Interliant Customer Story Legal and Financial Needs

Highlights

• UK-wide legal firm with 10 offices and over 600 staff
• Managed Windows 2000 web servers linked into an Onyx CRM system
• Tightly integrated system for customer service and sales
• 24x7 monitoring and management of the web servers, networks and security systems
• Frees up internal IT resources for other projects
• Onyx implementation and integration services

An integrated CRM and web environment for improved customer service and sales

Russell Jones & Walker (RJW) is a leading national firm of solicitors with a number of offices around the UK. The firm focuses on individuals, not corporate clients, working largely with membership organisations such as trade unions, associations and affinity groups. RJW specialises in personal injury, clinical negligence, employment, fraud and libel.

In order to face increased competition, RJW launched a specialist company called Legal and Financial Needs Ltd (LFN). This would allow for even more targeted marketing of their competitively priced products to membership organisations of all types.

LFN contracted Interliant to work with them to implement, integrate and host the web environment. “We have to make the offer when we first deal with the customer, not later. We must respond quickly and efficiently if we are to sell the higher value product that make us most margin.”

Ian Lauwerys, Head of IT

Russell Jones & Walker (RJW) was facing an increasingly competitive market, with the introduction of conditional fee arrangements, commonly known as 'no win no fee'. RJW's legal services to members of its affinity group clients were being challenged, as the individual member now had high profile alternative suppliers vying to undertake their legal claim.

Financial services and insurance companies were also targeting the affinity group market, directly competing with the work that RJW was undertaking for its customer organisations. In order to face this increased competition, a new specialist company called Legal and Financial Needs Ltd (LFN) was launched. The plan was that LFN would go into partnership with membership organisations and provide quality legal and financial services under the membership organisation's own name directly to its members.

"The project is unique in offering a legal and financial services 'one stop shop' on a large scale to ordinary people," said Ian Lauwerys, Head of IT at RJW. "The systems and processes were difficult to set up because nobody had done anything quite like this before.

The regulatory environment was extremely complex, yet we have successfully demonstrated that the systems are completely independent. Overall, it is the most successful project in which I have ever been involved."

Managing customer relationships within multiple brands

The ability to manage customer relationships whilst maintaining the brand identity of the affinity organisation itself was fundamental. High volume services such as will-writing are relatively low margin, so efficient sales and fulfilment processes were also an essential consideration. Customers can thereafter be offered slightly higher margin products, such as mortgages and insurance. Over time, as the relationship builds the products can be offered higher value products that are not often required, such as higher value investments, trust funds, retirement planning or litigation for personal injury or negligence.

"Success depends upon efficient business processes to get the best margin and to provide excellent customer service," said Lauwerys. "This involves bringing together a range of legal and financial products with a wide range of applications and manual processes."

LFN needed a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, and decided that Onyx Software offered the best solution, but didn't have the time or staff to implement it internally. LFN approached Interliant to implement the Onyx system on Legal and Financial Needs own servers. Also, being a global Managed Infrastructure Provider, LFN asked Interliant to provide managed hosting services for a series of linked web sites, one for each membership organisation. These would be secure and reliable extensions of the CRM system using a single template to offer LFN's products and services with the look and feel of each of the membership organisations own web sites.

Automating the whole customer services process

The system automates the whole customer service process, running the web sites and a whole series of product applications. When somebody calls, it displays their customer record and the organisation they belong to, so that they can be offered the correct branded services. The agent moves into the product application to make the sale and the details are then captured back into the CRM system, to record the lifetime value of each customer.

The web sites act as a customer portal into the same system, so that customers can view their own records, see details of their products, make enquiries and get details of new products. The whole system is supported by only four on-site IT staff.

The company is already beginning to achieve a tenfold increase in efficiency in selling some of their products through improved business processes. "The system is cutting out huge chunks of time," says Lauwerys. "For certain key products it has reduced one four hour process to just ten minutes."

"Interliant used its experience and knowledge of the industry combined with Onyx's software to give us a working system in just three months," concluded Lauwerys. "The business now has the tools it needs and we can now give customers such good service on lower value products that they will come back to us for higher value products."