When you partner with a legal call center, you have to consider two key metrics, talk time and work time, to get the most value of this partnership. These factors both play key roles in maximizing the efficiency of your client intake process, which contributes to the success of your law firm. Learning what these factors mean to your law firm can help you move forward in confidently acquiring support from a legal call center. Here’s what you need to know.
What is Talk Time?
Talk time begins whenever your intake specialists receive a call and communicate with the prospect. It represents the time between when a specialist answers a call and when they disconnect. It also extends to messaging systems, such as SMS, chat and email, where you may receive additional inquiries.
During this time, intake specialists acquire information about the challenges faced by each prospect and offer support that satisfies their request. When talk time ends, work time often begins to allow your intake specialists to compile information from the call and continue the intake process.
What is Work Time?
Put simply, work time is everything that has to do with the intake process with the exception of the actual call or message series. Upon ending a call with a potential client, your outsourced intake specialists move into the work time phase. During this time, their activities may include data entry, form completion and post-call communication. Work time allows intake specialists to support the call with administrative tasks that provide structure and enable follow-through.
Importance of Talk Time vs. Work Time
When quantified in minutes and seconds, talk time acts as an important key performance indicator that lets you assess the efficiency and productivity of your intake specialists. Only the time spent directly corresponding with the client counts as talk time.
To find your team’s total talk time, you simply add up the number of minutes they spend conversing with clients, and then divide by the total number of calls or messages in that period. If you have a high average talk time, streamlining your intake processes and providing intake specialists with specialty training can help.
Work time comes in next to support all the work that went into the intake call or messaging process. Allowing for this time ensures proper documentation of the information needed to track and follow leads through the intake process. Effective legal call centers, like Alert , take it one step further by handling more of the client intake process for you. We complete all lead tracking by importing the information into your law firm’s CRM or CMS. This helps to optimize your conversion rates as you’re able to provide the support your potential clients need when they could benefit most.
Understanding the Value of These Two KPIs
While different, talk time and work time are both valuable when partnering with a legal call center. Together they work to help you achieve your client intake goals. With the right legal intake partner, you can ensure your talk time and work time add up to exceptional efficiency that helps you bring in more clients. Learn more about Alert and how you can acquire the support you need to streamline your client intake process and maximize productivity in your law firm.
