Legal Answering Service vs. Call Center

You may often hear people using the terms call center and answering service interchangeably. After all, you cannot blame them as both of them have a lot of similarities. Both of them have customer representatives sitting in front of computers in cubicles and have a proper office set up in commercial buildings for attending calls from clients. However, the difference between a legal answering service and a call center doesn’t lie in the physical aspects; it is in how each processes calls and handles clients.

Let’s take an in-depth look at how a legal answering service and a call center operate:

Answering Service

An answering service is designed to cater to the needs of specific market segments like law firms and solo practitioners regardless of their practice areas. They have live operators who are capable of handling large volume of calls and answer phones efficiently. Unlike call centers, an answering service offers a more personalized experience and focus on individual calls.

To make things simple, you may think of an answering service as a virtual receptionist that works for you round the clock. When you hire a legal answering service, you can expect the following services:

• Note down messages and queries, and take personal information of your prospective clients
• Provide basic information of your law firm
• Capable of answering legal queries of your prospective clients
• Often connect or transfer client calls to your law firm
• Have fewer live operators, offering your clients personalized experience and great first impression
• Likely to take calls 24/7

The average call time is relatively shorter, as live operators ask a few basic questions from callers and answer their queries or concerns in a timely manner.

Call Center

A call center differs from an answering service in three ways: they serve horizontal markets; their main purpose is telemarketing or providing customer support, and they are suitable for larger operations. Another difference is the duration of calls which typically spans from 5 to 15 minutes or more.

The following are a few features of a call center that make it unfit for law firms:

• Gathers and stores information about clients and orders, and send it in bulk
• Mostly used for handling customer complaints, taking orders, and selling products and services
• Cannot perform clerical duties because of high volume of calls

Why an Answering Service is Better for your Law Firm

As you can see, a legal answering service and a call center significantly differ from one another. To sum it all up and prove why the former is better for your law firm, here are some benefits that an answering service has over a call center:

• Alleviates internal workload
• Can take up clerical duties
• Round the clock virtual receptionist service
• Significantly reduces the number of missed calls
• Personalized service

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