Five AI-inspired Ideas for Client Relationship Partners
Client Relationship Partners (CRPs) are responsible for the success of the firm’s long-term relationships with its key clients. Gen AI offers CRPs a range of new opportunities to accelerate their impact and effectiveness. Here are five examples worth noting.
#1 Weekly Client Intelligence Podcasts
PwC in New Zealand has developed a simple AI agent that automatically curates all relevant public information about each of their key clients and produces a weekly podcast for their CRPs to listen on their way to work. This initiative ensures their CRPs are kept up to date with the latest developments about their client’s business, their industry, financials, key executives and public commentary. The delivery format of a NotebookLM podcast is far more accessible than a written document or email. For smaller clients with less public data the cycle time is extended to three or four weeks, but the concept is the same.
The CRP still have the job of interpreting the news into actionable insights and opportunities. However, the podcasts are a powerful catalyst for deeper strategic thinking and generating a long list of conversations starters with client contacts.
#2 Understanding the Firm’s Full Capability Set
“Not knowing others’ expertise” was revealed as one of the top barriers to deeper collaboration in professional services firms in Harvard professor Heidi Gardner’s groundbreaking research. CRPs, particularly those new to the firm or the role, often face the challenge of knowing who is best suited across the firm to address specific client’s needs or new problems. The problem is magnified in large firms with many offices across multiple jurisdictions.
CRPs now have access to AI tools that allow them to analyse EVERY client advice produced by every practitioner across the entire firm over multiple decades. Some simple AI queries of this vast data set will reveal a shortlist of those practitioners across the firm that have the most relevant expertise and experience to assist with specific client needs. The research doesn’t reveal those that claim expertise, but rather those who have actually done relevant client projects and have the runs on the board.
Some further legwork will be required to validate the initial research, but AI turns the oceans of possible candidates into a shortlist of specialists who could really help.
#3 Firm Mover Advantage
Gen AI has the potential to disrupt who does what in major firm-client relationships. Clients may use Gen AI to do more in-house and outsource less. Firms may be able to deliver some of their services much faster and cheaper. AI could be used to add new services and identify and manage a wider set of the client’s business and legal risks. It could also allow clients to pursue minor contract infringements or claims that were previously too costly in a non-AI world.
CRPs have a window of opportunity to start a conversation with their target client about ‘co-creating’ a new future – who does what and where, why and how value is created and shared in the relationship.
There is a major first mover advantage here. Clients will entertain the CRPs that are proactive and initiate this type of conversation. Those that are late to the party will just pick up the crumbs.
#4 Client Avatars
Ashurst Perkins Coie’s London office is beta testing a new training program using Generative AI-powered client avatars developed in partnership with legal training platform LEVRA. The avatars are designed to help lawyers, of all experience levels, simulate conversations with clients to build their ‘soft’ skills. They create a training pathway across core skills that allows the lawyer to learn and practice outside of real client situations, so they understand how best to communicate, provide advice, and make decisions involving clients.
CRPs provide client data to make the avatars as realistic as possible and to ensure they reflect all the client’s stated needs, but also their more subtle turn-ons and turn-offs. Training simulations using these avatars create a wider pool of people across the firm who are ‘client and job-ready’.
#5 AI-moderated Client Feedback
Listening to clients is a top priority for most CRPs. Having one-on-one feedback conversations is time consuming and expensive. Online surveys are impersonal and lack interactivity. They also often receive a poor response rate.
An AI-moderated interview is a live conversation where an AI agent asks questions, listens to the answers, and decides what to ask next based on what it hears. While a static survey collects answers, an AI-moderator can actually ask follow-up or probing questions, the same way a human moderator would.
One leading Australian law firm is exploring using AI-moderated interviews to survey a wider cross-section of their clients. CRPs will do face-to-face interviews with the General Counsel and other senior executives, but they plan to use the AI-moderated survey for other members of the inhouse legal team and day-to-day users and decision influencers.
An AI moderator can hold hundreds of conversations at once, in dozens of languages, whenever it’s convenient for the participant, on a phone at 10pm instead of a scheduled call during business hours. Research on computer-administered interviews has found that people sometimes disclose more to a machine than they would face to face.
In conclusion
Much of the commentary around Generative AI focuses on how it can be used to substitute the work of junior lawyers and accelerate legal service provision. Gen AI has huge potential benefits in business support areas and for critical roles like CRP. The five examples discussed above are just the tip of the iceberg.