What Can A Lawyer Answering Service Do That My Voicemail Can't?

There was a time when voicemail was an exciting new technology, and helped bring businesses and their prospective clients closer together. That time was the 1990s.

Today, in the age of “I need answers now!”, consumers view voicemail as a hindrance, and simply don’t have patience for it. Automated machines have become particularly useless for attorneys, as people with legal problems don’t have a minute to waste. If a prospective client calls your office seeking immediate assurance and guidance, but instead hears a pre-recorded message, they will be less than thrilled to say the least.

Customers have a wide range of legal options to choose from these days, and definitely don’t have to wait on you to return their voicemail message. Instead, they can just move on to calling one of your competitors. This is why lawyers who rely on their automated machines to handle the calls they can’t answer typically have disappointing client conversion rates.

So if voicemail won’t help you capture clients, what will?

A Live Voice Is Key

Going from a machine to a live person may seem like regressing in the digital age, but when it comes to converting new leads over the phone, having a real person answer everyone of your calls is essential. In fact, statistics show that 53% of consumers will get irritated if they do not get to speak to a live person right away. Voicemail simply isn’t getting the job done.

Unfortunately, lawyers and their staff answering every call that comes into their office just isn’t realistic. And if you account for calls that come outside of normal office hours, law offices could be missing out on almost as many calls as they pick up (yes, having a live voice matters after hours too). The only way to ensure all your phone calls are accounted for, is to team up with a 24/7 lawyer answering service.

Let’s go over a few things that a quality lawyer answering service can do for your firm, that an automated message simply can’t.

Making Your Callers Feel Important

Often we turn to machines for improved efficiency, but when it comes to handling legal phone calls, a certain level of empathy and human touch is required. The prospective clients calling your firm are looking for help with a serious problem, and are likely scared. They want to know that someone actually cares what they’re going through.

A trained receptionist from a lawyer answering service will carry a significant amount of experience in handling legal phone calls, and know the appropriate tone and dialogue to approach your prospective clients with. Just picking up the phone within the first three rings can go a long way in showing your customers you care about their case. A warm greeting from a live person will be much more heartening for a caller to hear than a canned message followed by a beep.

Performing Legal Intake

Another way to showcase your firm’s competence during times when you’re unavailable to do so yourself, is having a live voice ready to take customers through a process known as legal intake. Performing a legal intake over the phone typically involves a trained live receptionist taking first-time callers through a list of predetermined questions. These questions are designed to extract personal and case information from potential clients, to get you all the information you need to impress the caller during your follow-up conversation.

A quality lawyer answering service, will have receptionists ready around the clock to perform that legal intake on behalf of your firm. Having this process executed correctly every time will go a long way in helping your practice convert more new leads, as it can give your first-time callers a sense that your firm knows what it is doing and has a real plan of action for solving their issues.

Keeping New Leads From Going To Waste

Getting people to call into your firm is exhausting and expensive work. It would be a real shame if all that effort was for nothing, because you continued to rely on a a machine from before Y2K to capture your new leads. You need to work smarter! A simple call to a lawyer answering service, such as Answering Legal, can ensure that the leads generated by your marketing campaigns actually equate to new clients for your firm, and actually deliver a significant return on investment.

Don’t believe us? Check out this blog post, and hear from real attorneys how using a lawyer answering service has changed their firm for the better.

Want to see for yourself? You absolutely can! Answering Legal offers a free, no obligation, no contract, 10-day free trial of its service, which you can get started with right away. Sign up here.