A potential client lost, an emergency unattended, or a current client unsatisfied is what any call that comes in after hours means. That’s how your legal firm most likely operates right now, which is troubling because hundreds of after-hours calls go unanswered every year, according to a study conducted by the Journal of Hospice and Palliative Nursing.
You could be losing a lot more than you realize. In fact, that same study found that current clients made a sizable portion of the calls.
In this post, we will go over how a legal answering service can maximize your productivity and help grow your business. You’ll also find out what the top legal answering service is and what they do differently from the rest.
What a Legal Answering Service Can Earn You in Terms of Clients
Poor customer service costs a lot of money. In fact, best-selling author and marketer Neil Patel says it costs more than $83 billion in the United States alone. A big part of that is missing or mishandling calls.
That’s a lot of money to lose. Even if your firm or practice only loses a tiny fraction of that, it could still be hundreds of thousands a year.
And that’s not all. You could also lose potential referrals from the calls you don’t answer. That means less business and less growth. But there is a solution that can save you time and money.
Live Answering Service Solution
This is why the top legal answering service, Always Answer, has built its business on its 24/7 feature. Most surprising is that this feature has live agents handling your calls at all hours of the day or night! No impersonal and, at times, useless automated system here.
These live agents can follow custom scripts that Always Answer has in place or they can adhere to whatever instructions you give them. This means that the live agents can gather the information that you request and then pass it along to you once you are in the office.
Boost Productivity With a Legal Answering Service
Focus on your casework and forget about whatever call is coming through. That’s the number one way that a legal answering service can help you boost productivity. Your paralegals can focus instead on drafting forms and researching memoranda and other documents.
In other words, set your team free to work at their best level without having to worry about answering calls or gathering customer information. While each call means more business for you, it can also be a detriment to your workflow.
Productivity Costs
You see, a University of California study has found that it takes an average of 23 to 25 minutes after an interruption to get focused back on what you were working on.
Even if your team could handle the calls coming in, that means one member of your team would have their whole day consumed by the task. This creates a chain reaction in which the rest of your team has to pick up the extra work left behind, and as a result, less gets done by everyone.
That’s not all, not only can a legal answering service handle all of your calls, but a service like Always Answer can even deliver any messages and information gathered in each call to you via:
- Fax
- Text message
- At no additional cost to you
These messages come at no additional cost, and they can also be delivered to you either after each call or during scheduled times.
The Damage That Not Having a Legal Answering Service Causes
The damage caused by not having a legal answering service or virtual receptionist compounds. In all aspects, whether it be financially or in terms of productivity, we’ve seen how a lack of a cohesive system in place can slowly drag your firm or practice down.
However, there are still yet more consequences to not having a robust answering system in place like the one that Always Answers offers.
The consequences are:
- No call consistency: Always Answer’s live agents are trained to follow whatever script or instructions they are given. Every practice likes to handle things in their own way, yours is no different. However, by not having trained agents answer your calls, each call will be handled differently. This lack of consistency can make it difficult for clients to deal with and difficult for you to get the information you need from each call.
- Damage to your brand: The reputation of your law firm or practice can be negatively impacted by having a poor call-handling structure in place. People, especially customers, need consistency. A brand that has no consistency is difficult to pin down, an unknown, and at worse, a risk. Risk isn’t something that clients are looking for in a legal practice.
- Clients lost: Existing clients may be dissuaded to continue working with you if they sense instability and a lack of structure in place. Why would they expect quality representation from you when your practice is run so poorly?
To further cement this argument, consider that a study conducted by SEMRush found that 14% of customers leave a business when it doesn’t know how to handle their complaints and when their calls go unanswered or are mishandled.
Don’t Miss a Detail With Recorded Calls
It can be hard to keep track of a client’s needs, especially if you are more detail oriented than most. While Always Answer’s competitors may have some kind of system in place to relay important information to you, many of them lack the live agent staff that Always Answer has.
In addition to a more personable and human touch, Always Answer also has a record calls feature. Via the use of inline server level recording, Always Answer is able to completely record and store your calls. These calls are stored for 30 days at no additional charge to you
Longer Storage
If you need your calls to be stored for longer, you can always sign up for additional voice recording storage. Even patched calls can be recorded by Always Answer’s inline server level recording.
You can always play these calls back to gleam further information and details from. This feature works great if you are adverse to the idea of having a large amount of paperwork to process. Due to the fact that the server’s are already set up and configured, you don’t have to do anything to take advantage of this feature.
Call Center Capabilities of the Top Legal Answering Service
Everything that has been discussed today, the quality of live agents and convenient features, are only made available by the top legal answering service on the market and that’s Always Answer.
Always Answer is an answering service that is built to slot into your existing operations seamlessly. Their live agents and staff are trained to work for diverse clients and with strict adherence to your custom call-answering requirements. You can even manage how the live agents greet your callers and what information you want them to get from each call.
Additional Features
Should you deem that a call is too important to not handle yourself, live call transfer is available. There is also toll-free calling and even bilingual answering services. Always Answer has created a robust ecosystem that can handle the needs of any law firm or practice.
Their trained live agents easily set them apart from competing services that rely on strange and off-putting AI voices to handle their calls.
The Right Legal Answering Service for You
Not only does a legal answering service give you a chance to obtain as many clients as you can handle, but it also helps you present your firm or practice as an always-available source of information. Having a legal answering service like Always Answer is essential, with the number of calls that come in after hours.
To learn more about how we can help you maximize productivity, contact us today. If you still need to know more about live answering services or call centers, click here.
