Establish Follow-Up Protocols
While the past year has brought on many changes within the legal industry, the expectation for great client services has remained a constant. Whether you are a solo practice or have a whole team of intake specialists conducting follow ups, the communication you send out to potential clients is critical. It is a factor as to whether they will sign on, refer you to others, and remember you again if they need a lawyer in the future.
In a primarily remote world, the standard of correspondence that you engage in with potential clients has heightened. Without in-person meetings, those calls, texts, and emails are even more important to establish relationships. To ensure your clients receive an experience you can be proud of, establish follow-up protocols for your firm to follow.
- How many touchpoints of each method will you use daily?
- What contact methods will you prioritize to follow up with leads?
- How long will you engage with a lead before closing it out?
Answering these questions will solidify the standard of communication for your law firm. Up until you receive that signed retainer, it is best to put yourself in a lead’s perspective. How would you want to be contacted?
Nowadays, with inboxes flooded with emails, phone calls and especially text messages are the best forms of contact with leads. Not only can you ensure your message will be seen by your prospective clients, but you are also streamlining the process for them. By giving leads a quick and easy way to get in contact with you, you are providing a simple path to signing on. Ideally, you can provide a link within a text message for a client to e-sign a retainer, with a provider such as AssureSign.
While simplifying the intake process for leads is the goal, it is also important to find ways to enhance the process for you and your staff, as well. Follow up texts and calls may take little time to execute or send, but when you have your staff working on many, the minutes definitely add up. It also increases the likelihood that a lead may fall through the cracks.
How often does it happen to you that a call comes out of the blue, interrupting your current task and you forget to actually hit send on that follow up text?
Imagine that following the initial meeting or conversation with a prospective client, you do not have to find a few free minutes during your day to text or email. Rather, you can have automated templated texts or emails sent featuring auto-populated merge codes, ensuring you are not losing that personalized touch.
Utilizing legal technology to aid in this process will provide peace of mind that you are demonstrating quality customer service, without expending too much staff time. Once you solidify your follow up procedures, including how many touch points you will send out to a lead, as well as the specific messaging, you can set up automated emails, texts, and tasks to be generated to remind you or your staff to follow up with a phone call.
SmartAdvocate’s legal case management software delivers this solution for you. Beyond their robust system to help optimize the intake process, their AssureSign integration allows you to include your retainer in a text message, so your lead can easily sign and return to you within seconds. Upon receipt of the signed retainer, SmartAdvocate can automatically generate a welcome text and email, again auto-populated with personalized information for your new client, to welcome them to your firm. Simultaneously, a task can be automatically generated and assigned to the appropriate staff member so that they are alerted of the signed retainers and to call the new client to discuss next steps.
SmartAdvocate allows your staff to send and receive text messages from a separate phone number, not a personal one. It streamlines the process, by also automatically saving all outgoing and incoming correspondence into the case file, so that at any point in time, anyone on your team can look up a particular file and be completely caught up on a case – with a bird’s eye view of all previous communications.
For lawyers of all practice areas, personal injury or otherwise, establishing these follow up protocols will help to create a standard for your firm, ensuring all leads undergo the same quality client experience. SmartAdvocate provides the solutions to make it an easy process for you and your firm.
