Why A Live Answer Means Everything To Your Customers

When a person calls your law office, it’s usually not regarding a casual matter. In many cases, a person will be calling your firm on one of the worst days of their life. Their call could be regarding an unexpected event, like a DUI arrest or an unjust dismissal from a job, for which they require immediate legal assistance. Even calls regarding matters like estate planning and traffic tickets can carry a high level of urgency.

Unfortunately, most firms will struggle to match their callers level of urgency, as a caller’s worst day is just another work day at the office for an attorney. Even if the lawyer truly does care about a consumer’s troubles, they will often be too busy to give them their full attention. In fact, many legal phone calls will end up going straight to a lawyer’s voicemail. So when a customer calls your firm on one of the worst days of their life, they get greeted by an impersonal pre-recorded message!

As you can probably imagine, callers to your firm aren’t going to be too pleased with this treatment. And if you’re one of those lawyers that still believes the majority of customers out there will leave you a message and patiently wait for your firm to call them back, you may be in for a rude awakening.

Getting Inside The Head Of The Modern Consumer

Today’s attorney must have a live professional voice ready to answer every one of their office’s calls. If this sounds unrealistic, too bad. That’s what is required of firms to be successful in the digital age. Here are two reasons why.

The Modern Consumer Won’t Wait For You

In a blog post from SAS, Eric Singleton, Chief Information Officer for the retail clothing chain Chico’s, provides some important insight on the modern consumer.

“There’s an expectation among today’s consumers that the ability to consume is a 24/7 thing,” says Singleton. “When consumption can take place at any time of the day, retailers have to address the nuances and the requirements of different consumer needs throughout day.”

While this may be true of retail shoppers, law consumers can’t carry the same 24/7 expectations, right? Well as we stated earlier, legal consumers are dealing with urgent problems, and as a service that’s been answering the phones for lawyers for many years, we can tell you that people won’t hesitate to call a firm outside of normal office hours. We can also confirm that if you don’t provide a live answer to your customers outside of normal office hours, they’ll usually just move on to calling another firm. Don’t expect to receive too many voicemails, as most modern consumers don’t have patience for them.

If You’re Not First, You’re Last

It turns out Ricky Bobby was right! Being that first firm that picks up with a live voice matters a great deal in today’s consumer world. According to the Rainmaker Blog, 58% percent of consumers will only contact one attorney. This tells us that legal consumers have no interest in going on a wild goose hunt for the right attorney. They’re looking to hire the first firm that comes off as impressive to them on the phone. Your job is to make sure your firm never misses an opportunity to be that impressive firm.

So how do you achieve this? You literally need a live voice ready to answer phone calls on your behalf at all hours of the day and night. The lawyers at your firm won’t have time to do this, so you’re going to need to invest in some professional legal phone answering help.

What A Live Answering Professional Can Do For Your Firm

Picking up your office’s phone calls within the first few rings means a lot, but that alone won’t help you capture new leads. In order to consistently secure new leads, you’ll need to always have a trained legal receptionist on the other end, a fact that FindLaw elaborated on in an article from May 2018.

According to FindLaw: “(The prospect) still needs confirmation that you’re the right attorney for them. They need a quality intake experience that is organized and empathetic to help them decide that you’re the lawyer to hire. Once a connection is made, that client is virtually yours to lose.”

A trained legal receptionist ideally will have a lot of experience in answering legal phone calls, meaning that they’ll know how to engage with your callers and won’t be fazed by any high-stakes situations that are presented to them. And having that receptionist take your callers through a proper legal intake process, will confirm to them that their problems are at least on the way to getting solved, and that your firm is the one who can solve them.

Now, this all sounds nice in theory, but how are firms supposed to go about providing every one of their callers with this level of care, when callers are reaching out to their firm during late hours of the night and weekends?

Where To Get Live Answering Assistance

With the right help, providing every single one of your callers with a live answer really isn’t that difficult. Answering Legal is a phone answering service that specializes in answering calls for attorneys, and stays hard at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. Every call your firm is unable to pick up during the work day or outside of normal office hours, will be handled by one of our trained legal receptionists. And we do mean every single call.

All of our receptionists have been trained in not only handling legal phone calls, but performing full legal intakes. Our receptionist team will ensure that your firm always makes the best impression on first time callers, and will collect the customer and case information you need to effectively evaluate and move forward with new leads. Our service will also be able to keep current clients from feeling neglected, as our receptionists can take messages and update your callers on when they should expect to hear back from you.

Getting Started

Answering Legal offers all lawyers the opportunity to try out its service for free for seven days. We’re confident that once you see firsthand how our live receptionist team impacts your firm, you’ll be ready to invest in our service full-time.

Click here to begin your free trial!

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