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Legal Is a Product: How To Segment Your Customers and Offer Them Legal Support

Malgorzata Sikora

4 min read

Dec 3, 2020

If you run an online business, most likely you receive a number of requests concerning documents that your customers would like to sign. We know it’s a demanding process and, at LiveChat, we really care about helping your business. At the end of the day, your legal agreements are a product of your company that should support the sales process.

We’ve learned our lessons about the best ways to segment and maintain your business documents. Below, you’ll find some tips and tricks on how to do this in the best possible way. 

Keep it transparent 

If you work for different sizes of companies, transparency is important. Having custom-made documents always implies a cost and additional work for your legal team. To deliver the best service for all groups of your customers, try to clearly state what kind of documents are available for which group. For example, you may wish to divide your customer’s base into segments based on:

• Industry/type of business - Usually ecommerce providers will need different types of documents compared to businesses in the finance or insurance industries. Your customers will definitely appreciate your understanding of different needs. 

• Size of a company - It’s obvious that small and medium-sized businesses will request different sets of data than enterprises will. Try to search for the optimum value in regards to the complexity and costs of document delivery.

• Country or region - Documents are not only about the size of the business. In some cases, your customers may request certain documents due to their country of origin. For example, your customers from California will most likely be more concerned about the California Consumer Privacy Act than the GDPR from Europe. 

• A mix of all of the above - Remember that it’s possible that there is no one standard that fits your business. You may need to create a mixture of different elements to name and manage your segments. 

Quality first 

When it comes to segmentation, one of the most important rules is to care about the quality of your basic documents first. Whenever you attempt to segment your customers, try not to get tempted into creating simple, basic documents. Remember that regardless of the size of the business, your customers should get enough information and transparency to see that your business is reliable and trustworthy. 

At LiveChat, we decided to create quite broad “Terms and Conditions” to explain as clearly as possible how we deliver our services and the basic elements of our relationship with customers. Furthermore, we’ve added a short list of documents that we provide that you can find in our legal section. You can use this trick to help your customers understand and navigate through your documents. 

Balance complexity and simplicity

There are plenty of documents that your customers may need. Those range from DPA, SLA, and NDA documents to risk assessments and compliance documents. Once you create documents for your company, you should think about who will be reading them and what the level of complexity should be. 

Simply speaking, don’t overdo documents that are for general use. Try to keep a balance between technical, legal, and explanatory elements. For example, for documents that include technical aspects such as security terms, try to point out sections that explain what technical measures are described within the section. 

Also, you may wish to include an automated process that, for example, places links to additional documents, like a data processing agreement that can be signed online. This will help you to keep the process simple and accessible for all of your customers.

Be prepared for questions

Don’t get discouraged when your customers keep asking about your documents and the reasons for having them. As with any product, your legal documents need a bit of an introduction as well. At LiveChat, we really enjoy sharing with our customers FAQ sections about our legal documents. For example, the hot topic over the last two years, namely GDPR, earned its own FAQ document that can be found here. 

What’s more, our advice can help with the training of your team because legal knowledge for support and sales is a valuable resource for every business. Your company will look even more professional with properly trained employees who understand the legal needs of your customers and can appropriately help them. 

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