A quality lead can bring in thousands of dollars. Unfortunately, many law firms lose leads when there’s a substantial volume of incoming inquiries and a lack of time and manpower to respond diligently. Instead of sifting through leads and capturing the quality ones, the leads simply disappear, and likely move on to a competitor.
Fortunately, there is an easy and affordable solution to this problem: partnering with a legal call center. Legal call centers ensure law firms never miss a lead; they sift through them and pick out the quality ones. Then they can capture and convert the leads into signed clients on your behalf.
Call centers are extremely useful for services with a high call volume per answer, or a high cost per service. Successful law firms fall under both categories.
That’s why, when used for legal practices, legal call centers can provide a positive return on investment (ROI) while saving firms time and effort.
Functioning Without a Call Center
Law firms can survive without a legal call center. However, lead loss is inevitable.
By avoiding call center services, your firm may not be able to achieve the greatest ROI without formidable expenses and additional workforce. An in-house intake specialist, or a whole team, requires extensive training along with individual salaries and benefits.
While your marketing team works on generating leads, their conversion potential depends on how well you can process them. Leads can be processed in-house, but at what cost?
At the end of the day, many firms can’t afford to hire the workforce needed to tackle intake effectively, so they face bottlenecks with lead flows. Potential clients often reach out for consultations only to face unanswered calls and web forms or lengthy hold times. This drastically increases the cost to acquire a new customer and lowers ROI.
Legal Intake Call Centers as a Solution
Losing leads due to lack of time and workforce can be avoided by taking advantage of legal call center services. With a legal call center, all calls are answered within three rings and web forms are processed within two to five minutes (or less). If a lead isn’t converted on the first call, which is often the case, the legal call center makes follow-up calls according to the firm’s desired timing and frequency. All of this is executed around the clock and in multiple languages.
Best-in-class legal call centers can reduce lead loss rates by eliminating conversion bottlenecks and only forwarding e-signed clients to the law firm. This way, lawyers don’t waste their time on “empty shells.” Legal call centers not only find pearls for you, they also shuck the shell.
While you could hire intake specialists to deal with the above matters, paying salary and benefits to such experts can take a toll on your budget. Legal call centers:
- Provide 24/7/365 assistance
- Have multi-language support
- Respond to leads from web form submissions, text, chat, and email
- Handle inbound and outbound calls
- Can schedule appointments on your behalf
- Have lead tracking abilities
- Integrate with your firm’s CRM/CMS
- Convert leads during the first call if possible
- Follow up with non-converted leads
Additionally, legal call center intake specialists aren’t just well-versed in legal terminology. They are trained in empathy, call control, and how to gather all of the pertinent information to qualify each lead. They essentially act as an extension of your firm, so they handle every situation with professionalism.
What is the ROI of a Great Legal Call Center?
To determine the precise ROI of a legal call center, you need to evaluate how much you are spending on eliminating lead flow bottlenecks.
With the average fee being $10,000, every time you lose a lead, your firm loses $10,000. Since the industry average lead loss rate is 8%, if you lose 8 out of 100 leads each month, you are losing $80,000. In reality, you lose more since you’ve invested time, money, and effort in lead generation.
To achieve a maximum ROI from leads, you need 24/7/365 coverage by dedicated, highly-trained intake specialists. By delegating intake to a legal call center, you free up time to work on current cases and retain existing clients. At the end of the day, legal call centers can simultaneously raise the ROI from leads, increase the time spent on revenue-generating tasks, and delegate jobs like converting leads into e-signed customers.
