How We Make Our 24/7 After Hours Phone Answering Service Work

Law firm owners don’t often get the luxury of time off. We’re not even talking about taking a few weeks of vacation, either—that’s also a luxury that’s hard to afford. No, we just mean enjoying a night off after a day of work!

The smaller the law firm, the more responsibility is on the owner’s shoulders. It’s not easy to get the kind of support and coverage you need to be able to relax at the end of a day without your hand hovering by your phone.

But with our highly-trained virtual receptionists, you can! We’ve optimized our service to be able to provide the same quality to every caller, regardless of when they’re calling in. Read below to find out more!

The Value Of 24/7 Coverage, 365 Days A Year

You might be thinking, depending on your practice area, that you might not have a need for 24/7 phone coverage. However, even practice areas you might not expect get late-night calls.

Sure, for personal injury and criminal defense firms, it’s easy to imagine clients calling often at night. But what about tax attorneys? Maybe a small business owner stayed up late into the morning reviewing their taxes, and found that they might actually be in violation of a tax statute. You can be sure that person won’t want to wait until morning; they aren’t going to be able to sleep until they’ve spoken to a lawyer.

71 percent of clients prefer their first contact with a lawyer to be over the phone, but only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live!

Even if late-night or weekend calls are rare for your practice area, every attorney should be able to see the value and peace of mind a 24/7 after hours phone answering service can provide. Why miss out on the business those late-night or weekend callers represent? Or, even worse, why sacrifice your time whenever they call in.

Most small law firm owners have their firm’s phones forwarded to their cell phones after work. How many times have you had to interrupt a family bonding moment or been woken from your sleep by a phone call? The worst part is that some of these calls represent real business opportunities, but some of them don’t. The potential of new client calls late at night, however, means you can’t afford to ignore these calls. And, of course, existing clients don’t like to be sent to voicemail either—nobody does!

With 24/7 phone coverage, that won’t be a worry. Our virtual receptionists are available around the clock, every day of the year, to ease your worries and make running your firm without sacrificing your personal life possible.

Optimizing For 24/7 Service

24/7 quality answering is a vital service we here at Answering Legal are proud to offer our customers. But it’s not easy to run a 24/7 after hours phone answering service. We need to ensure that the quality of our answering doesn’t fluctuate by the hour. We do that by valuing our team, training, and providing 24/7 support.

First and foremost, of course we need virtual receptionists to handle the phones overnight. Because we only hire receptionists from within the U.S., this is harder than it sounds. While other answering services can outsource to receptionists in time zones where a U.S. graveyard shift is a 9 to 5, we don’t. We believe that outsourcing leads to a drop in quality for our customers, introducing unnecessary complications and leading to a less-than-premium outcome.

A Purdue University study found that regardless of their satisfaction with a call center, 65 percent of consumers would alter their behavior or perception toward a company after finding out they used an offshore call center.

That means we must prioritize flexibility in our receptionists. We make sure to have flexible but reliable schedules, and we allow our receptionists to volunteer holidays, as not everyone celebrates every holiday.

On top of that, we always put our personnel first. We make sure that everyone undergoes months of rigorous training before ever answering the phone for a law firm. We also have regular retraining sessions for new or changed accounts, so that our receptionists are always prepared to deliver top quality service regardless of the hour.

How We Provide 24/7 Intake, Messages, and Transfers

When we say 24/7/365, we mean it. We don’t cut corners; each of our features is available all day, every day, year-round, and for no additional cost. We’ll work with you to customize your service to fit your needs, and we’ll take it from there.

We’ll even transfer new client callers to you at any hour if that’s your preference. We know that some attorneys are hungry for every client, so if you want us to call you at 2 AM on a Wednesday morning to check if you want to speak to a prospective client right away, we can do that. And you can be sure those clients are likely to stick with your firm after that kind of treatment!

Our transfers work like this:

1. When a caller identities themselves as a new client, our receptionist will put them on hold as per your call protocols
2. Then they will call you, the attorney, and see if you’d like to patch the call through
3. If so, our receptionist will give you the basics of the caller’s information

If you decide not to take a transfer, however, our receptionists will perform a legal intake, no matter the hour. Our receptionists train for months so that they can perform legal intake for all kinds of law firms. You can read more about our legal intake process here.

All the information shared in these phone calls is dutifully taken down by our receptionists, all to be included in a message at the end of the call. That includes the contents of the legal intake! These messages are then sent to you via the Answering Legal app or any legal CRM you may have integrated your service with.

This way, you’re in complete control of when you respond to these messages. Want to respond first thing in the morning? You’ll have notifications on your phone that lead straight to a follow-up. Want to respond as soon as the call comes in? You can change your notification settings so your phone alerts you when a message is delivered.

Ensure You And Our Receptionists Have 24/7 Support

Here’s the problem: just having 24/7 phone coverage isn’t going to do much for your peace of mind. It’s important to know that if something goes wrong, your 24/7 after hours phone answering service has your back. That’s why we also have a 24/7 support team on standby at all times to address our customer’s concerns and support our receptionists.

If at any time you have a message for our service, you can let us know via email at [email protected], by phone at (631) 778-7010, at our support link here, or on the app via the support ticket function! Our support team will immediately get on top of the issue, whatever it is, from turning off transfer calls while you’re in court to recovering a lost message.

And, of course, as anyone who has worked in a call center can tell you, sometimes phone calls can get intense. Our receptionists are well-trained in these issues, but even then, at some point there may come a phone call in which a receptionist needs help. Our support team is always on standby to help resolve difficult phone calls satisfactorily for all parties involved, to make sure your firm is always well-represented.

Get A Taste Of What 24/7 Phone Coverage Can Give Your Firm

We have to admit, we’re a little bit biased. We’re proud of our service, our receptionists, and our support team, and we do like to brag here on the Answering Legal blog. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to take our word for it.

If you want to feel the effects of a 24/7 after hours phone answering service, just sign up for our free trial! There’s no contracts, no strings attached; we don’t even need your credit card! We just want to make sure you can rest without needing to worry about your phones, even if it's just for the free trial.

It’s not just a 24/7 answering service you’ll be trying either. All of our features are available for our free trial, as soon as you sign up. You’ll be able to make use of our mobile app and our integrations with top legal software.

Get the support you need to relax on your time off. Click here or call 631-686-9700 to sign up for our free trial. For a limited time, we’re offering firms that sign up for our service their first 400 minutes free.