Consumer Maven

Lovemarks, Love Bytes and Law Office Software

The study of consumer behavior fascinates me.   Doing field observationals on how people shop reveals physical behavior patterns that help understand the purchasing process.  Understanding why and how people buy is important to getting sales.  Despite this, it is customer satisfaction with the product that can make or break a company’s long term success.  Customer satisfaction isn’t just a survey at the end of the purchase cycle.  It is so much more than that:  it is the sum total of the buying or shopping experience.

For business software, usually the shopping experience is about finding the right software, installing it, and learning how to use it with varying degrees of success.  If another package hits the market and we’re not enthralled with what we have, we often look to see what else is out there and often we replace what isn’t completely working to our needs.  Of the business software on the market today, there are few that were the leaders when they first were released.  For anyone who used the predecessors to MS Office Productivity Software in the 1980s, we all remember multitudes of programs that no longer exist today.  The same can be said for most other user applications. 

An exception to this is Needles, a law office case software program designed to manage cases.  The Needles software was first launched in 1985 under the name PINS, which stood for Personal Injury Negligence System.   Chesapeake Interlink, Ltd., a company already familiar with the application needs of business users, was approached by a group of attorneys who wanted customized software for their practice.  The PINS software was the first case management software to hit the market.  Ten years later, when many software companies disappeared from this application’s landscape, the firm launched Needles, which runs on a PC platform.  In 2005, the company celebrated its 20^th year of business in providing attorneys and law offices a product that they love.  Yes, I said LOVE. 

There are few things more unlikely than to think that attorneys and their staff can find love in a byte, until I heard about the Needles experience.  Customer experiences with one company become a sum of memorable events.  When it comes to software, not all companies can provide consistently positive memories.    In February of 2005, Chesapeake Interlink, Ltd. sponsored a contest  in which customers were asked to finish the sentence, “I love my Needles because…”  Clearly Chesapeake Interlink, Ltd. and Needles have earned much customer love.  When I was given a copy of the book of over 180 responses, (Needles has about 400 client testimonials in total and that number is always growing) I was intrigued at the type of comments. 

Written primarily by attorneys or their paralegals, Needles users proclaimed their love for the software and for the Company.  Apparently the system is so well designed in serving the needs of law offices that it has the ability to capture all pertinent information related to any case and provide any information on any case with relative ease.  Their to-do list, the heart of the system and the love of any calendar aficionado keeps a practice humming and on schedule, without concerns that missed deadlines or statues will be blown.  Needles was frequently credited for: ‘getting my life back,’ ‘being able to provide superior client service,’ and ‘knowing what I need to know when I need to know [it].”  Other comments included outright proclamations of love for Needles, because “Needles loves me back.”  When was the last time you said that about your office software?

In his book titled, “LOVEMARKS,” Kevin Roberts, CEO Worldwide of Saatchi & Saatchi, refers to trademarks that have emotional connections and love. Roberts also makes it clear that where love and products are concerned, love must be also earned.  I was struck at how much of what defined a LOVEMARK also defined the Needles software experience.  Roberts states that companies must be passionate, involve their customers, celebrate loyalty, tell and retell great stories and accept responsibility.  All of these define Chesapeake Interlink, Ltd. and their relationship with customers.  

The firm gives superior customer service in many areas.  The sales staff doesn’t push to “sell” their product.  They help prospective customers understand how Needles can help make their practice better.  The training department doesn’t provide mass training for groups of users, but helps law offices, insurance companies and other users so that the system is set up for their business requirements.  Needles is highly customizable; user configurations then become highly personalized.  Not surprisingly, while Needles has converted customers from other case management programs, they have never lost a customer to a competitor.  Calls to the company will never leave you in voice mail jail.  Are you ready for this??? A person, yes, a living, breathing human being answers all calls and makes sure you get taken care of.  Needles upgrades come primarily from the input of their client user base.  The firm has a Customer Advisory Board.  How much better than that can you get?

You can check them out either at their corporate website, Needles Case Management Software for Law Offices, or their press site, which includes several customer stories about attorneys who love their case managment software programs. 

Purplus and confused

Some friends of mine are still in grad school and they needed a copy of Adobe Acrobat to make .pdf files.  One of them found a good price, or so she thought, at Purplus Software.  Not being an Adobe expert, she ordered what she thought was the appropriate product, for $124.95. Mysteriously, they received an email that the credit card was declined. My friend is notoriously efficient, and cut/pastes their credit card information from a flash drive file, so it is virtually impossible to make a mistake. Perhaps a transposition on the dates?? The CSV code is easy to remember.   

In a hurry, she went back online and put another order through. Haste makes waste is the saying. The price for Adobe Acrobat was $165.95. Out of curiosity she went back to their website and found that they offered an Adobe Acrobat for $97.95.  She requested a price refund for the difference and was refused.  She was also told that she would probably incur a restocking fee if she returned it.  Because they needed to use the software, they did not have the luxury of time and had to use the software.  My friend has major health issues, so simply running to the store is not an option for her. 

I was so floored that a product could have three prices, but here’s what I was told via emails sent to her:

The first order was for item product ID# 8345. Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard Academic.  That was the one she initially ordered for $124.95.

The second time she ordered, somehow her search for Adobe brought up Adobe Acrobat 6 Standard, $165.95, which at the day I am writing this, is no longer on their website. 

The third offering of Adobe Acrobat 6 Standard was for $97.95. That item is also no longer on their website.  I do have to acknowledge that it is an abnormally low price so perhaps that was a web pricing error.  My friend really just wanted a price adjustment, ideally from the lowest priced item they were currently selling, but she would have been happy for a price adjustment to the item she first ordered. No dice.

Katie, from Customer Service told her that, “My boss has informed me that we cannot match the previous price as the price we paid for the particular software that you ordered (which was CD with manual, and the one we are currently selling is OEM) was higher than the price of the new software we just received. You may refuse the package however please note we do charge a 15% restocking fee for returned unopened items.”

I looked at the materials that came with the highest price software my friends were charged for, and it too, was OEM for Dell.  Obviously the OEM story doesn’t pan out. We all know that ordering online can be risky, but generally most companies that care about their reputation make stellar efforts to be fair and equitable towards their customers. I can’t help but feel that in this case, this is a company that just didn’t care to go that extra mile.

Must have software for your law or professional services office

A friend of mine is working on a project for a software company. Years ago I had a life managing and implementing financial and other user applications. Despite my education in business, I was at heart a tech nerd. Many years later, I am still proud of my geek heritage. I maintain an unnatural love for almost all things software, especially when I hear about an application area that is still so untapped.

Some time ago, when I needed the advice of an attorney, I was both surprised that they had any computer savvy at all and yet appalled that their offices were so low tech. One of the partners admitted to me that the office was held together by a young twenty-something gal who was attending law school at night and ‘a whiz’ on the computer. Whiz or not, she could only do what the programs they had would allow her to do. I remember going to meetings and watching with amazement as the paralegal, soon to be attorney, manually dug through amazing mounds of physical files and papers while putting cases together for trial. In between it all I would, hear lawyers yelling out reminders to check for issues of conflicts and scheduling concerns, and remind each other about impending filing deadlines that needed to be met. From what I heard about other law offices, this was common in the practice of law. Clearly, the high tech corporate world I was from had not met many law office environments.

Fast forward to 2006 and my friend tells me about something called case management software. Being in a business that requires a lot of contact management and billable time, my ears perk up. It turns out she’s working on a project for a company called Chesapeake Interlink, Ltd. I asked for more information, all the time wondering if this is something I can use to help our own professional services consulting business.

First, I should tell you what this software, called Needles, does. While it was designed specifically for law firms and those in the legal profession, it is a must have for anyone in the professional service industry who needs to track time, have a place to connect emails to projects or clients, add client notes, be able to keep track of all of a case or project’s documents, calendar appointments and deadlines (so we don’t miss important deadlines and meetings), track case status and other important information,  and check our system for conflict of interest issues. (Our consultancy makes it a policy to never take on another client who is a direct competitor of an existing one. Understanding how a client’s connections can affect this policy is also important to us.) By using the software we can track communications, Statute of Limitation dates, provider information, expenses, multiple payments, etc. You can see how, even if you are not an attorney, this software is like having an administrative staffer working for you 24/7. It also has a report writing system so that customized reports can be created on virtually any field, standard or user-defined, in the database.

Besides all of the critical issues that this software handles, it is also highly flexible, or in as we would say in business, it is highly customizable. Remembering in awe the Patagonian sized mountains of files at my attorney’s law office, I asked my friend if this software from Heaven had any solutions for that. “Of course,” I heard my friend respond. The software also had document management capabilities that provided links to any letter, pleading, photograph, diagram, scanned item or other document that needs to be viewed in the case file. I suddenly saw a great leap forward for the environment, as millions of trees breathed a collective sigh of relief that no additional members of their family would end up being fodder for the client’s files or any extra needed copies.

I’ve been an adopter of calendaring systems as soon as I ever found out about them. For those of us who live by our Palm Pilots or our Outlook or ACT! programs, Needles has something for all of us. The heart of the Needles system is the checklist. A daily task list is automatically created as each file progresses that enables the client to easily record completion of items, reassign tasks to accommodate staffing changes, generate or change task due dates, create single and repeating items and track multiple statute of limitation dates or warnings. It is truly a system from the “Goddess of Scheduling.”

While the nuts and bolts of all the unbelievably cool things this software does for anyone who needs it are impressive, what struck me most was the company culture of this organization.  Now that I’ve talked about Needles Case Management Software as if it was the only software on the planet, (Microsoft withstanding; of course), I have to tell you about the company.

Chesapeake Interlink, Ltd. was the first company to ever make a case management software program for law offices. From what I understand, in the early mid-1980s a group of attorneys approached them and asked if they could create what evolved into a case management software. After all that I’ve heard, that alone helped me understand why this privately held business has been so customer focused. Their roots and the core of their business has always been about helping law offices and attorneys do their work more effectively and efficiently.

My friend tells me that their customers are not just customers but customer evangelists who hold a passion for the software and the Needles name. From my experience in enterprise implementations, I’ve seen software companies develop good or bad reputations through their interactions with their user base. Until I heard about Needles, I had never heard of such fierce customer loyalty and passion for a software product. Software, after all, is intangible. You can’t hold it, feel it, cozy up to it, wear it or eat it. Despite all that, Needles Case Management Software for lawyers, and us other professionals, seems to be the closest thing to comfort food a software program can be. The company knows how to listen to their customers and how to keep them happy. Needles is an example of how technology in offices can be a beautiful thing when a company really gets what is important to their customers. In turn, their customers are passionate about them. It’s no small wonder that the company that developed the first case management software for law offices is still an industry leader. Check them out yourself and Go Needles!

 

 

 

HP Computing

Our firm is a virtual agency, held together by the company headquarters and staffed by professionals who work from their homes.   Right now I'm working from home on my HP Notebook. It's almost three years old but I bought it with so many cutting edge features that it easily can still compete with many notebooks being sold today.  I have several HP products.  I've been using Personal Computers now for a very, very long time.  This means that I've also used many different brands of computers, printers, monitors, scanners, etc.  My favorite for the last several years has been HP.  Whenever I had a new HP product, I found their customer service to be superb, and what’s more, when I call I'm speaking to people that are employed here so in between any long waits we can banter about issues that would not be possible if the support were outsourced.  But I digress.

Recently we decided it was time for my location to replace the desktop, which is or was an old Compaq.  My old desktop is something I jokingly refer to as the computer held together by duct tape.  The CD drives both croaked over a year ago.  The sound card has issues (which means I don't get distracted listening to music, to be sure!).  The computer doesn't have enough memory to run some of my programs, and certainly not enough memory to run an external CD drive, and has been at it’s maximum installable memory levels for years.  The hard drive ran out of room a long time ago, requiring many programs to be uninstalled.  The duct tape that was allowing the computer to still be usable was having a 2GB USB Flash drive to work from.  I finally decided that yes, it was time to say good bye to this old thing and to take the plunge and reinstall all the software and set up multiple e-mail accounts and all the good fun that comes with a new computer.    

You can imagine the excitement in finally taking the plunge and placing an order for a new computer. This wasn’t just any computer, but one customized for the needs of this office.  Using our corporate credit card, the order appeared to successfully go through. You can imagine my disappointment when I received an email a few days later saying that the order was declined. Apparently, thanks to the many losers who choose identity theft as a way to spend their days, we can’t have a computer sent to a location that is not the billing address. Since our billing address is different from anyone else’s workplace address, this is a problem. I understand HP’s position in maintaining the integrity of a customer’s credit card usage, but I am so unhappy that I cannot buy the product I want without going through having cash advances, transfers and other rigamarole just to get the computer system that I want. That is, if it is still offered by the time I finish doing everything that needs to be done so I can order it in my name.   If I am going to go through all this extra hassle for this machine, then HP, you must really be worth it!