Until now, the goal for most software investments in professional services firms was that the applications should simplify and automate the core line-of-business operation which they addressed – but that’s no longer enough.
In today’s market, technology must do more than fulfil tactical responsibilities, it must also help deliver strategic ‘wins’. And, it must contribute to the ultimate goal of the firm’s digital transformation – delivering streamlined operations and data-rich business intelligence to empower employees and engage clients. People and technology, working together in beautiful harmony.
The silo challenge
However, achieving this harmony can be challenging. The pressure of a rapidly changing marketplace and the advance of technology has seen an explosion of specialist applications come to market, each one fulfilling critical tasks to support the operations of the professional firm.
These individual applications allow firms to simplify and systemize routine departmental activities. However, they also create a complicated technology landscape with disconnected processes, information in silos, and data unable to be accessed by other systems where and when it is required. And, almost always, there is a disconnect between a firm’s systems which prevents it from fully mining the rich client and business intelligence it is collecting through its CRM, relationship tracking, intake/conflicts, experience, and time and billing processes, together with its customer feedback mechanisms. Despite the capability of each of these systems, none can ever be THE solution on its own.
In addition, the applications in use often complicate how data is collected, shared, and repurposed. Without addressing this issue, transforming to a streamlined workplace that harmonizes people, processes and data for better business performance becomes a near-impossible challenge.
The power of joined-up data
The need to solve this challenge has never been greater. The arrival of the digital economy has seen law firms, as with many other professional services organizations, change how they go to market to identify, win and retain high-value work. Firms not only have to face increased competition, but they have to meet ever-higher client expectations.
Firms must modernize to compete in this new economy. And a key part of this modernization will be to establish new connectivity that offers sophisticated and granular data connectivity between systems, and functions. This will allow firms to analyze data in real-time, automate its inclusion in end-to-end business process workflows, and enable users to better collaborate across departments and locations.
To work well, this requires firms to join up data from across its systems of record – including CRM, intake & conflicts, time & billing, financial management, client satisfaction assessment tools – along with data from third-party sources to provide a multi-dimensional resource.
Our expertise, your technology
Wilson Allen is a specialist services company, and our mission is to make your technology work better for your firm. We successfully do that by combining technical expertise across a broad portfolio of vendor technologies and industry-specific software applications with a deep knowledge of professional firm operations, and an absolute commitment to service excellence.
Our prime directive is to streamline and automate the end-to-end business processes that underpin the operations and profitability of your firm.
We help deliver on the promise of digitization by ensuring applications are integrated in a way that supports your firm throughout the entire engagement lifecycle – from the pursuit of new business to onboarding, through client and matter inception, through service delivery to cash collection, and managing financial outcomes.
We ensure that the data needed to fuel your business operations is accessible, accurate, up to date and integrated into essential workflows. We help you to harness that data to build multi-dimensional sources of business intelligence to direct and support decision-making.
We provide the specialist resources to help you execute on your mission – we can help improve use of your existing applications, implement new technology, and extend your in-house teams with additional resources and skills.
Real-world results: harmonizing marketing and onboarding
The benefit of this approach is evident in a recent project our CDI practice recently completed with leading Canadian law firm, BCF.
The Wilson Allen Client Development & Intake (CDI) practice brings together a team of specialists with knowledge of marketing, business development, intake, risk management and data governance processes, as well as the software applications commonly used to support each of these.
BCF imagined a more cohesive and client-centric experience for their business development and onboarding processes. They wanted to break down silos to provide better quality data and integrate operations across the multiple systems they already had in place. The ultimate goal was to make partners and client teams more effective by providing a global view of prospective business.
Wilson Allen helped BCF achieve that goal by managing an upgrade of the firm’s Intapp Intake & Conflicts applications, creating new forms and workflows, building integration to initiate the conflicts process in Salesforce. and then data transfer to create client & matter records in 3E.
As a result, BCF now has integrated systems with liberated data that allow it to share information to promote cross-selling, and differentiate itself from its competitors.
Read more about the success of this project here
To find out more about how Wilson Allen can help make your technology work better for your firm, and to transform to a streamlined workplace that harmonizes people, processes and data for better business performance, please contact us.
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