4 Reasons Why An Answering Service Is The Ultimate Lead Capturing System

A great legal marketing campaign can get your firm seen, but will not by itself secure you new clients. This is important for attorneys to keep in mind when their expensive and time consuming marketing ventures fail to result in a profit for their business.

It is easy to blame the quality of your advertising for a lack of new customers, but your marketing is often times not the problem. In fact, promotion is just half the battle when it comes to securing new clients for your firm. Once you are able to get people calling into your business, you need a proper lead capturing system in place to make sure interested customers actually turn into paying clients. Without one, just about all of your marketing efforts will go to waste.

So what is the best way for your law office to capture new leads? Surprisingly in today’s digital world, it is an old school form of communication that still reigns supreme.

According to a 2014 FindLaw study, 74% of law firm prospects beginning a search online end up contacting the office via phone.

People looking for a lawyer’s help are typically searching for the quickest possible response to their legal issue, which is why they opt for calling your office over other less direct contact methods. You need to make answering those calls a top priority, and we do not recommend you try to do so alone. Teaming up with a quality answering service can help ensure that your firm is ready to handle the calls of all potential clients, and put you in the best position to win their business. Here are four reasons why an answering service can serve as the perfect mouse trap for bringing new clients to your firm.

Answering Services Keep Customers From Passing You By

If your firm is operating without an answering service, you are losing out on many of your potential clients before you even get the chance to speak with them.

You never know when a new person will choose to reach out to your firm. In many cases it will happen outside of office hours, or during a time in which you are too busy to get to the phone. When a client calls your firm, and no live representative of your business is there to speak with them, there is a high probability that client will move onto calling another law office. Automated voicemail systems do not have a strong track record of keeping people’s interest. With so many law offices in existence today, it is foolish to expect customers to wait for you to return their call.

Teaming up with an answering service can keep your callers from slipping away, because they provide a team of legal intake receptionists to answer your firm’s calls 24/7. Any call your office misses, no matter when it occurs, will be picked up by a trained legal receptionist. This gives your firm the ability to capture new clients 168 hours a week, instead of just 40.

Answering Services Provide Comfort For Your Callers

A trained legal receptionist from an answering service can provide comfort to callers by:

• Answering any FAQs regarding your firm
• Offering a time frame for when they can expect to hear back from you
• Letting them know that you will be given their message right away
• Providing a polite and friendly human voice to empathize with their issue

Always try to put yourself in your callers’ shoes when evaluating your business. Would you wait around for a response if your call to a firm was met with a vague, disinterested, or automated response? Most likely not. With an answering service, you can feel confident that your clients will never be left in the dark regarding questions about your services, and will want to put their trust in your firm.

Answering Services Can Perform Invaluable Legal Intake Work

Having a quality legal intake process is a necessity for capturing new clients. Unfortunately, doing the process the right way can take time, which is something your law office likely does not have a lot of during the work day and especially not after hours.

An answering service that specializes in legal intake will be able to solve these problems by providing trained receptionists to perform proper legal intakes on all of your new callers. This gives you the peace of mind of knowing that all the calls your office can’t get to are not just being picked up, but being handled with the same level of care you would give them.

How will your firm benefit from consistently strong legal intake work?:

• First time callers will always end phone calls feeling like their case is in trustworthy hands.
• You will know before even speaking with a client whether or not their case fits your firm.
• All of the information gathered from your calls will always be accurate and detailed.

It is crucial that your intakes are performed correctly, because the quality of your intake process will often dictate how your first meetings with new customers will go. Which leads us to our final reason.

Answering Services Fully Prepare Attorneys To Win Over New Clients

If you are constantly losing out on potential clients, it’s time to examine your lead capturing system as a whole, and determine if it is putting you in the best position to be successful. You can only be at your best as an attorney when you have the tools to do so. An answering service can provide you with those tools.

With an answering service as your main lead capturing system, you will have the personal and case information of every new caller sent to you immediately by the receptionist who performs their intake. When it comes time for you to follow-up with a customer, you will enter the interaction fully prepared to win their business. You can deliver new clients an appropriate plan of action for their legal issue right away, and will never be thrown off by facts you were not already aware of. Delivering that level of elite care to your clients, is how your firm can really stand out in today’s overcrowded legal field.