Devin Miller is an IP lawyer and serial entrepreneur. As the founder of Miller IP Law, Devin focuses on helping startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks, but he’s also founded and co-founded a large number of startups. Throughout all of his endeavors, Devin aims to provide great customer service at every step of each customer’s journey, and he’s here to share his one big tip for helping it all run smoothly and functionally.
Providing top-notch customer service through automation
Devin says the biggest gripe people often have with attorneys is bad customer service. Attorneys are notoriously difficult to communicate with and bad at reaching out. They’re known to typically take 3 to 4 days to respond and get back to any type of communication, whether it be an email or an urgent phone call. Devin wanted to counteract this by streamlining communication through an automated system while also providing a personal touch in communication in order to maintain healthy, satisfying relationships with customers. That’s why his one big tip is to automate tasks when you have the ability to do so.
It’s important to walk customers through the process of your business and make sure they know what they need to do and where things are, as well as provide status updates when necessary. But this can all be time intensive, especially when you have a large amount of customers to keep up with. That’s why automation can be so helpful. Devin has implemented an all-encompassing automation system that keeps customers updated and also gives internal reminders to get in touch with clients if it’s been a few days. In this way, automation is not removing the human element from the process, but rather setting reminders to keep the personal, human nature of it throughout.
Mapping the customer’s journey
Devin says he measures the success of his automated system by the customer’s satisfaction with the experience. His advice for a company that’s just starting out with an automated system is to start by mapping the customer’s journey. What should the journey be like? At what points should they be doing what things, and what will they want to know at each point? What are the points in the process that can be automated? Where are touch points necessary? Once you have the entire journey mapped out with answers to these questions, it’s just a matter of execution.
This process takes a lot of shifting. “We didn’t get it perfect on the first try, and we’re still always iterating,” Devins says. “We add something new every week, and we fix something different every week.”
At the end of the day, there’s only so much you can do– “Only so many hats you can wear,” as Devin puts it. You won’t be able to provide a personal touch for everybody at every possible point. The key is to figure out where it really matters, where you can have the best impact in the customer’s journey, and to follow that.
To learn about Devin’s law firm, Miller IP Law, visit milleripl.com. They also provide free strategy sessions where you’ll be able to sit down with an attorney and discuss patents and trademarks at freestrategymeeting.com. If you want to talk to Devin about anything else, you can connect with him at meetdevin.com. He’ll always be happy to find time in his schedule to meet and talk.
