Three Signs You’ve Hired Premium Legal Intake Services

Call centers have a bad reputation. Ask anyone what they think of a call center, and they’re likely to think of it as a soulless replacement for in-house staff that inevitably does the work worse than the people they’re replacing.

While there are certainly call centers out there like that, they’re giving the industry a bad name. Like vanilla ice cream and hot dogs, legal intake services and other call centers tend to get a lot better the more premium they are.

By premium, we don’t just mean more expensive; we mean of higher quality. While price and quality often go hand in hand, it’s not always true. So how can one tell the difference between average legal intake services providers and their premium counterparts? In this blog, we’ll go over three ways to know you’ve found premium legal intake services.

Every Prospect Gets A Quality Legal Intake

First and foremost, of course, in evaluating the quality of legal intake services should be the quality of the legal intake they provide. If you’re getting subpar results from your legal intake services, then you haven’t found the right one. If you’re unsatisfied with your service, we have a few suggestions for evaluating the right one.

The best legal intake services are highly customizable. Your clients should feel like they’ve reached a member of your firm, not someone you’ve never met. In the best case scenario, you’ll receive compliments from callers when you speak with them yourself, telling you how much they loved the interaction, and how much they preferred speaking to a live person over leaving a voicemail.

Making sure you’re answering every call is important; only 1 in 3 phone calls to law firms are picked up live.

That makes availability a key criterion as well. You want your legal intake services to shore up the times when you aren’t available, both in and out of the office; that means you need them to be available 24/7. For a similar reason, bilingual answering is important too; you should be able to trust your legal intake services to handle every call coming into your firm, regardless of who is calling and when.

Finally, and most rarely, premium legal intake services are specialized. Your virtual receptionists should be providing legal intakes to new clients calling law firms, not customer intakes to whoever happens to be calling a business they answer for. The fewer other industries they answer for, the better trained they will be to answer for your industry.

Their Technology Plays Nicely With Yours

A legal intake services provider is, believe it or not, both a tech company and a service company. While you may not necessarily interact with their software, it does exist, and its quality is reflective of that company’s quality.

That software is usually on the receptionists’ side of each phone call. It lets them know what firm they’re answering for, what specific customization requests that firm has made, and allows them to transfer live callers. If any of these features is missing or subpar, it might be time to evaluate the effectiveness of yourlegal intake services.

That software also allows your legal intake services to integrate with your other law firm software. Your phone intakes should seamlessly flow to your CRM or legal intake management system so you can automate them just like you would an online inquiry. With premium legal intake services, you’ll be able to send educational material, next steps, or even retainer agreements automatically after every intake.

The use of technology in intake is key: 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 2023 Clio Legal Trends Report.

Premium legal intake services enhance your firm’s flexibility. You shouldn’t feel chained to your desktop in order to refresh an online portal when you delegate your phones to an outside service provider. Instead, you should be able to access your messages anywhere. Email and text messages are a great step toward this freedom, but most importantly, a custom mobile app is key to making this happen.

Premium legal intake services, to sum it all up, should have technology that makes your life easier. It should be functional first and foremost, and simple to use. Hopefully it’s also proprietary, owned by the company you’ve hired to handle your phones. And finally, it should save you time. Being able to integrate phone inquiries into your automation processes and follow up on messages in an easy-to-use mobile app will greatly increase your firm’s productivity.

Your Life As A Law Firm Owner Is Easier

What’s the point of hiring a company to make your business easier to run if it’s always a pain to operate their product? If you’re having trouble using software, or some other tool is giving you trouble, and you’re having trouble getting help, you’re probably not getting the best service possible. The following advice applies to almost all technology and services you might contract to help you run your firm, but it applies especially to legal intake services.

Premium legal intake services will never give you the run-around. Your payment plan should be clear and straightforward, not convoluted and opaque. Your bill shouldn’t be a never-ending list of dubious add-on fees. If you’re not receiving every feature offered by your legal answering service because they cost extra, you’re not dealing with a quality legal intake service.

You should have access to 24/7 support for your legal intake services. One of the worst things that can happen when implementing a new tool into your business is that it doesn’t work, or is difficult to use. The absolute worst thing that can happen, though, is if you’re left on your own to deal with the problem. In the following video clip, Dorna Moini, CEO and founder of Gavel, explains just how important support is when adopting new technology.

While it’s not entirely within anyone’s control, your legal intake services should experience very little downtime. Things like proprietary servers, local servers, and backup generators can be used to mitigate the risk of downtime due to environmental issues and human error.

Finally, for your callers’ sakes, your legal intake specialists should be 100 percent U.S.-based. While there’s nothing wrong with outsourcing, offshoring doesn’t reflect well on a business.

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.

Premium legal intake services will usually only hire their receptionists within the U.S., and sometimes even only in their own backyards. That’s the surest way to know you’re dealing with a company worth investing in.

Answering Legal Does Premium Right

If you’re looking for premium legal intake services, look no further than Answering Legal. Our virtual receptionists only answer for lawyers. That means we can train them to be legal intake experts. And, we are 100 percent U.S.-based.

Our service is nothing to sneeze at either. We use a flat-rate pricing structure; our customers never have to worry about mystery fees or missing features. Our receptionists are available 24/7, as well as our support team. We integrate with the top legal software in the industry, and that list is always growing. And, we even have our own mobile app!

Experience premium legal intake services, no strings attached. 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.