Examine the following checklist as a measurement of current call handling protocols. Perform a review several times a year as your firm changes and grows to set benchmarks for your goals.

• How many new client calls are received each day?
• How many of the new clients calls schedule appointments and how many do not?
• How many hang ups do you think you receive?
• How many times have you returned a call from voicemail only to find the caller has already hired an attorney?
• How many show and no show?
• How are the new clients being prepared for a productive consult?
• Are clients prepared when they show?
• What type of intake questions are you asking?  Do they lead to a consult?

If you are an attorney, you are aware of the day-to-day challenges of routine administrative duties. In a profession where mobility is 90% of the job, it is nearly impossible to field incoming calls in the office or even via cell phone. Hiring an in-house receptionist is one solution, although this still bodes issues. Hiring in-house can be extremely costly, requiring legal training and management of additional staff. Also, legal receptionists can only work 40 hours a week, which still leaves a large stretch of time without call coverage.

Virtual receptionist services can solve these problems for an affordable price. Highly trained agents are live on the line, prepared to answer calls 24/7. Expect lead conversions to increase now that callers reach a live agent rather than voicemail. Prepare clients for meetings by sending documents via email. Create customized scripts that ask pertinent questions leading to a consult. Grow your client base with bilingual call support. The benefits of virtual receptionist services are endless – how does your current call handling procedure stack up?

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications. Alert Communications provides 24/7 call answering support.

White Paper #1 – Turning Leads Into Clients: Professional Call Center Etiquette for Personal Injury Lawyers

Capturing leads can be daunting, especially without a strategy in place. Utilizing an attorney answering service is an affordable, repeatable avenue for more lead captures. Attorneys spend a considerable amount of money on marketing, so once a potential client picks up the phone you want to ensure that all pertinent lead data is collected. With customizable scripting, legal receptionists can obtain the information needed to answer all of the caller’s questions and point them in the correct direction. Don’t allow a missed call to become a missed opportunity; consider a professional call center for efficient data intake and call management strategies.

White Paper #2 – Turning Bankruptcy Inquiries into Attorney Appointments: Professional Call Center Etiquette for Bankruptcy Attorneys

Bankruptcy attorneys will benefit from the use of a call management system to organize caller information and scheduling. An attorney answering service simplifies these jobs by implementing specific strategies for data intake, appointment setting, and general messages. With a virtual receptionist every call is an opportunity for new business. By implementing strategies that work for your goals, simple inquiries can efficiently become appointments.

Legal receptionists act as the face of your law firm, so make sure the correct steps are taken to acquire and retain more leads once they reach you. Alert Communications will deliver an effective call management solution to save you money and exceed your business objectives.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications.  Alert Communications provides 24/7 call answering support.

Attorney answering services increase business and decrease in-house labor costs.With an attorney answering service, office receptionists are freed from the phones to focus on administrative duties and monetary issues. Law firms can outsource receptionist services for a lower rate and have live answering services after hours and on the weekends when higher call volumes are likely due to accidents, crime, and other unfortunate events. Not only can attorney answering services share information over the phone, but also quickly through text messages, live chat, and emails.

Law firms also benefit from using bilingual attorney answering services to cater to all potential clients. Agents receive high-quality training on all of the law firm’s procedures in order to gather pertinent information from callers. With a 24/7 attorney answering service, phone tag is eliminated and questions are answered on the spot. This can potentially increase business by 20-30%. The best attorney answering service will have agents who are friendly, highly competent, and leave
the caller feeling cared for by the end of the conversation.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications. Alert Communications provides 24/7 call answering support.

Two ways to turn leads into conversions:

1. Have a real person answer prospective-client calls. An answering machine or voicemail can only answer a call, not questions.  There may be times during the day or after hours when no one is in the office to take potential client calls.  Route those calls to an on-call attorney or have an industry-savvy receptionist at a live call center answer them.  Prospective clients want to speak with a real person and if one is not available then they’ll often hang up and call another law practice. 
    
2. Take the caller to the next step in the ‘selling’ process.  Sales gurus say that each contact with a prospect should take them to the next step in the selling process.  If you’re outsourcing your potential client calls, rather then just taking a message the receptionst could collect intake information, connecting qualified leads or schedule consults.  All of these would qualify as taking the caller to the next step in the process

And here are the ways Alert Communications can help:

• Manage your leads 24/7, and record calls for quality assurance.
• Develop custom scripts to qualify those leads.
• Deliver qualified leads to your sale people via call transfer or e-mail.
• Schedule appointments and confirm scheduled appointments.

We can answer your calls 24/7, after regular hours and/or for overflow. Our live and automated services enable customized call routing, which can help you manage costs and increase the efficiency of your call traffic. We even provide Spanish-language support at no charge.

If you’re expanding your marketing and media efforts to promote your business, or your business provides that service to others, talk with Alert Communications to learn more about our 24/7 media and marketing support services.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications.  Alert Communications provides 24/7 call answering support including: legal media and marketing support.

This past weekend I attended a tradeshow promoting Alert Communications’ attorney answering services. Based on the traffic at our booth, I’d say it was very successful. Many well-qualified candidates interested in using our services stopped by to ask questions and learn more. But since I would like some sales figures to confirm our success, I won’t make a final decision until we’ve done some follow up, and I see those final numbers in a few weeks or a month.

As I said, we had a lot of traffic. The people were very nice and had a lot of great questions to ask us. Are you available 24/7? Do your agents speak Spanish?  Can you schedule appointments for me, and how do you do it? What makes your service different from other call centers/answering services?

All the visitors spent a lot of time explaining their situation and gave us a chance to tell them how our lawyer answering services could truly help them. But guess what the most popular question was — How much is it?

That same question was asked in a variety of ways. I quoted rates, explained our services are month to month and did my best to help them see our value. I made a point of explaining that our attorney answering services are designed to help them capture new clients they might otherwise lose. And I pointed out that  additional business would pay for the cost of our services. I was doing a good job, but not nearly as good a job as my existing clients did for me.

It was great! THEY were great! Many of our clients stopped by our booth to say hello and tell us what a great job we do. On several occasions, I had 5-10 people at my booth when an Alert client stopped by to sing our praises. This was live, word-of-mouth advertising that was better than anything I could possibly say to prospective clients.

Our current clients explained how great our staff is, how friendly they are, how our account managers help them and — best of all — how they had no idea how many calls they were missing until they started using our services. They went on to say their practices were growing because they were no longer missing those calls. If only my cell phone shot video, I would have some great video testimonials for our Web site!

While there are any number of effective online, electronic and printed ways to advertise in today’s business world, I have to admit there’s still nothing that beats the impact of word-of-mouth advertising.

If you don’t know what your clients are saying about you, it’s time to go find out.

Frances Starr, Director of Sales & Marketing for Alert Communications.  Alert Communications is a 24/7bilingual inbound call center, specializing in professional attorney answering, virtual receptionist, Spanish answering and business answering solutions.

Sometimes it’s difficult to make the decision to choose a specialized service over a general service, especially when your first thought is whether or not it’s cost effective. If you’re an attorney, you may wonder about the differences between a general answering service and one that specializes in offering lawyer answering services. Consider this.

If you’re a bankruptcy attorney, hiring a company that specializes in lawyer answering services can eliminate you handling client creditor calls. By providing a client list to the company, a receptionist can verify representation and notify you of the call details via e-mail. With a general answering service you might just get a message with a call-back number.

A personal injury practice also can benefit in both time and money with specialized lawyer answering services. The receptionist can take potential-client calls, complete an intake form and deliver it to you in csv format to import to your case management software. Some lawyer answering services can immediately connect the caller to you as well. This can reduce the time your practice spends on the phone with an unqualified caller.

If you choose the right lawyer answering service as a criminal defense attorney, you could retain a client on the first call. For instance, a receptionist can immediately connect potential traffic-violation clients to you and remain on the line to transcribe the conversation. You receive an e-mail from the receptionist that documents fees, credit card information and pertinent case facts. You’ve retained the client on the first call and have a detailed transcript of your conversation.

Immigration attorneys can benefit from a specialized lawyer answering service where potential clients are taken care of on the first call, giving them no reason to continue to shop for legal services. In this type of practice you want to be sure the lawyer answering service offers multi-lingual support as well as intake processing and appointment scheduling. 

When you shop around for lawyer answering services here are a few questions you should ask:

• Do they provide 24/7 service?
• Do they offer bilingual or multilingual services?
• Can they provide customer referrals?
• Do they have specialized training?

A specialized lawyer answering service will cost a bit more, but it’s a smart investment in your practice. The applications mentioned above are designed to either reduce your work load or help you capture potential new clients. Paying a bit more so your client calls are handled professionally and successfully the first time the phone rings is definitely worth a lot more.

I recently invited one of my clients to connect with me on Linked In. He accepted my invitation and then sent me an e-mail about some concerns he had. His office situation had changed, and he wasn’t sure how my attorney answering service could possibly accommodate his needs. (I knew he didn’t have to worry, but he didn’t know that yet.)

He had moved to a shared executive-suite arrangement and was concerned about his clients getting directions to the new location and finding him in the new building. I called him and explained that if he added our call-protocol option to his account, our receptionists would be able to help his callers with these questions.

During our conversation, I found out that my client had a much bigger problem.  As a bankruptcy attorney, he receives many calls from client creditors. These calls take up a big chunk of his time. (He didn’t have to worry about this, either. I had the perfect solution.) I told him that our legal receptionist answering service could easily manage the creditor calls and completely eliminate this task from his to-do list.  Needless to say, he quickly gave us what we needed, and our live legal receptionist immediately began handling the creditor calls.

I thank LinkedIn for bringing me the new business. He was already a client, but by connecting with him directly, I became more accessible. As the owner of a business, I might seem inaccessible or too busy; but as a professional connection on LinkedIn, I am accessible and available. I encourage everyone to reach out to your business contacts and connect with them on LinkedIn—you never know what will happen!

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