How A Legal Virtual Receptionist Can Save Your Firm From Scheduling Disasters

Scheduling disasters happen every day in law offices across the country. Double bookings and forgotten appointments can cause embarrassment for attorneys, frustration for clients, and often lead to unnecessary conflict. They are an epidemic that must be stopped!

Fortunately there’s a pretty easy solution for this highly debilitating issue: Hiring a legal virtual receptionist.

For those unfamiliar, a virtual receptionist is a receptionist that can answer your office’s phone calls from an off-site location. Most virtual receptionists are actually pretty limited in what they can provide. But, when teaming up with Answering Legal and our staff of 24/7/365 receptionists, you’ll receive invaluable help in keeping your monthly calendar clean and organized. Here’s how we can be of assistance.

Integrating With Your Calendar

Most answering services out there won’t be able to help you manage your schedule, because they either simply don’t care to, or can’t access your calendar. At Answering Legal, appointment scheduling is a premium feature available to all of our customers (upon completion of their 10-day free trial), and comes at no additional cost. Our service can easily integrate with most calendar softwares, including Google Calendar, meaning we can accommodate the calendaring needs of just about any lawyer.

Once an Answering Legal virtual receptionist is given access to your work calendar, they’ll be able to effectively book appointments with clients on your behalf, allowing you to dedicate your efforts to more important things. Our staff will know which times slots you are unavailable, and never double book you. They have been trained to work with a high degree of accuracy, assuring that scheduling mistakes never occur.

So why is appointment booking such a valuable feature for attorneys?

The Mindset Of The Modern Consumer

Today’s consumer has a lot of legal options to choose from, and if the person answering your office’s phones is unable to inspire confidence right away, you’re likely to miss out on a lot of new clients. One of the biggest things your first time callers will be looking for is some kind of indication that their problems are on the way to getting solved. You’ll need a quality virtual receptionist to provide them with that assurance.

So let’s say a new prospective client is calling into your firm, and you can’t get to the phone. If you let that call go to your voicemail, you’ll in most cases miss out on a chance to win their business, as today’s consumer generally doesn’t carry enough patience for dealing with automated messages. A virtual receptionist from your average answering service may be able to keep the customer’s attention a little longer, but can still leave consumers frustrated if they can’t book a time to actually speak with the lawyer. Like we said, modern consumers always want to know what comes next.

An Answering Legal virtual receptionist will not only be able to provide a live answer for your new customers and take them through a proper legal intake process, but offer some much needed closure to the phone call, by setting up an exact time for them to speak with you. By doing this, you’ll keep consumers from moving on to calling other firms, and let your potential clients know right away that they’re dealing with a firm that actually cares.

Read More: What Can A Lawyer Answering Service Do That My Voicemail Can’t?

But What About After Hours?

Many lawyers will experience a high number of customer calls during overnights, weekends, and holidays. In most cases, they won’t have any receptionist coverage for those hours. This means that they end up missing out on a sizable amount of new clients.

With Answering Legal being a 24/7/365 company, our receptionist team will always be available to answer your firm’s calls. And we guarantee that all of our premium features, including appointment scheduling, will be fulfilled by our virtual receptionist outside of normal office hours. You can sleep easier at night, knowing that if a significant client does call in during the overnight, they will be handled with care by one of our highly trained receptionists. You may even wake up to a few new appointments on your schedule.

Read More: Five Types of Attorneys That Absolutely Need An After Hours Answering Service

Final Thoughts

One of the best things about Answering Legal is that we are a highly customizable service. So if you have preferences for how you want our virtual receptionist team to handle your calendar and appointment scheduling, we can in most cases accommodate your needs.

We truly believe that our appointment scheduling services will bring a higher level of organization to your firm’s day, providing you with more clarity and less stress. To get started with a free 10-day trial of Answering Legal, click here!

To learn about more ways using an attorney answering service can transform your firm, check out this blog post!