Making The Best Use Of A Virtual Receptionist For Lawyers

It’s common sense that a tool is more useful when you know how to use it. As we discussed in our series on our mobile app, that is just as true for simple tools as it is for complex ones.

Knowing how to make the most of a virtual receptionist for lawyers is the same way. The theme of today’s blog is to be an active participant in your legal answering service. While there’s value in a set-it-and-forget-it tool, active participation will enhance your results and make your law firm run more smoothly.

Making active use of a virtual receptionist for lawyers doesn’t have to be a bear to handle, either. In this blog, we’ll demonstrate how to make the best use of a virtual receptionist for lawyers without sacrificing your valuable time.

Adjusting Your Custom Settings As Needed

The first step to getting the most out of your investment in a virtual receptionist for lawyers is to make sure all of your custom settings are where you need them to be. These settings are established in setup and often not touched again unless something about your firm changes drastically.

But setup doesn’t have to be the end of dialing in your custom settings. Actively checking up on your virtual receptionist for lawyers can let you squeeze some extra value out of your legal answering service.

Take legal intake, for example. When you set up your custom legal intake with an answering service, you’re likely to establish a handful of intake questions and some call protocols. It’s easy to let this be the end of your intake journey. But setting up a quarterly intake check-in to evaluate the effectiveness of your intake questions and process will make you get a much better result. For more about how to check if your legal intake is working as intended, click here.

If you think this kind of check-in doesn’t bring value to your firm, check this out:

52 percent of firms satisfied with their revenue make good use of tech tools like a virtual receptionist for their client intake, as opposed to 47 percent of firms unsatisfied with their revenue, according to the Clio Legal Trends Report.

There’s a five percent difference between firms that are satisfied with their revenue and those that aren’t when it comes to intake technology. Running a successful business is a matter of optimizing in corners like these, where a simple quarterly check-in can push your revenue up to five percent.

Staying On Top Of Your Calls

It’s a bit obvious, but perhaps the best way to make the most of a virtual receptionist for lawyers is to stay on top of your calls. Delegating your phone is a great way to save time, but it’s also a great way to secure the leads you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to reach. These are the people that call when you’re too busy to answer your phone or after hours.

If you’re not checking your messages regularly looking for these and other new clients, you’re not getting what you need from your investment.

After all, according to Clio’s Legal Trends Report, 79 percent of callers expect a response within 24 hours of leaving a voicemail.

A virtual receptionist for lawyers will extend that time frame and make new clients more forgiving, but legal consumers are still very likely to go with the first law firm that gets back to them. That means you need to be responding to their messages and following up as often as possible. Of course, if you’re constantly checking your messages and calling clients, you’re not saving yourself a lot of time, and you’re not that much better off than if you were answering the phone yourself.

Therefore, you should set up scheduled times when you respond to client inquiries and new client callers. It can be as often as a glance at your messages every hour, or as infrequent as once a day, but the important part is to schedule it.

It’s a simple productivity hack, but it works: if you put a task on your calendar, you’re more likely to do it. By actively scheduling time for existing client follow-up and new client responses, you’re making sure it gets done without taking too much time away from your work.

Being An Active Participant

As we mentioned before, the theme of this blog is being an active participant. As much as it seems like a set-it-and-forget-it service, hiring a virtual receptionist for lawyers should be a consistently active process if you’re interested in making the most of your investment.

For example, let’s say you’re a litigator, and you’re going into court. You're going to want to pause your message notifications while you’re in court so that your phone isn’t buzzing the whole time. With a simple 30-second support call or request, you can have your messages turned off temporarily, and then request access to them again on your way out.

If your answering service has an app, it’s even easier to have full control over your messages! You can simply turn off the notifications on your app (or, barring emergency contacts, your whole phone) and slide the setting back to its default once you’re done.

There are plenty of other ways to turn a virtual receptionist for lawyers from a passive tool to an active linchpin in your firm. You can adjust your call forwarding protocols, for example, if you’re going on vacation to make sure your answering service is taking all your calls. In that same situation, if you’re truly taking some time off, you can have the messages rerouted to someone else in your firm or have your virtual receptionist for lawyers inform callers that you’re on vacation and will be back soon!

Since customization is key, it’s really up to you how you use a virtual receptionist for lawyers. Taking some time each quarter to analyze the performance of your answering service and seeing how you can get more out of your investment will lead to much more success.

Make The Best Use of Answering Legal

We know how to make the best use of a virtual receptionist for lawyers because we run a legal answering service ourselves. We are always letting our customers know how they could be making better use of our services through newsletters, emails, and blog posts, because we want our customers to get the most out of their investment.

We do feel we have a leg up on other answering services. Our operators are true virtual receptionists for lawyers: they only ever answer for legal professionals. And they only do that after three months of rigorous training in legal intake. If you’d like to learn more about our virtual receptionists, click here.

Answering Legal has great virtual receptionists for lawyers, but we also run a very tech-forward answering service. We have a mobile app that allows you to run your firm from your phone, and integrations with top legal softwares.

Make the best use of the best virtual receptionists for lawyers, for free. 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.