Why You Should Use an Answering Service for Your Criminal Defense Law Firm

As a sex crime criminal defense attorney, you must complete various tasks like managing casework, collecting evidence, developing legal defenses and strategies, representing clients in court, and offering legal advice. You should also answer all your clients and lead calls. However, making a follow-up call, delivering vital messages, scheduling appointments, and monitoring your communication endeavors can be overwhelming. Effective communication is also crucial to your legal practice’s success; it enhances your company’s reputation, drives sales, maintains client relationships, and improves client satisfaction. To streamline your calls, consider hiring a skilled answering service provider. Please read this article to learn how legal answering services can benefit your legal firm.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is crucial to determining your law firm's success in legal practice. Hiring a legal answering service guarantees that no single call goes unanswered. Your clients will get an instant response whenever they call your law firm. It aids in boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty, giving your clients reasons to return in the future and refer your law firm to their loved ones.

When a sex crime defendant or their family calls your law firm, they want their concerns and questions answered. They also want you to show empathy for their situation. Empathy involves understanding and sensitivity to another person’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings. It helps your live agents connect with your clients and make them feel their concerns and needs are heard, leading to positive customer experience outcomes. It also allows your law firm to build trust and find the optimal method to resolve the legal issue to your client’s satisfaction.

Your Answering Services Can Increase Your Law Firm’s Sales

Most firms rely on call centers to grow, and sex crime criminal defense law firms are no exception. Hiring an answering service is a worthwhile investment to help your firm meet quotas and drive sales effectively.

However, defendants are now more sophisticated and informed as clients, altering client interactions and conventional selling approaches. Previously, virtual receptionists were trained to use a script, enter clients’ orders, and handle the issue. Today, they should create value by adopting contemporary selling techniques. 

Seasoned call agents use performance support technology that supports them in real-time while on the call. Performance support also automates/streamlines the agency’s interaction with many processes and systems, allowing them to focus on your clients. Moreover, it offers in-application tooltips and guidance, so your agent can spend significantly less time searching through sale sheets, articles, and scripts. 

Other practices your call agent can use to increase your sales include the following:

Outbound Lead Generation

Outbound lead generation involves identifying and reaching out to prospects interested in your legal services. Its goal is to generate more leads for your company quickly. It is a proactive approach that encompasses many techniques and permits more strategic and targeted outreach to clients, resulting in higher conversion rates and improved revenue streams.

The first step involves identifying your target audience by considering different factors like age and location. Next, the agent will create messages that resonate with your audience before reaching out to them via channels like social media, email, and traditional advertising. Finally, they will follow up.

Other pros of outbound lead generation include the following:

• It allows you to reach a larger audience than you would not via inbound approaches alone. Using real-time analytics, your call agent can track which approaches yield results and drive more clients.
• Your lead generation team also shortens your sales cycle and closes more business deals.
• It creates brand awareness and improves your law firm’s reputation.

Make a Good Initial Impression

On average, individuals have about seven seconds to make a good initial impression. In other words, the agent’s greeting is crucial to creating positive client experiences. The agent can personalize their greetings by asking for your client’s name. Responding to a live chat or answering the phone with a pleasant greeting that addresses the client by their name sets the tone of the conversation. You can share tips and guidelines for phrases and greetings the agent should say and avoid.

Moreover, skilled agents take a moment to be mindful before starting the following string of conversations. It allows the agent to listen attentively to your client without interrupting them. Even if the agent knows what to say, good listening skills help the agent match the client’s language and tone, making all the difference in how the client's experience turns out and building trust.

Improved Workflow Performance

Handling every incoming call by hand takes time and effort. When sex crime suspects and defendants constantly call your firm, your legal team is compelled to take the calls. While it could benefit the caller, it can negatively affect clients in your office since few attorneys assist them.

Your phone answering service provider functions as a call filter that allows you to take the calls you want to answer while the call agency handles the rest. Your call agent should identify which calls should be directed to a specific department or attorney. They will also help high-priority callers get the assistance they need and deserve more quickly. Finally, they are trained to identify and filter out spam callers, significantly reducing your legal team's time handling unwanted solicitations and spam. 

Also, a 24-hour virtual receptionist can mechanize the operation, letting you focus on offering top-notch services to customers without worrying about delays in response times or missed calls.

Schedule Appointments and Meetings with Ease

Suppose you are busy collecting and analyzing evidence of an alleged sex crime to develop the most effective legal defense, and a prospect calls you to book their initial consultation the following week. The call will disrupt your thoughts and force you to stop what you are doing to find the most convenient time. An answering service is tailored to relieve the stress of booking appointments. All you need to do is grant the live agent access to your calendar, and they can schedule appointments around your availability.

Your call agency can also take it further by making reminder calls to your clients. It ensures the clients remember and reduces the likelihood of a mix-up and confusion.    

Reduce Operating Costs

As a business owner, you could think an answering service will cost you more than you save. Nonetheless, in reality, an answering service can reduce your operating costs. Receptionists neither offer free services nor do telephone answering service providers. However, an average receptionist's salary in the US is $38,101, which does not include benefits. Also, a receptionist should work forty hours per week and take breaks. That means if your company is open 24/7, you will require at least one receptionist.

Receptionists will come and go. Whether they get promoted without your company or find greener pastures elsewhere, you should interview different potential candidates and train them. That means reduced time for you to pay attention to other essential tasks.

Employing legal virtual receptionists can save you more money than you may think. Established service providers offer different options to pay for their services, providing flexible pricing choices that suit your needs and budget.

Call Patching Services

If you want your law firm to succeed, you should be able to offer excellent customer service around the clock. However, since you must represent clients in court and have quality time with your loved ones, you require a trustworthy service that can answer and handle your call while you are away. Also, with every marketing campaign you organize, the resulting influx of calls can overburden your team and reduce their ability to attend to your existing customers effectively. You also risk losing leads to your competition. Luckily, you can solve the issue with call patching.

With call patching, you add another level of support for your clients calling during busy hours or after work hours. If your in-office time is unavailable, the call patching system will transfer the callers to your legal answering service team. The agent will then handle your clients’ concerns and forward the calls to the relevant staff on your team.

In a process referred to as a “warm transfer,” your virtual receptionist will contact the staff member directly and provide detailed information to serve the customer effectively. Unlike a cold transfer process, your client can state their reason for calling, feel like VIPs as they are introduced to your legal team, and get answers to their questions. It gives them confidence in your firm’s capacity to obtain the most favorable case outcome for them and fight for their constitutional rights.

Make Your Business a Big Fish in Big Pod

Your legal practice does not have to be big to act and look big. Failing to have the resources of an established law firm is an insecurity that most small businesses exhibit. That is unnecessary. With an answering service provider, you can balance being perceived as a large company with offering your clients hands-on support and personalized interactions.

A call agency gives your firm an anticipated image and instills confidence in your company among existing and potential customers that it can handle different sex criminal charges. If individuals are constantly bounced to voicemail whenever they call, it can give them the impression that you should equip the practice to handle the present workload.

On the contrary, if they call at any time of the day and a courteous person who can help them or take their messages to the relevant department greets them, it gives your callers confidence that you can handle any business they bring your way.

Your skilled answering service provider uses state-of-the-art technology to offer updated information about your firm and services whenever callers have concerns or questions. The service provider also has resources like call monitoring, tracking, and recording to make their services more accessible and synchronized with your practice’s standards. That way, you can track all calls to ensure the agent handles and resolves them appropriately.

Personalized Solution Designed to Meet Your Business Needs

An experienced answering service that offers round-the-clock legal support should customize solutions that suit your business objectives. You can select from different services and only choose those you feel will benefit your business.

As your practice grows and your business requirements change, you can modify and upgrade your solutions to meet current business strategies.

Multi-lingual Services that Facilitate Client Communication

As a sex crime defense attorney, communication is essential to creating positive customer experiences and increasing customer loyalty and conversions. Good customer care service involves listening to and understanding your clients' needs and telling them how you can help them.

Offering your clients the option to speak in their native language demonstrates that you care about them and their legal needs. According to the 2014 report of the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI), 72 percent of respondents claimed that support increased client satisfaction with client support, with fifty-eight percent claiming it improved brand loyalty.

Typically, bilingual clients face challenges filling out legal paperwork and might require bringing an English-speaking person to ensure they fill out the form correctly. When your answering service helps them with the process in their native language, the legal process is less overwhelming and time-consuming.

When you fail to use multi-lingual phone answering services, you compete with other legal companies for the same pool of sex crime defendants. Meanwhile, you have lost Spanish-speaking leads (about 13% of Americans speak Spanish). A call agent will increase your company’s customer pool and reduce the busy work of vetting leads.

Hiring an Experienced Call Agent Allows You to Focus on Other Critical Areas

A legal answering service takes on all the roles relating to handling clients' concerns, enabling you to prioritize other matters. Handling your clients' calls can be time-consuming, and you might neglect other crucial issues.

A law firm's answering service handles your clients' calls and responds to emails, allowing you to deal with critical business functions like collecting evidence, interviewing witnesses, and representing clients in court. You will increase your capability to grow and scale up your law firm practice with the extra hours on your hands.

It Promotes a Positive Return on Investment

Each lost lead affects your firm's return on investment (ROI) because losing out on a prospect is costly considering your marketing investment. A virtual receptionist can reduce the number of lost leads by:

• Answering clients' calls round-the-clock.
• Providing bilingual support.
• Converting leads during the first call.
• Responding to leads through multiple channels.

Additionally, intake professionals at legal call centers know the legal industry and its nuances, including terminology, practice areas, and how to navigate sensitive situations, contributing to a positive ROI.

Contact a Skilled Legal Answering Service Provider Near Me

Typically, sex crime criminal defense law attorneys deal with many clients and defendants, each with unique expectations and legal requirements. Consequently, timely, personalized, and professional service is the heart of your business, and hiring an answering service can keep you connected with your clients 24/7, improving customer satisfaction and your company’s reputation among clients and your competition. With vast experience and legal call-handling expertise, a call agency can help you compete in the fast-paced legal industry.