by Matthew Pitts
Selling a legal service, like any other service requires a bit of personal outreach and interpersonal communication. When a potential client asks you for information about divorce, you inquire further and offer specific information. It would be foolish to go on about estate planning if the client is interested in modifying a child support order. The same holds true for your legal website or virtual law office.
Customizing the experience for every client
Ideally, you should be able to address each potential client/client individually and simultaneously. You should be able to respond to their inquiries with immediate information. Furthermore, you should be able to do this for 100 or even 1000 potential clients simultaneously. So how do you accomplish this?
Persona based customization
There are many ways to deliver a customized experience via your website/VLO. I like to use what I call "persona-based customization". Persona-based customization can be as basic or as advanced as you like. Persona-based customization is similar to contextual targeting. In other words, you you target the context of the potential client by dynamically delivering relevant and useful targeted information. Persona-based customization in the e-lawyering context allows you to give the potential client/client what they need when they need it.
A more advanced implementation of PBC would be a system that tracked and remembered certain persona-relevant actions of the potential client/client across the website/VLO. The same system would customize this user's experience when they returned to the website/VLO. A more advanced implementation would use this information to customize every part of the client experience, including dynamic questionnaires.
Sample of basic persona-based customization (limited functionality)
Below is a very basic form of persona-based customization. Ideally, you would have a predetermined list of possible client personas. Persona-relevant actions would persist a potential client into one or more persona-based customization paths. Please experiment with the sample below.
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Select a service context here. In a live application, we would set this value implicitly to respond to the potential client's action on the site.
In other words we would respond to the user's contextual selections behind-the-scenes and the process would be seamless.
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No context selected. Place basic information here.
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