Nelson Elder Care Law provides legal services to the Woodstock, Georgia area for elder law, medicaid crisis planning, veterans benefits, probate & estate administration, estate planning, special needs, and asset protection.
We started using Daylite on day one when we started our firm in September of 2014. We originally started with Daylite 5 and absolutely loved it. We’re a Mac only firm and everyone’s always on their iPhones and iPads so when we started looking for a CRM program, it was important to find something that worked with that. We heard good things about Daylite. We don’t use all the features that we’d like to, but it’s definitely a program that grows with us as we do.
We did quite a bit of research into what other firms were using. There’s a lot of legal based CRMs specifically tailored to law firms but they’re extremely expensive and a lot of them don’t work well with Macs. They also don’t have some of the features that Daylite has.
First is the fact it’s Mac friendly. We didn’t want to be on PCs when we opened the firm. The other fact was the way we could easily integrate it into our firm. A lot of CRMs make it hard to onboard people. Trying to bring someone into a new program that they’ve never used before and get them up to speed fast is very important – especially for us being a small firm because we need people to hit the ground running.
It’s really three fold. The first is that we’re able to offer better customer service and our clients know that. Even if one of our attorneys is not available when a client calls, our staff can still pull up their info right away and tell them where their matter is and the next steps. This helps us avoid using attorney time to answer general questions. It also helps us so we don’t have to call back clients. We can give them the answer right away, which from a customer standpoint is amazing.
When someone first calls we get their information and put that in Daylite as a contact. At that point we put them in our pipeline and then send them a few emails about information about us, directions to our office, and some information they need to fill out before coming in for their consultation. One of those things is how they heard about us. As soon as we get that back, we plug that info in Daylite as our referral source. Under that pipeline we can track that and then see if it turns into money.
We do a lot of speaking events. We keep track of which speaking events people have attended by tagging them with specific keywords for that topic. This way we can filter them out and avoid emailing someone about a speaking event they’ve already been to. This helps us make the emails really specific. For example, if they’ve never been to an event we can send them a list of all of the events and topics coming up.
Really, everything. We do everything through Daylite. It’s the backbone of the company. We use Daylite to check the status of all of our matters. We can pull up and see how people are related so if we have a client and her daughter calls in, even with a different last name, we can see right away if we have permission to talk to the daughter or not– things like that.
About half of our staff works outside the office for a good portion of their day. We can check and see if each other have made calls, if they got in touch with a client or not, and what meetings they have. We can even check notes from their meetings that day. It really helps us to manage the overall flow.
The main reason for moving to Daylite Cloud was to make sure everything syncs seamlessly. Before we moved to Daylite Cloud, we had problems with things not syncing on people’s iPhones. Now that we’re on Daylite Cloud, everything just syncs automatically. We don’t have to worry about someone being in the office and syncing with the server. From the standpoint of reducing frustration, Daylite Cloud has been amazing.
The batch preference has probably been the thing we love most. When we started using Daylite and adding keywords, we weren’t specific about the different speaking events because we were newer to the program. If we were back on Daylite 5, it would take forever to go through and edit those keywords but now with Daylite 6 we can batch edit those keywords in our preferences so quickly. It turns what would have been a long task in Daylite 5 to something very quick in Daylite 6.
The number one thing Daylite has helped us with is efficiency. Whenever we’re talking to other firms, they have to dig through files or they don’t know the status of their cases. Most of the small firms don’t have the functionality of a CRM that Daylite provides like being able to check the status of cases, know who’s referred you business, where your business is coming from, and how many clients you have in the pipeline.
I think it’s more of a geographical expansion for us. Right now we focus on two main counties in Georgia and we’d really like to expand that. When we start moving to satellite offices, I think Daylite will be really beneficial to help the different offices communicate with each other. It’s easier to manage multiple offices with a tool like Daylite and that’s really where we see our company growing.
We hired the right people that had experience with growing. We also focus on making sure our customer experience is amazing. Having referral sources really understanding what you do is part of that. When people referred to you go back and tell them that you did a great job, they keep sending more business.