What kind of service do you want to offer to your clients? You need to balance the cost of telephone handling with accessibility, and ensure your technology helps, not hinders, the client relationship experience.
Call handling
If you don’t want to incur the expense of employing someone to answer the phone for you, you can be permanently on voicemail whilst you are busy with clients or dealing with matters at Court. But this is not a great experience for your clients. So, what are the alternatives?
There are established telephone answering services and paying on a per minute basis, they aren’t necessarily too expensive either. They can answer the calls, using your firm’s name and give your clients the impression that you are available as and when they need you.
However, there are definite drawbacks. These services are generic and tend to specialise in more mainstream businesses. They don’t tend to be trained to deal with victims of domestic violence looking for urgent help, those with mental health issues calling from secure hospitals, or criminal law clients calling from the police station or prison.
Our telephone answering services are only provided to law firms, especially those handling these types of work. Our call handlers are the first point of contact for clients who find themselves in the most difficult of circumstances and who might not always express themselves as politely or calmly as we might hope. Depending on the level of service you would want, we can provide:
- An answering service either on a price per minute of calls basis or to answer calls in designated hours
- A 24-hour service for phones to be answered by our designated staff, seven days a week, 365 days a year: including calls from the Duty Solicitor Call Centre
- A tailored service to forward calls to you or your staff by direct transfer of calls or to take messages and forward by email.
If you want to maintain a service which has the obvious benefits of having a human voice available to answer the phone at times you specify, but in an affordable way, then we can provide this for you. Our rates are comparable with those of the well-known telephone answering services. But our expertise in handling calls from clients like yours is on another level altogether.
Softphone installation & support
Once they reach a certain size; firms usually need to move beyond the world of purely mobile phone telephony. But with no desire to turn back the clock to legacy telephone consoles and desktop handsets, the world of cloud telephony and softphones (hosted on desktop/laptops and or mobile phone apps) can be the way forward.
That is, if you can navigate the multitude of different providers and their respective offerings. We can help you, getting you a system that is both fit-for-purpose and fully operational, without the risk of being sunk by excessive costs or paralysis born of not being able to translate the jargon.
Broadband, fixed and mobile contracting
Benchmarking and regularly updating contracts for broadband, fixed and mobile telephones can be one of the biggest areas in which firms can make a difference to their bottom line by keeping control of costs. This is much more easily done if you have experience of the relevant benchmarks in terms of the pricing that can be achieved. You can lean on our experience and we can help you achieve savings in this area that will help you keep your spending under control.