Managing a law firm successfully requires a heavy focus on building, nurturing, and maintaining excellent relationships with every client. This goes way beyond guiding them through the legal system and providing them with top-rate legal counsel. A great law firm makes its clients a top priority and takes all the necessary steps, including seamless communications, to make them feel important.
This client-centric approach guides almost all the choices you make about your law firm like where you locate your offices, how you market your firm, what kind of environment you want your clients to find when they come in, how you furnish your office, who is responsible for answering your phone, and how you want them to handle this vital task. And although every one of these choices plays an important role in how your clients perceive your law firm, the one that matters most is getting the ideal person to answer your telephone.
To solve this matter you can either hire a receptionist that works directly for your firm, with all that it implies such as the cost of finding the right person, the cost of training them for a few weeks, the increase in overhead, etc.; or, you can contract a virtual receptionist service that is tailored to meet your exact needs without all the hiring costs, as well as a few more advantages for your firm such as:
Capture more leads
Every time someone calls your law firm (except robocalls, and spam calls obviously), you are presented with the possibility of turning them into a new client for your business. Capturing new leads that can be converted into customers down the line is a key function of a virtual receptionist. Good virtual receptionist services invest heavily in excellent training for their receptionists and this makes them perfect for your law firm right off the bat. They know how to ask probing questions and gently direct new leads to your services and areas of expertise. This also means that they are able to filter callers that are less likely to hire your firm and save your valuable time.
Schedule meetingsÂ
Virtual receptionists can be given access to your agenda and you can direct them to schedule appointments with clients. This ensures that your day runs smoothly and minimizes any delays that in the long run translate into happy clients who feel that they are important to you. You can also have them confirm appointments with clients so no time is wasted and you give that personal touch that your clients will surely appreciate.
Present a professional imageÂ
A virtual receptionist shows your existing and potential clients that you are running a professional operation. This is very important because at the end of the day your clients are looking for somebody to represent them and their interests, and nobody wants to be associated with an unprofessional or unserious firm when it comes to any sort of business, especially if it has anything to do with the law.
Keep costs under control
Hiring an on-site receptionist means that every hour that they are at the reception desk is an hour they are billing your law firm. This is true whether the phone is ringing off the hook, or if it’s a very slow day and they only need to handle a couple of calls during their entire shift. With a virtual receptionist, you can keep costs under control easily, because you pay for what you actually need. Hiring a live receptionist service means that you don’t have to pay a setup fee, and you are able to cancel your service at any time.
Highly customizable service options
When you hire a live receptionist service for your law firm, you have the option of customizing this service to make it precisely fit your needs. You can choose the scripted response that they will be answering every call with, you can have any messages sent to your email or your phone via SMS, you can have them forward your calls in the way you choose (attended transfer, call transfer, voicemail), you can have them completely manage your schedule, and you can even set simple call instructions based on specific client criteria you choose. All these options can be added on to the live receptionist service or you can use a bare bone set up, depending on your needs.
As you can see, hiring a live receptionist service is an ideal option for any type of law firm due to the highly adaptable capabilities of the service, as well as its ready-to-go nature. When you pair that with the fact that a live receptionist will be able to help you convert more prospects into clients just because of their specialized training, then you can understand their value, which far surpasses their cost.