them and will need constant reminders of what is expected of them. One of the best practices I can recommend is something we do at my office called Follow-up Friday. Every Friday we send a status email to every client that we have letting them know where their case is and what the next steps are. This is an opportunity to clearly define documents that we might be waiting on from the client as well as any tasks that they have been assigned. Numerous times in my history I have had clients go silent for several weeks. When I finally reached out to them to ask about the final documents that I had been waiting on, I would hear that they thought they were waiting on me. Simple weekly follow ups will avoid this kind of confusion. .

Customer Care

When you get your first divorce client, case management may seem fairly simplistic. But once you are getting 3 cases a month or more, it can become significantly more challenging. Be sure that you are using calendar blocking to block out times on your calendar for processing the data, inputting into family law software, following up with clients and preparing reports. This way when new clients come in you will be more able to set realistic expectations for how long it might take to process their case.

These are just a few tips to ensure that the client interaction is just as professional and positive as your marketing efforts are with other professionals. If you like these kinds of tips and tricks you may want to consider our next two-day event in Phoenix set for the end of June COVID allowing.

For more information, contact Leslie@smarterdivorcesolutions.com