Live Answering Service 101: How Are My Calls Handled While I’m On Vacation?

If you’re an attorney, one of the hardest things to do is to take time off. And while it’s true that a lot of lawyers tend to have a workaholic nature, the biggest reason attorneys tend to keep putting off much-needed vacation time, is because they feel they can’t afford to stop working. For growing firms, answering every single phone call with a live voice means everything, because any calls could represent a chance to win over a new client.

Thanks to Answering Legal, lawyers no longer have to make the choice between sacrificing invaluable vacation time or missing out on new clients. Our 24/7 live answering service has been helping attorneys successfully take time off for years, and is able to ensure that new opportunities don’t pass their firm by while they soak up some sun on the beach or go exploring another country. In this blog post, we’ll let you know how vacationing as an Answering Legal customer works, and clue you in on all the perks of having our service while you’re away from the office for extended periods of time.

How Calls Get Forwarded During Your Time Off

Investing in Answering Legal means your office’s incoming callers will never get sent to an automated machine ever again. Our 24/7 receptionist team is always available to answer your office’s incoming calls, even on holidays! During your time away from the office, this will prove to be an incredibly invaluable tool, as instead of a large majority of your vacation calls going to voicemail (which modern day consumers loathe), your potential new clients and existing clients will actually get the assistance of a live person.

When an Answering Legal customer decides to take a vacation, they’ll have a number of options in how they want their calls handled. The most popular call handling option for those stepping away from their desks for days or weeks at a time, is full-time call forwarding. This call forwarding option provides exactly what the name implies. All of your office’s incoming calls immediately get transferred over to our service to be answered on the first ring by our receptionist team. Doing this ensures that your ability to capture new leads does not dramatically decrease while you’re enjoying a break.

The Impact of Live Phone Answering

All too often, legal consumers that get sent to voicemail will move on to calling another firm right away, because they feel that their concerns are not being heard. Our receptionists are kind, attentive, and highly professional, and will make sure that your firm never loses a potential customer due to an uncaring first impression. We’ll let your callers know when they should expect to hear back from you, and answer any basic questions they might have about your firm in the meantime (using information provided by you).

For those hesitant about the impression using a virtual receptionist might make on your important callers, we can’t stress enough that our live answering service is much different than others. At Answering Legal, we only answer calls on behalf of lawyers. This allows us to put our new receptionist hires through specific training in answering legal phone calls. Our trainees spend months fielding practice calls, carefully watching our other receptionists interact with legal callers, and learning how to perform the legal intake process. Just about every lawyer that uses our legal receptionist team walks away highly impressed, and if you don’t believe us, check out some of our reviews!

Keeping Up With Your Messages On Vacation

While some lawyers have the ability to completely turn off their brains on vacation and actually relax, we know many of you will spend your time poolside stressing over the potential callers you’re missing out on. This is of course a very reasonable instinct, as the thought of missing out on a game-changing client because you were too busy waiting on line to ride Splash Mountain, is cringe-worthy for those in charge of growing firms.

For the worrying lawyers in desperate need of some peace of mind, Answering Legal is a must-have service. At the conclusion of every call our service answer on your firm’s behalf, the virtual receptionist who answered the call will send you a message recapping all of the pertinent information from the call. The message can be sent in text and/or email form, and can be viewed right from your smartphone. You won’t even have to bring your laptop on vacation with you. Just check in with your mobile device periodically, and you’ll be caught up on all your office’s incoming calls almost instantly. If one of the messages indicates that a caller’s situation is time sensitive, you can jump into action, knowing that you’re only interrupting your vacation time for a really good reason.

We Provide More Than Just Vacation Coverage

Let’s address a question that has probably popped in the heads of many of you, as you’ve read through this blog post. No, you aren’t allowed to just using Answering Legal for short-term vacation coverage. While you can try out our service for free for 10 days, and can leave at the end of it with no financial penalty if you feel it isn’t a good fit for your firm, we won’t allow lawyers to just briefly use us for a holiday weekend or a quick getaway.

The truth is that most lawyers that give our service a chance end up being quite thankful for our 24/7/365 coverage. Even when you and your staff are in the office, having additional phone coverage from our receptionist team can mean a great deal. We’ll take the pressure off your firm to answer every single one of it’s incoming calls. Our ability to send you customer messages and transfer live calls over to a lawyer’s cell make us an essential lead capturing tool, and a more than worthwhile investment. And let’s not forget about Answering Legal’s ability to answer phones after hours. Our team will make sure lawyers don’t have to frequently answer phone calls in the middle of the night, and will keep you from getting burnt out during the time between your vacations. And of course when vacation time does come around, our live answering service will prove to be quite the luxury.

See Answering Legal in action, and discover why thousands of lawyers trust us to handle their phones while they vacation, by signing up for a free 10-day trial of our service today. To get started, simply fill out this form or call us at 631-686-9700.