Make your business more rewarding

This point award system is designed to work as a loyalty program and is customizable. You determine:

• Which service items earn points.
• Which clients you want to award points to.
• How many points to award per dollar billed.

Not all states allow these types of incentives. (We initially developed this plug-in for clients in Alabama, which does allow legal support firms to give clients gifts, gift certificates, and even cash in exchange for points.) But if you can offer incentives based on settings, then the merit system can be a powerful tool in building client loyalty.

You assign a value in redeemable points for dollars spent with your company, then monitor each individual contact’s points status. Points are earned when an invoice is generated and posted, however points are pending and not redeemable until the invoice is paid.

Not all service items are equally valuable to your business, so you probably won’t want to award points for all services. For example, earmark original pages to earn points, but not delivery or other pass-through expenses.

You can set up point-sharing between contacts, if they prefer. For example, designate that every $50 is worth three points, and give your attorney-clients the option to allot those points any way they wish between their secretaries, paralegals and themselves. They could split points three ways, give them all to their secretary, or use some other breakdown. You can also honor requests to transfer lump sums of points from one person to another, and award bonus points for signing up.

If you are redeeming points for cash, gift certificates or other items, you can see how much you have spent on redemptions, plus see at a glance how much you need in reserve to cover all outstanding points.

Know which calls generate the most revenue

If you are not legally allowed to give rewards or prefer not to, you can use this system as a sales analysis tool. With your point system set to award one point for each dollar earned, you can see how much revenue is generated by each of your clients, broken down by individual contacts at each firm.

The points plug-in tracks business by who requested a job so you can see how much revenue, including original and copy sales, was generated from an order. You can easily see who your best clients are, not by who you are billing the most, but by whose calls generate the most revenue. This is better for marketing purposes because total invoice amounts can be misleading — a lot of work is billed to third parties, whom you don’t market to, and a lot of a law firm’s invoices might be copy orders on jobs they didn’t initiate.

This differs from MR8’s Order Analysis, which shows how many calls your clients made, but not the revenue generated from those calls. It also differs from the Client Rating Report, which shows billing amounts for a firm, but these could include a lot of their own copy orders and no connection to copies ordered by other parties on jobs your client initiated.

With a merit system, you know which clients “earn” the most revenue for your business, so you can market more effectively, maybe by giving these clients special attention, rewards (as allowed by state law), or a preferred rate.

Whether you choose to award clients for their loyalty or use this system for sales analysis only, the MR8 merit system makes it easy to see which firms and which individuals are generating the most revenue for your company, so you can treat them as the important clients that they are.

Give clients access to their points

If you have MR Web, add the Rewards Points for Web plug-in to give your clients the ability to track and redeem points online. Clients can:

• See their current points balance, pending amounts, and history.
• Make requests to redeem or transfer points online.

(Requires MR Web and MR8 Rewards Points plug-in.)