When prospective clients reach out for legal representation, the number one thing they look for is responsiveness, according to an ABA Benchmark study on the legal intake process.
Therefore, having a great response time, also known as reaction time, can help boost new client conversions and improve your marketing return on investment.
Optimizing your reaction time starts with an effective intake process designed to convert new leads into paying clients. Your reaction time will come into play as you see how quickly you can respond to lead inquiries and move them through the intake process. Once you have that information in hand, you can work on optimizing your reaction time to maximize your lead generation efforts and boost legal intake conversion rates.
Why Does Reaction Time Matter?
When legal problems arise, prospective clients, particularly those with personal injury cases, often contact law firms with an urgent need that requires immediate attention. Unfortunately, about 42% of law firms take up to three days to respond to their prospective clients’ messages, as found during the completion of the ABA Benchmark study. This figure indicates that there is a great need for improvement in reaction times across the entire industry.
With a great reaction time, you can serve this need for immediate legal representation before your competitors and sign the client on with your firm as a paying client. If you do not offer immediate assistance, however, your prospective clients will likely keep calling other firms until someone does. Therefore, until you improve your reaction time, you are set to lose business and waste valuable marketing dollars as your leads go to your competitors.
The Biggest Challenge in Improving Your Reaction Time
To best optimize your law firm’s average reaction time, you must establish great intake procedures and hire dedicated intake specialists. Without well-trained intake experts on hand, you could miss calls or experience follow-up delays that severely impede your reaction times. These specialists need to remain fully dedicated to optimizing intake conversion rates, not handling other tasks, to keep your reaction times up to par. Otherwise, multi-tasking could result in decreased attention on the intake process, leaving prospective clients looking for a more responsive law firm.
Therefore, to improve your reaction time, you should hire dedicated intake specialists that are properly trained to capture and convert incoming leads. With a sole focus on the intake process, they can provide a high level of responsiveness and capture more leads than ever before. You will need to focus on providing the highest quality training and support to your team to ensure your intake process always serves the needs of your prospective clients.
Alternatively, you can hire a legal services call center that specializes in optimizing reaction time to boost legal intake conversion rates. These call centers provide around-the-clock support to quickly answer and respond to any call or message your law firm receives from prospective clients. With this level of support, you can improve your lead capture rate and convert incoming leads into paying clients.
Improve Your Reaction Time to Achieve the Best Results
To gain more clients and maximize your marketing return on investment, begin by improving your reaction times. When you optimize your response times, you can effectively serve the needs of your prospective clients and prevent them from turning to the competition. Without dedicated intake specialists serving your clients, you might find it difficult to optimize your reaction times. To accomplish this goal, you can either train and manage your own team of dedicated intake specialists or outsource this task to a trusted legal services call center.
