They accompany legal professionals in their digital transformation by helping them get the most out of their new technological solutions, this is the mission of Customer Success. Today we start our series of articles on the backstage of a legaltech by following Justine and Martin, managers of Hyperlex's Customer Success team, to discover how such tools are implemented within legal departments.
Can you present your background and what motivated you to join a legaltech like Hyperlex?
Justine: A lawyer by training and a graduate of the Paris Bar School, I worked in economic law for three years before embarking on my first entrepreneurial adventure, with the desire to be at the heart of the business. The choice to join a legaltech was a natural one: it was an opportunity to put my business expertise and entrepreneurial experience to good use in the digitalization of the legal sector.
Martin: After a combination of law and business school, I first worked as a lawyer before joining a consulting firm specializing in supporting the legal profession. One thing leading to another, I was able to see the importance of innovation in legal departments, which are required to be more and more efficient. Hyperlex then presented itself as an opportunity at the crossroads of my skills.
What motivated you to become a Customer Success Manager in particular?
J: Customer Success is a cross-functional mission that interacts a lot with other departments: between the legal and the tech professions, there are also strong connections with marketing and the sales department.... Working in Customer Success requires curiosity and understanding of these different aspects, which makes the mission very rewarding!
M: The real dimension of AI: artificial intelligence is not just a buzzword, it is a tangible reality. I had the opportunity to observe the market a lot before joining Hyperlex and I was confronted with the daily life of lawyers. What I liked about Customer Success was being able to help them implement solutions that would really save them time.
What does the term "Customer Success" mean?
M: Customer Success is the team that ensures that the tool is taken in hand and that everything that Hyperlex can do is valued, to make sure that the solution is exploited 100%. It's about making sure that our clients gain in performance with the solution. The other aspect of our mission is to manage support and answer any questions our customers may have.
J: What differentiates Customer Success from traditional customer service is that it never stands still. There is a real active approach to the customer, who still needs to be convinced. Customer Success must ensure that the customer's project is a success. We want our customers to be satisfied and to talk about us.
What is your range of action?
We deal with onboarding, adoption and retention, but also support. The onboarding phase is at the heart of our activity: it's the first contact with the customer, the first image they will have of our company. So we have to frame this stage as much as possible. The lawyer is not always a technophile. There is a lot of work to do in terms of popularizing, accompanying and defining the client's needs with them and also reassuring them. The next step is to manage the project alongside the lawyer: we then take on the role of project manager.
Can you tell us more about the main stages of onboarding?
Onboarding begins as soon as the contract is signed with our sales team and ends when the customer is using the solution independently. Its duration (on average 3 months) varies according to the customer's availability.
Step 1: the kick-off
The kick-off meeting is the starting point of the implementation. This meeting is crucial, as it allows us to inform the client about the different components of the project in terms of organization and schedule, but also to promote a positive dynamic and ownership of the project. From this point on, we will be able to precisely define the scope of the project and break it down into work packages (types of contracts to be imported into Hyperlex, fields of the summary sheets in the contracts, tree structure of the files, number of users, etc.). It is important to define these different elements WITH the client because Hyperlex is a tailor-made solution, made to fit their particular work processes. It is important to understand that Hyperlex is both a finished product, available off the shelf, and a solution that can be specifically configured for each legal department.
No two legal departments are alike!
At this stage, our role is to help the client to project himself. We help them ask themselves the right questions to anticipate the future and make the best decisions. We provide them with examples, analysis grids and, above all, we spend time with them so that the project is as light as possible and as stress-free as possible.
Step 2: functional setup
It is a matter of injecting into the platform what the client asked us to do in the previous step. The objective is to build HIS Hyperlex. Progress is made at the client's pace.
Step 3: Taking over the contracts
This phase takes place in parallel with the parameterization. It consists of importing all the contracts into the database. In general, the transfer is a painful point for the customer because he is in the middle of a transition. The role of Customer Success is to facilitate this transition by avoiding the manual entry of information which could take 6 months to a year! For this recovery work, our team of legal experts intervenes to bring their business expertise. The objective here is to build an efficient contractual database that can be used at the end of the onboarding process, i.e. to deliver to the client a tool that is already filled with his information.
Step 4: Training
We first conduct a face-to-face or remote training session depending on the needs and the client's case, then we distribute a post-training questionnaire to validate the acquired knowledge. On average, a half-day of training is required for 8 people. The idea of these "small committees" is to maintain proximity with our users. It is also an opportunity for us to capture the spontaneous, "naive" feedback of the user, which is very useful for the development of our product. Afterwards, we provide a FAQ that we update regularly.
The advantage of working with a startup is that we are able to move very quickly on the product: we are therefore very interested in user feedback to make it evolve. That's what you have to remember: when you choose Hyperlex, you acquire both the existing product and the whole perspective of future developments.
Martin Fauvel, Customer Success Manager at Hyperlex
Step 5: the go-live
Behind this barbaric term, is simply the launch of the use of the product by the customer. The objective is to make it an event to encourage internal adoption. Our role is to support internal communication so that there is a good start and that the various employees realize that this is important. Through this project, we want to show that the legal department is an actor in its change and has a real competitive advantage.
For the legal department, the implementation of a tool as revolutionary as Hyperlex is a golden opportunity to show that it is innovative and adapts to the business challenges of the company.
The legal department can thus assert its role as a business partner by demonstrating that it is moving at the same speed as the rest of the company.
Step 6: Adoption
Customer Success remains present during this transitional period to support the change. For us, it is a time of vigilance and observation that allows us to evaluate the good assimilation of the tool internally, to understand and to propose corrective actions if necessary.
Can you tell us about your team?
Our team consists of 6 people. Alongside the Customer Success Managers, there are the Customer Success Juniors who help with configuration, support, updating the FAQ... and the legal experts. The latter are at the crossroads of Customer Success and Data Science: they take care of the recovery of the existing system but also teach the algorithms to recognize legal concepts.
At Hyperlex, the legal experts of the Customer Success team transmit their business expertise to AI to make it the specialist of our clients' contracts.
Justine Guine, Customer Success Manager at Hyperlex
What do you think are the qualities of a good Customer Success?
- Listening to the customer
- Pragmatism: finding the most appropriate solutions for the client's priorities, but also identifying the most relevant topics for the various Hyperlex teams, always with a view to developing our product.
- Reactivity: we want our customers to be happy, and even to go beyond their expectations, by providing them with answers that are as adapted as they are fast.
- Rigor: our clients are demanding. We touch what is most dear to lawyers, their database, which we want to be qualitative and reliable to make our solution credible. This involves a number of small details to which we must pay attention.
- Communication: knowing how to be at ease with the client, being able to reassure him and being a good teacher.
What do you see as the major challenges of this profession in the legal sector?
Play an active role in the digital transformation of the sector. For lawyers, this is a real challenge on which they need to be supported.
A victory for you is when a customer tells you...?
J: When people tell us "it's great, you were very responsive, everything is already set up, I already have all my results!" Feeling our enthusiastic customers brings great satisfaction.
M: A customer once told us that he didn't need any training because the tool was simple and very intuitive. Another example, heard at the end of a workshop: "thank you for doing this with us, without you we would have spent a lot of time!"
Your advice to legal professionals who are considering a project to digitize their business?
Take time to take stock of the situation: this is not a waste of time, on the contrary, it is less trouble for the future. Think about the purpose of your project: what will you use it for? This will help you to better identify the tools you need to get there.
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