People do not shop for a lawyer the way they shop for a sofa. Something has happened, they are calling now, and they will keep calling down the list until a human being picks up. The firm that answers is very often the firm that gets retained.
The research on this has been consistent for years, and it is worth reading before you decide the phone is handled.
Fewer than four in ten calls to small businesses were answered by a live person.
Waiting 30 minutes instead of 5 to call a web lead back cuts your odds of reaching them by roughly 100 times.
Firms that respond within an hour are close to seven times more likely to qualify the lead.
Most people sent to voicemail hang up without leaving one. You never learn they called.
A caller in the middle of something difficult needs to feel that they have reached a competent, calm office. Most of that is done in the first thirty seconds.
One
Your name, your tone, unhurried. Nobody hears a call centre. People in distress are extremely good at detecting one.
Two
Matter type, jurisdiction, dates that might matter, and a conflicts check against your list. You stop paying attorney time to discover a matter was never yours to take.
Three
A consultation in the correct attorney's calendar, with your intake form already filled in from the call rather than emailed to somebody who will not open it.
Four
Everything the caller said, in your practice management system, before the consultation happens. Nobody has to ask them to tell the story twice.
We take information. We do not give legal opinions, we do not estimate what a matter is worth, and we do not tell a caller whether they have a case. Those are your calls to make and ours to hand over cleanly.
Everything a caller tells us is treated as confidential and stays inside the United States. Where a matter is time-sensitive, we escalate to whoever you nominate rather than letting it sit in a queue until Monday. And if a caller starts describing something that clearly needs an attorney immediately, they get one — they do not get a promise of a callback.
The large outsourcers are built to sell seats by the thousand. That model works for enterprises and it is miserable for everybody else. We built Summit for the companies those firms will not take a meeting with.
Your callers reach people in the United States, in your time zone, who understand the reference when a customer mentions the storm last week. Nothing about your customer data leaves the country.
Bilingual on the same line, not a menu tree that dead-ends. If a share of your market speaks Spanish at home, that is revenue most of your competitors are handing back.
No account manager three layers down who has never heard a recording. When something needs fixing you talk to the person who can change it, and it changes that week.
Fifteen minutes. Bring your call volume and your average job value and we will work through the arithmetic with you. If the numbers do not justify hiring us, we will tell you that on the call.
Summit Call Solutions