In every business, including bankruptcy law firms, failure to meet your clients’ needs and expectations may significantly place you below your competitors. According to a survey by American Express, two-thirds of the respondents confirmed that a representative was crucial to their recent positive service experience, and 62% confirmed that a representative's knowledge or resourcefulness was critical.
Therefore, partnering with an answering service provides several benefits that can allow you to handle clients’ needs and scale your customer service operations. There are several benefits that any law firm can achieve from hiring a law firm. Stated below are a few undisputed reasons why you should use an answering service for your bankruptcy law firm.
What an Answering Service Involves
Before getting into the advantages of a call answering service, it is necessary to understand what an answering service is. This is to avoid confusing this service with an answering machine. Call answering service usually answers calls for its clients anytime. This means that the call answering service acts as an intermediary between the caller and attorney and can make it difficult to differentiate between an actual in-house receptionist and an outsourced answering service.
Reasons Why You Need to Hire a Call Answering Service for Your Bankruptcy Law Firm
Apart from understanding what a lawyer answering service is, you should learn why you need to hire a call answering service. This allows you to identify the key areas that the lawyer answering service can help in your firm’s growth. If you recognize your firm to have at least one of the following needs, you should hire an answering service right away.
Legal Answering Services are Conversant with Legal Matters
Not everyone employed in your firm is conversant with different aspects related to bankruptcy law. There are possibilities that they might mess up when answering incoming calls, which can deteriorate your firm's image.
Legal Answering Services Brings Organization into Your Law Firm
Sometimes your bankruptcy law firm can be overwhelmed by inbound and outbound calls forcing you to drag some of your employees from their primary tasks and address these calls. Doing such a thing can promote disorganization and make your service delivery inefficient.
You Will Not Have to Worry About the Possibility of Losing Clients
Clients want to reach out to your law firm anytime. No one would like to wait until the regular business hours to present an urgent legal issue to a law firm. If you cannot meet these clients' expectations, they will probably seek help from your competitors.
There are Chances of Cutting Down Your Costs
Every business needs to keep an eye on actions that increase their costs. Therefore, by outsourcing the right answering services, your bankruptcy law firm does not need to worry about hiring new employees, training, and other benefits.
A Legal Answering Service will Help You Put Up a Professional Image
The kind of first impression that your firm puts across means a lot. In that case, the way the first calls are handled determines if you will win or lose your clients. That's why having an answering service would help you present a professional image to your new and existing clients.
You Can Focus on Critical Legal Issues
Undoubtedly, bankruptcy law firms have a lot of tasks to handle. Therefore, having your employees focused on handling calls can significantly affect your firm’s performance and growth.
Benefits of Hiring a Lawyer Answering Service
A lawyer answering service usually provides call answering services, probably better and way much less expensive than what you would pay for a full-time receptionist. Apart from this, here are other benefits of hiring a lawyer answering service for your bankruptcy law firm.
Most Lawyer Answering Services Have Well-trained Operators
Lawyer answering services utilize well-trained agents well-versed with legal terminology to handle their clients’ calls. You cannot easily achieve this with in-house receptionists unless you consider catering to the cost and time spent to train them in different aspects related to your practice. Therefore, the next time a potential client calls your firm, you will be confident that he or she can turn into an indelible client, based on the level of legal understanding that your operators have.
Gives the Impression that Your Bankruptcy Law Firm is Established
When call answering operators answer calls on your behalf, they go beyond merely identifying your firm by its name but can also give the impression that they are part of your regular staff. Therefore, having an answering service usually gives the impression that your bankruptcy firm is well-established and can meet your potential clients' needs. This creates confidence in the services that you provide, which also helps retain your clients.
Better Handling of Potential Client Calls
Apart from taking appointments, a lawyer answering service can use other means to handle potential clients' calls. Most of these service providers use intake forms, record clients' calls, complete the intake form, and send it to your case management software. They can also email the intake form to you if you request it. This usually saves your time and money and helps you retain new clients once their needs are handled promptly.
Utilization of Call Protocols
Call protocols are another effective way to personalize the services that your existing and new clients receive. Lawyer answering services utilize call protocols that are custom to your bankruptcy law firm’s needs and usually know which situations they should connect directly to your number. The use of call protocols in your law conveys personalized attention to your clients. They also help you provide coverage beyond regular business hours while saving you the additional expenses of hiring full-time employees.
There are Several Service Options to Choose from
Major lawyer call answering companies offer a variety of options that their clients can choose from. There are four significant types of answering services that you can find. These include live answering services, internet answering services, automated answering services, and call center services.
Every option can fit your bankruptcy law firm depending on the platforms you rely on for its advertisement and contact with clients. However, live answering services are the most popular option since they provide a personal touch between the clients and your firm.
Internet answering service can also be a good option for a bankruptcy law firm that depends on live chat services, answering web inquiries, and order processing.
Finally, an automatic answering service would not be the best option for a law firm, but it would be necessary for firms looking for a 24/7 answering service.
Utilizing in-house operators in your firm cannot achieve the kind of benefits guaranteed by these services. That's why hiring a lawyer answering service is a reasonable choice to make. You can also evaluate each option and decide on which suits you best, all for free.
Using Lawyer Answering Services Eases Your Appointment Scheduling
Apart from answering and prioritizing your clients' calls, a lawyer answering service can also help you schedule appointments. Therefore, you should provide the operator with your work schedule and the parameters for your legal appointments. Therefore, you will expect the operators to take and schedule appointments with new and current clients even when your bankruptcy firm is closed. With a lawyer answering service, you will not fail to meet your clients’ needs on time.
Lawyer Answering Service Has Incredible Cost-Saving Capabilities
In-house receptionists allow your firm to continue offering legal services, but it does not come cheap. You have to provide a decent wage, coverage, and benefits. Apart from that, you might need to cater to the burden of their vacation and other additional staffing costs. Even when you intend to hire temporary staff, you can still cater to training them about your firm's procedure.
However, you do not have to worry about the detailed cost of hiring an in-house receptionist once you hire a lawyer answering service.
Lawyer Answering Services Allows You to Assess Your Growth
A competent lawyer answering service provider is expected to provide a report of all the call metrics after a specific timeline. These call reports can be suitable options to evaluate your firm's performance and help you offer tailor-made solutions to all its issues. You can also learn more about your clients’ needs and adopt suitable legal defenses for the issues at hand. These would help you put your firm on the right track for its growth and keep track of your competitors.
Lawyer Answering Services Guarantee Consistency in Your Service Delivery
When clients call your bankruptcy law firm, they expect a consistent experience from one call to another. They expect each call to be received and treated in the same way every time they call your firm. Guaranteeing consistency in calls is something that any law firm would struggle to achieve through its in-house receptionists. However, lawyer answering services would be the best solution for ensuring consistency in your firm.
Answering Services Establishes your Bankruptcy Law Firm
Nowadays, potential clients are aligning themselves with well-established bankruptcy law firms that deliver exceptional services. Therefore, a lawyer answering services would be the best solution towards creating an illusion of a big-sized bankruptcy law firm. It would make your firm look bigger than it is, which legitimizes it to your potential clients. Apart from that, your potential clients will consider your services as professional based on how the call answering agents handle their calls.
You Gain Value for Your Money
Lawyer answering services can offer other services like taking payments, faxing, and transferring calls to appropriate people. They can also manage your appointments as part of the services that they offer. This would not only be a suitable way to reduce your stress or destruction from your busy schedule but also be a suitable way to ensure that more tasks are done at an affordable rate. Eventually, you will be getting value for what you have paid for, unlike hiring an employee for every task at hand.
A Call Answering Service Do Things Your Way
A lawyer answering service must consider some specific legal phrases and restrictions in the legal field to deliver all services effectively. The best answering service should adapt to the brand's greeting and voice into every call they receive and even follow your regulations on solving specific issues. All these personalized services are offered at a considerable cost, especially when choosing a lawyer answering service provider specializing in legal matters.
There are Different Payment Options to Choose From
Hardly would you expect a lawyer answering service to rely on one payment method. Most of them provide several payment options that firms can choose from. This provides an opportunity to decide on an option that is convenient and cost-effective for your law firm.
Your bankruptcy law firm can choose options like flat-rate, per call and message, and pay as you go. With the flat-rate option, your bankruptcy law firm requires you to pre-purchase a package bundle for calls or minutes each billing cycle. However, you can be hit with a high overcharge fee for the additional minutes over your pre-purchased allotment.
With the per call and per-message option, your firm is billed per call or message. This might seem convincing, but the billing process might differ from one lawyer answering service to another depending on how they define a call or message.
Finally, the pay-as-you-go billing means that your bankruptcy firm will be charged according to its usage. Therefore, every time the answering service receives a call, an invoice will be generated for every service delivered by the lawyer answering service. Therefore, you do not have to evaluate your changing and fluctuating usage to find the best rate each month. This might bring uncertainty in your expenses, but it helps you pay exactly for the offered services.
Find a Lawyer Answering Service for Your Bankruptcy Law Firm
People with bankruptcy-related issues usually place their trust in the bankruptcy law firms to help them solve them. Therefore, you should not leave this crucial relationship to chance due to poor communication management with your clients. With the benefits you can achieve through a lawyer answering service, choosing one would be the best decision you could ever make for your bankruptcy law firm. Hire a bankruptcy lawyer answering service today and let it help you achieve the goals and expectations you have for your firm.
