Legal Video Customer Service And Your Bottom Line

Published on 20 February, 2013, this article by Accurate Vision's Director of Public Surveys reveals exactly what court reporting
agencies and litigation support professionals have to say about the legal video services they received during 2012.
 

Completed in January of 2013, Accurate Vision’s Year End Survey of over 100 randomly selected court reporting firms and litigation support services revealed that a surprising number of those surveyed were troubled and frustrated by the same legal-video misfortunes during 2012.

First we asked if the survey participants had any recurring complaints about the video depositions or other forms of legal video they booked during the year.

68% of all survey respondents replied in the affirmative.

Those who responded in the affirmative were then asked various questions to determine the exact complaint which reoccurred most often throughout the year.

The most frequent answer by far was poor customer service, as can be seen in the following tabulation.

Next we questioned the 52% who responded with "poor customer service" to determine whether or not there were specific customer service complaints they had in common.

The following tabulation reveals that their answers were evenly split between two specific customer-service complaints which accounted for 81% of all responses, very heavily outweighing all other answers.

Because the number of “bad-attitude” answers and “slow-resolution” answers were all but even, we drilled down into each of those complaints, and here is what we found out.

Armed with the knowledge that court reporting firms and litigation support professionals had poor customer service as their leading complaint about legal-video providers during 2012, we then asked a final set of questions to determine what value they place on the other side of the coin – high quality customer service.

Summary
 

Here is a bulleted list that summarizes the results of our 2012 Year End Legal Video Survey.

• 68% of the respondents had recurring complaints about the legal video services they received during the year
   
  
• 52% of the recurring complaints were poor customer service
   
  
• The two most common forms of poor customer service were:
  • 41% = bad and/or offensive attitude
  • 40% = slow and/or incomplete resolution of service issues
     
    
• bad and/or offensive attitude broke down as follows:
  • 42% = rudeness / argumentative demeanor / bad people skills
  • 28% = defensive when confronted with customer-service issues
  • 19% = passing the buck / unjustly blaming someone or something else
  • 09% = more focus on self comfort than on pleasing us
     
    
• slow or incomplete resolution of issues broke down as follows:
  • 57% = too much follow-up needed by us to get service issues resolved
  • 25% = slow response to important pre-job and post-job correspondence
  • 08% = lack of attention to detail
  • 07% = general lack of time management and organization
     
    
• A majority of court reporters and litigation support professionals surveyed agree that better profit is the biggest benefit from high quality, legal-video-customer service, with their answers coming in as follows:
  • 39% = improved profit margin on jobs that require legal video
  • 26% = enhanced efficiency / productivity and morale of our personnel
  • 19% = fewer complaints about video / videographers from our clients
  • 12% = peace of mind

Author's Note
 

Thank you for your continued interest in our annual year ending surveys.

Throughout the coming year, Accurate Vision will routinely survey court reporting agencies and litigation support companies as part of our ongoing effort to provide the legal community with informative and useful information, and also to ensure that we consistently deliver the highest possible levels of legal video service.

We therefore welcome comments and suggestions from customers and non-customers alike.

I also encourage you to find out more about how Accurate Vision can benefit your firm by visiting the related resources listed below this article.

Director of Public Surveys
Accurate Vision, Inc.