If you run a drinking under the influence (DUI) law firm, you spend hours collecting and analyzing evidence, interviewing witnesses, negotiating plea bargains, and representing your clients in court. You should outsource an answering service to handle clients’ calls. Otherwise, you will miss calls, which reflects poorly on your business, increasing the likelihood of missing out on leads and growing your firm. A call center is more pocket-friendly than hiring a receptionist and can streamline several services and improve your communication and administrative operations. And as with everything, you should choose the best phone-answering service for your business needs and goals. Please read this article to learn about various factors when choosing an answering service.

Assess Your Legal Practice

Before choosing your answering service, it is essential to understand your law firm's needs.

  • Analyze your call patterns and volume. How many calls do you receive daily, and at what time? That way, you can determine your required services and how much you are expected to pay.
  • Think about your law firm's business objectives and needs. Do you need an individual to respond to emails, schedule appointments, or offer customer care service?
  • Identify the functionalities and features you require from the offered service(s).

Your Law Firm’s Size

The size of the call center you hire can directly impact your DUI law firm. Retaining a provider that is not seasoned can drag your company behind. On the other hand, hiring a service provider that is too big can lead to a lack of individualized attention and unnecessary costs.

Specific call centers have a minimum call volume you should expect. Therefore, be prepared to give the estimated number to find a call center that fits your business needs easily and quickly.

Does Your Law Firm Have Future Expansion Plans?

Do you expect your legal services to take off, or do you have plans to grow your business? If so, choose a phone-answering provider that accommodates your expected business growth and can grow with you.

The Provider’s Previous Work Experience

While any DUI defense law firm, start-up or established, can benefit from taking advantage of a phone answering service, every call center is created differently. When selecting your provider, it is vital to consider the company’s industry experience.

A call center with specialized experience will be better placed to handle your communication professionally and offer stellar customer service. They know what questions to ask your callers and can guide them accordingly.

Since you are the customer in this scenario, look for the best options for your needs. Read reviews and take note of the friendliness of agents, the quality of customer service, and recurring challenges. Also, check if the answering service agency responded to any reviews, negative or positive, and analyze the response. They treat you like they will treat your existing and potential customers.

The Technology the Call Center Uses and Business Integration Tools

You should know your call center's features. Common technological features include the following:

  • Unlimited concurrent calls.
  • Interactive voice response.
  • Call queues.
  • Call control.
  • Automatic screen pop.
  • Skills-based routing.
  • Conference calling.
  • Click-to-call.
  • Voicemail transcription.
  • Real-time reporting.

Take time to learn and prioritize every feature based on your DUI criminal defense law firm's needs.

Another technological feature to consider is business tool integration. With a single click, a call center that integrates your helpdesk, chat, social media platforms, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing platforms, and e-commerce platforms will increase your legal team’s productivity and efficiency.

If you want more value for your money, hire an agency with automated tasks. For instance, when you miss a call, the answering service can create a new ticket in the helpdesk with the voicemail transcription and call details. Once the agency creates a new contact in your customer relationship management, they can update your system with your lead’s information.

Consider the Cost

Most attorneys can pay more for optimal call-answering services. If you want to save more, do the quick math on the cost of losing leads and existing clients due to the following:

  • A bug that should be fixed,
  • You cannot access real-time reporting, or
  • Your agency is not competent to handle the job professionally.

There are issues to bear in mind when exploring pricing, including the following:

  • Training costs.
  • Subscription fees.
  • Per-desk charges.
  • Price per agent.
  • Price per minute.
  • Implementation fee.

Finally, ensure your selected call agent’s billing system is transparent and that you can always see charges. The agency’s support team should be responsive, particularly if you have challenges with your billing.

24-Hour Call Answering Service

The legal industry does not run on bankers’ hours, so you need round-the-clock availability. A drunk driving arrest can happen at any time of the day. Your clients should be able to contact you during holidays, weekends, and in the wee hours of the night.

Choose a live answering service that offers 24/7 availability. Your clients will appreciate having their calls answered and appropriately handled, even if they call during non-business hours. Responsive and timely customer service is critical to client satisfaction and retention.

Having an after-hours call answering service also helps attract new business. The sound of a friendly, well-informed person on the other end of the line encourages DUI defendants and their families to follow up, giving you a competitive edge.

Can You Monitor the Quality of Services the Call Center Offers?

Ask the live answering agency whether it has call center monitoring. Call center monitoring involves tracking and evaluating communication between clients and agents.

You could be wondering why you should track the call center’s activities since the role of a phone answering service is to answer and make calls. Monitoring is essential to delivering stellar customer service by ensuring your agents offer top-notch services and meet your client’s expectations. The reporting can assist you in identifying bottlenecks and issues, understanding what is working, and identifying improvement areas.

There are two ways of conducting monitoring, namely:

Quality Assurance

Quality assurance helps you improve customer satisfaction and live answering agents’ performance.

By setting guidelines, you can analyze communication, give the agency feedback on improving it, and identify any customer care issue before it becomes a crisis.

To conduct quality assurance monitoring, you should listen to all calls, looking closely at the aspects below:

  • Whether the agents comply with your DUI law firm's procedures.
  • The tone of the calls.
  • If any cross-selling and up-selling activities happen.
  • Whether the agents handle your calls professionally.
  • Are your clients’ concerns and questions well answered?
  • The call transfer length across various departments.

Performance Monitoring

Performance monitoring involves tracking the agents’ productivity and measuring the number of calls they can answer in a specific time. It can also help you know how many clients abandon calls and the number of clients whose issues are resolved on their initial contact. Some of the metrics you can use to monitor performance effectively include the following:

  • The number of incoming calls answered.
  • After-hours work time.
  • Average talk time.
  • Average call length.
  • Hold time.

Consider Hiring a Call Center that Offers Multilingual Services

According to the Harvard Business Review, 72.1% of customers spend quality time on websites in their native language, and approximately 72.4% of clients are more likely to purchase services or products specified in their native language. Also, over 56.2% found that information in their language was more vital than the price.

Multilingual answering services increase customer satisfaction by meeting clients' backgrounds and dialect needs. When your live answering agents are fluent in different languages, DUI defendants and their loved ones can communicate and receive help in their preferred language. Most clients appreciate this inclusive approach since it reveals highly individualized customer care. It builds your client's trust in your law firm, fosters positive client-company relationships, and increases sales. It also improves your brand's image and recognition, showing that you are willing to go above and beyond to assist your clients.

By leveraging multilingual services, you ensure the agent can understand the DUI defendant’s issues, questions, and legal objectives, and the call agent can effectively communicate their recommendations. The advantage of this is that it avoids misunderstandings, which can result in:

  • Lengthy calls.
  • A misinterpretation of words and misunderstanding can be costly for you as a criminal defense attorney.

The Call Center’s Location

There are two locations to consider when choosing a call-answering service provider: overseas and in your home country. Most legal firms are attracted to offshoring because it is pocket-friendly. However, outsourcing your answering services overseas has several disadvantages, including political instability and language barriers.

While hiring a call center in your country is expensive, it is in your firm’s best interest since you will increase customer loyalty.

Call Center Intake Specialist Training

How qualified are the call agents? How comprehensive and effective is the provider’s training program?

A well-trained employee is vital to your call center's performance, and without a robust training program, they will not adapt to your legal practice.

Privacy and Security

As a DUI criminal defense attorney, your answering service agency will receive sensitive information like the defendant’s name, date of birth, phone number, social security number, and alleged criminal activity. As a result, a data breach can pose a significant security risk to your clients. It can also violate the client-attorney privilege, negatively affecting your professional license.

Several must-have features ensure call agents act securely and professionally, including the following:

  • Automated call recording announcement for Cisco platforms for all calls to reduce the chance of agents forgetting to read the call recording announcement, making the call recording non-compliant since implicit content was not submitted.
  • Live monitoring.
  • Notifications and alerts.

Other technological questions to ask your service provider before hiring them include whether:

  • You can set up role-based access that limits the information your call agents can access. It allows you to remove access following a detected vulnerability or a contract termination.
  • The agency operates on the cloud. Cloud products are safe. The provider's reputation as a service is on the line, so investing in security and taking strict security measures to protect your data is their priority.
  • The answering service leaves less data collection to auditory agent interactions. The call center should be set up so that whenever your client wants to share numerical data, they can easily type the number into their device. That way, any outsider listening will not recognize the number your client is typing.
  • The agency has full audit logs, including who listened to your call recordings.
  • The agency changes its passwords periodically.
  • The call agents are trained on the security protocols, procedures, and policies.

Finally, check the call center’s certifications, including whether it is compliant with the following:

  • ISO 9000.
  • Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) certification.
  • the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI).
  • General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
  • Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

Customized Call Handling and Scripting

In the legal industry, having a scripted and customized call center can aid your lead intake and determine how to route calls. An agency that understands the nature of DUI criminal cases should create a practical strategy to handle your calls as an extension of your company with tact and professionalism.

You do not want your callers to feel like they are being fed a script or faced with an interactive voice response (IVR) system that takes them in circles trying to contact a real person.

Contact the Best Answering Service Near Me

An experienced and reliable call center is fundamental to your DUI criminal defense law firm. When answering defendants’ questions, responding to emails, contacting leads, or routing callers to the appropriate department, you should consider retaining a service provider who delivers the spectacular client experience your clients need and deserve. Consider different variables and decide what your law firm needs and what you can live without. No answering service provider is one size fits all for law firms, and you should conduct a few trials before settling on the firm that suits your needs, budget, and goals.