Mass tort litigation requires numerous leads, and generating those leads costs money. You risk wasting hard-earned marketing dollars if your potential leads are not converted into signed clients as soon as possible. Leads, left unconverted, will just continue shopping around for other firms.
The first step in stopping the firm shopping process is immediately responding to leads the first time they reach out, whether it’s via phone, web form, email or text. This means taking some control over the lead’s buyer’s journey.
Here’s how to prevent mass tort leads from going to your competition with the help of a legal call center.
Changing the Buyer’s Journey
Legal call centers change the buyer’s journey. Your law firm’s attorneys stay busy doing what they do best: helping clients after they complete their buyer’s journey through your sales funnel. Your in-house intake staff is busy, too, carrying out their assigned projects during regular firm working hours.
Potential clients want to speak to a live person when they call the first time. That means your firm needs to provide live phone coverage 24/7/365 in order to meet those expectations. According to an ABA intake study, 42% of the time law firms take at least three days to return a potential lead’s initial call. A lead that needs help will likely move on to the next law firm instead of waiting for that return call.
Busy law firms have trouble answering calls within three rings, a practice that minimizes lead loss. Legal intake call centers focus on responding to all of your mass tort leads immediately, around the clock, or for off-hours, weekends and holidays. This way, your attorney’s can continue to focus on what they do best, and your intake staff isn’t overwhelmed.
Lead Tracking Capabilities Make a Difference
A buyer’s journey requires a legal call center with lead tracking capabilities. Lead tracking in the marketing world means following a prospective lead from the first phone call through qualification to successful conversion as a client.
The loss of even one potential lead significantly impacts a mass tort marketing campaign’s return on investment (ROI). Lead tracking allows you to take the necessary steps to re-engage with a potential lead that fell through the cracks. Tracking also shows you where your intake procedures need improvement.
Legal Intake Requires Special Training
Intake specialists require specialized training to learn to convert callers into signed cases, sometimes in a single phone call, especially for mass tort.
A lawyer’s education includes learning how to talk to clients. Lawyers know their field of expertise, the language that applies there, and how to address their clients’ needs.
In contrast to lawyers, a call center’s legal intake staff receive training in how to talk to potential leads. That type of training requires a whole different set of skills. Intake specialists receive specialized training in:
- Empathy and psychology
- Legal terminology
- How to strike the appropriate tone for each client
- Differentiating between types of clients
- The skills needed to control phone calls to get the required information, or to get the call back on track
- How to convert leads into signed clients
Attorneys know how to apply the law to help their clients. Legal call center staff know how to convert leads into the clients law firms serve with distinction.
Integration With Marketing Campaigns
The best legal call centers blend seamlessly with marketing campaigns. To perform optimally, marketing campaigns must align with an efficient legal intake process. This is true whether you market in-house or hire a marketing firm.
Your mass tort marketing strategy prompts prospective leads to enter your sales funnel. Your marketing strategy determines:
- Who will encounter your legal intake process
- How the campaign designs the expectations of your prospective leads
The marketing strategy targets a particular audience in its efforts to generate prospective leads. That audience is made up of prospective leads who are not yet qualified leads. The legal intake team will take them from prospective leads to qualified leads using your unique qualification standards.
Collaboration between your legal intake and marketing teams is key to developing the legal intake questionnaire offered to your target audience. It also tells the legal intake staff what type of leads they should expect from the mass tort marketing campaign.
Your marketing campaign invites prospective leads to your sales funnel; then, the legal intake team walks them down the funnel until they become qualified leads and eventually signed clients. To provide a smooth buyer’s journey, the legal intake staff must meet the expectations set by the marketing campaign. That will only happen if the legal intake specialists understand the marketing campaign goals.
Qualified Leads Are What You Need
No law firm can operate efficiently if it is flooded with useless leads, and no mass tort marketing campaign will be successful if the useless leads are not weeded out.
Partnering with a legal call center can allow you to turn prospective leads into the qualified leads you need for a successful campaign. Every lead is important, whether it comes from a phone call or a web form, chat message, email, or text message. A great legal call center becomes your partner to provide the most leverage, especially when your leads come from multiple channels.
Legal Intake Call Centers Help Grow Your Business
Your leads look for answers at the times best for them to contact you. That may mean in the middle of the night, on the weekend, or on a holiday. Leads want answers to their pressing questions, assurances that your firm can help them with their legal issues, and a comforting, empathetic voice that guides them through their turmoil to light at the end of their quest. A 24/7/365 legal call center can consistently provide that support when you cannot.
The tracking capabilities, follow-up perseverance, quick conversion time, combined with the personalized script that you design for your target audience adds up to higher ROI for your marketing dollar. In fact, it often makes more economic sense to partner with a legal intake call center, rather than hire a full-time staff for your office.
If you are interested in learning more ways to stop lead loss, we invite you to download our eBook, “10 Ways To Ensure Your Leads are Not Lost in Your Next Mass Tort Campaign.”
