As a growing legal firm, you may find yourself wondering: Is a virtual receptionist worth the cost? The short answer is “yes!” Keep in mind that your practice may not be small for long. In order to grow, you will need to accommodate an increasing number of prospective clients.
As a small law firm, maximizing productivity, professional appearance, and client attentiveness are paramount. But, so is managing your costs effectively. With limited staff bandwidth and resources, it’s an ongoing challenge to consistently provide seamless reception and responsiveness without overstretching your team or budget.
Hiring a Texas virtual receptionist for lawyers under the right fee arrangement can offset the costs and help your small law firm grow to its full potential. Below, we provide information that can help answer the question of whether a virtual receptionist is really worth the cost:
Evaluating the Cost-Benefit Balance of Virtual Receptionists for Small Law Firms
Many smaller legal practices are turning to virtual receptionist solutions to gain a tremendous force multiplier in bolstering their support capabilities cost-effectively. But is investing in a remote, off-site receptionist service genuinely worth the expense for small firms?
Like any major operational decision, there are important factors to consider before outsourcing legal intake services for law firms. Do the services align with your firm’s needs, capacities, and growth goals? An asset for some practices may be an unnecessary expenditure for others. This can depend on factors like:
- Your current and projected client volume and demand
- How many calls/inquiries routinely go unanswered during business hours
- What your opportunity cost is for missed opportunities or client dissatisfaction
- How efficiently your current staff juggle reception duties with billable work
- Your vision for strategically scaling the firm’s capabilities as you grow
What Are the Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Receptionist?
For small law offices, hiring a virtual receptionist can be a game-changing force multiplier that delivers tremendous return on investment. A service like LCC, that offers affordable options can benefit firms in the following ways:
- Boosting client satisfaction, referrals, and retention with reliable call handling
- Providing consistent, high-quality brand representation to all callers
- Increasing attorney and paralegal productivity by eliminating call duties
- Boosting new client acquisition rates by capturing more incoming leads
For some small firms, well-trained in-house staff may be capable of juggling reception responsibilities during regular hours. For most firms looking to grow, however, outsourcing tasks like call handling and intake can be invaluable.
The key is carefully evaluating the tangible benefits virtual receptionists provide against the hard costs and opportunity costs specific to your firm’s situation. With that cost-benefit analysis informing your decision, you can ensure any investment will be impactful, not superfluous.
How to Calculate the Opportunity Costs of Missed Calls
For small law firms, every inbound call represents a potential new client opportunity. Failure to answer and properly intake that call and you may have just missed out on a lucrative new case.
The hard dollars missed from failing to convert those calls into retained clients are just the start of the opportunity costs involved. There are multiple levels of negative impacts that underscore why consistently capturing leads via seamless phone responsiveness is so crucial. Consider the following:
Missed Revenue
The most direct opportunity cost when calls go unanswered or are handled poorly is the immediate income lost from not acquiring that new client/case. Even for a small firm, just a few missed cases each month can translate into thousands of dollars in fees not earned.
Underperforming Marketing Investments
Law firms invest significant money into various marketing channels – TV/radio ads, outdoor billboards, online SEO/SEM, etc. These channels all encourage potential clients to contact them. When calls inspired by those campaigns are missed, it renders those advertising dollars wasted with zero return.
Damage to Reputation and Referrals
In today’s hyper-connected world, poor phone experiences spread quickly via online reviews and word-of-mouth. Future prospects will be turned off from even calling if your firm has a reputation for not answering or dismissively handling new inquiries, drastically curbing growth.
Low Client Satisfaction and Retention
Even for existing clients, allowing too many calls to go unattended projects an unprofessional lack of attentiveness and accessibility. This erodes client satisfaction, trust, reviews, and the likelihood of retaining clients or receiving referrals down the road.
Fortunately, calculating your actual opportunity costs from dropped calls and insufficient call handling is relatively straightforward using your own metrics. How do you do this? By analyzing the following:
- Determine how many incoming calls go unanswered or mishandled during business hours each week/month.
- Factor your average case acquisition rate from proper call intake.
- Calculate your firm’s average case value across your service areas.
- Multiply the number of dropped opportunities by your case conversion rate and average case value.
- This provides an approximate monthly revenue figure you’re currently missing out on.
Even just a few dropped calls per week can equate to thousands of dollars in opportunity costs from missed cases, underutilized marketing spending, reputational damage, and client dissatisfaction.
Investing in a reliable virtual receptionist solution to ensure no call ever gets missed can allow your firm to recoup those costs while driving greater growth. With full insight into your opportunity costs, you can easily evaluate if the service fee for inbound call handling offers a solid return on investment for your firm.
Finding a Virtual Receptionist that Works for You
For cost-conscious small firms, a virtual receptionist provider like Legal Conversion Center provides a straightforward, value-driven pricing model. The most affordable structure includes a low base fee charged per contract. This is combined with economical per-minute billing only for the active talk time our agents spend live on the phone with callers.
At LCC, we avoid nickel-and-dime pricing traps like requiring minute package minimums, charging per-minute fees just for transferring calls to your office, or adding extra fees for items like call recording access or workflow customizations. Our goal is to help our partners grow and thrive through cost-effective services.
With transparent per-minute pricing directly tied to live usage, you only pay for the services actually rendered without surprise overages. There are no hidden charges, minimum quotas that charge whether you “use” the time or not, or other billing ambiguities. With LCC’s legal answering service cost structure, you can afford to reap the benefits of a virtual receptionist.
Legal Conversion Center’s Virtual Receptionist Is Worth the Cost for Your Small Law Firm
If you are still on the fence about hiring a virtual receptionist, call Legal Conversion Center. We have affordable rates with no hidden fees, which can help you take your legal practice to the next level. Our virtual receptionist team is highly trained and compliant with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and DNC, and we offer Spanish answering services for law firms.
Call us to discuss our virtual receptionist packages with a representative or get a free quote by filling out the form on our website.