Many personal injury firms are making a huge mistake with their website.
This mistake may cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in lost prospects, and it is an enormous source of frustration for the attorneys who make it. Wouldn’t you like to know how to avoid making this same mistake?
The mistake is: They think a really great website will be mostly “self-service” – and so they’re completely unprepared for the telephone traffic that a new ad campaign, online marketing campaign, or the website itself will generate.
How can you be ready for the phone traffic your website and online campaigns will generate?
In the first two installments, we showed you how to improve the quality of your leads, and capture more of them. Now let’s talk about why good websites still generate phone calls – and how to ensure you’re ready.
Why good websites still generate phone calls.
- People are impatient and may be in crisis. They don’t want to search through your website or wait for a response to an email to get answers to their questions.
- Not everyone is comfortable reaching out for the first time online.
- Prospects want to feel confidence in the attorney who will represent them—and they need to hear a live voice to get that feeling.
Obviously, your first and biggest focus is being appropriately staffed with legal intake professionals when people are actually calling. This can be challenging when advertising campaigns are generating peaks in your call volume or you are getting calls after-hours. If you handle mass torts cases, callers may be in different time zones. Selecting a quality, experienced legal answering service to handle overflow during your peak times and after hours may be the best marketing investment your company makes.
Other important considerations
It is absolutely vital for your marketing department to give your legal intake staff plenty of advance notice about marketing initiatives and advertising schedules. For example, are they about to do an email blast to 10,000 prospects? Will you have enough staff to handle the responses—and will they have all of the details on how to qualify prospects? You would be amazed at how much havoc and lost opportunity failure to do this creates.
Next, it’s critical to prepare your legal intake staff for the different kinds of requests they’ll receive during a specific marketing campaign. These may include requests for assistance with:
- Acute medical issues
- Whether a specific case qualifies
- Filling out legal and insurance documents
- How your process works
- How long the case may take
- What will happen after their call
Planning ahead for these considerations will put you miles ahead of most of the competition, who still think their website ought to handle most of the lead intake process.
Want to know more about winning the marketing game? Next month, we’re going to share the one counter-intuitive step that is giving attorneys like you more of their precious time every day—to spend on billable activities.
Are you ready to give your firm an unfair advantage? Suite 1000’s 24-hour legal intake service is available to discuss how our intake specialists can reduce your overhead while capturing every lead and every piece of data from every call you receive. Call now: 877-925-2324.
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This blog was written by Laurie Leonard, the President of SUITE 1000, a U.S. based national telephone answering service, inbound call center and outsourced call center service. Her company has specialized in handling legal intake, sales leads, email lead response, appointment scheduling, customer service and help desk calls for over 20 years.
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