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Some people are really passionate about scissors. Fiskars, a manufacturer of scissors, knives and garden tools, recognizes and appreciates their passion—so much so that it’s created an online community called The Fiskateers for customers who love to scrapbook using Fiskars’ products.
Participants in this virtual hobby group exchange helpful tips and ideas. But, more than that, they’re volunteer innovators and ambassadors of the Fiskars’ brand, suggesting new products and trumpeting the benefits of ones they already use.
This is not an isolated phenomenon. Word-of-mouth marketing experts Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba have dubbed this kind of customer enthusiasm—and the organic marketing and sales opportunities it creates—customer evangelism.
Word-Of-Mouth Marketing Takes Hold
In their insightful book and e-manifesto on the topic, McConnell and Huba assert that we’ve entered a new era in which people make consumer decisions by relying on the word of trusted family members, friends and colleagues. Consequently, they state, “customer-driven referrals [have become a] valuable new currency in an organization’s growth.”
Although McConnell and Huba depict a word-of-mouth revolution, you might wonder what they find so revolutionary. After all, how many times have we heard the business adage: “Acquiring a new customer is five to six times more expensive than keeping a current one happy”? But as McConnell and Huba explain, there’s a big difference between mere customer loyalty and customer evangelism.
Customers Crave Emotional Connections
Customer evangelists, they say, have “an emotional connection” to a product or service and, by extension, to the company or individual providing it. Among other common attributes, customer evangelists:
- Passionately recommend your business to friends, neighbors and colleagues
- Deeply believe in your company and its people
- Offer you unsolicited praise and suggestions for improvement
- Forgive occasional service lapses
- Freely extol your virtues
McConnell and Huba conclude that the best way to build and sustain your business in this new era is to cultivate evangelists “who will act as missionary zealots, spreading the word and recruiting new customers” for you.
After first reading McConnell’s and Huba’s observations several years ago, I started weighing their relevance to the legal profession. Most lawyers rise and fall on their books of business—on the quality and quantity of their client relationships. It’s widely reported, however, that client discontent and defection is prevalent.
On a micro level, this problem has been attributed to poor client service, outmoded billing practices, stiff competition among firms and uncertain economic times. On the macro level, there’s the Broken Windows Theory. As originally conceived, this theory of community decay holds that disorder in urban neighborhoods leads people to be disorderly. Metaphorically speaking, if you don’t fix broken windows quickly, people get the message that nobody cares and more vandalism and ruin follows.
In Broken Windows, Broken Business: How the Smallest Remedies Reap the Biggest Rewards (Business Plus, 2005), media and PR expert Michael Levine applies the theory to the business world. He opines that companies should place a premium on identifying and quickly repairing their broken windows—those aspects of their operations that ward off consumers by signaling an indifference to their satisfaction.
Given the ample empirical evidence that the attorney-client relationship window is broken, and in view of larger uncertainties in the current legal marketplace, lawyers and law firms would benefit from engaging in and embracing the tenets of customer (or client) evangelism.
Encourage Clients To Sing Your Praises
This raises a key question for lawyers to consider: What would compel our clients to voluntarily shout our praises until the rafters ring?
According to some authorities, lawyers can turn clients into raving fans by:
- Projecting a professional image
- Maintaining a positive and helpful attitude
- Communicating in a courteous and reliable manner
- Producing excellent work
- Getting client feedback on a regular basis
- Becoming well-acquainted with the client’s industry
While these are all positive action points for lawyers to employ in building and maintaining client relationships, they aren’t essential to cultivating client evangelists.
As McConnell and Huba suggest, client evangelists crave emotional connection and validation that can’t be satisfied by a practitioner’s task mastery alone. It requires authenticity—a desire and ability to put down our guard, open up and let our clients get to know who we are, what’s important to us and where we stand. It also requires empathy and compassion—a desire and ability to see the people behind the legal matters we take on. We need to understand their feelings and needs as well as what’s meaningful to them.
Opening up and being empathic and compassionate with clients might not come naturally to some lawyers. It’s not surprising. We’re trained to translate human relations into the three R’s: rules, rights and responsibilities. As a result, we’re well-versed in transforming complex, emotion-laden situations into a dry set of facts and relevant law. For many, the prospect of having to authentically engage with clients on an emotional level can be pretty daunting.
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