Are You Losing Potential Clients?

By Chris O'brein

13 Dec 2015 | Lawyer Marketing

Stop the Intake Breakage

We use the term “breakage” to describe the possible cases that fall through the cracks due to an inadequate intake process. Cases can fall through the cracks during any phase of the intake process, but we, at least, like to see firms giving themselves a fighting chance and eliminate different steps it takes for a potential client’s information to get from their origin into your intake department.
In today’s competitive legal marketplace, just focusing on potential clients coming from a live phone call isn’t enough. Consumers have become very savvy. They are researching lots firms and contacting many of them.

To make your legal services available to the potential clients you are offering 24 hour live chats and after hour phone coverage through external resources. As these leads come in from phone calls, walk-ins, web contact forms, web chats, referrals, after-hour call centers and other 3rd party leads, it is imperative to find a way to get these leads centralized into one system as quickly as possible.

Some firms handle this better than others, but using different methods to try and consolidate leads and manage follow-ups just isn’t going to work. Some people say Outlook is their tool for this as emails come into their intake department. This is not optimal either because as the initial attempt to reach the potential client may take place, the follow-up attempts are not.
Another issue with using Outlook emails is that the lead becomes one person’s responsibility as opposed to the intake team as a whole. On top of this, you can’t report on how efficient your intake process is when your data resides in Outlook emails.
For groups that are focused on getting this information into a consolidated system, it usually requires someone hand keying the data which takes time. This time could be better utilized for the actual follow-up process on top of allowing more time between when the initial lead is submitted to reaching out to that person.

In conclusion, whether it be Captorra or another legal intake solution, it is important to find an application that can not only consolidate these leads into one solution but assist your intake staff with the follow-up process as well.

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