For legal firms, intake is an integral part of a successful lead conversion strategy. High-quality reporting assists your practice in understanding how well intake is helping you achieve marketing and business goals. Additionally, it allows you to analyze how well your firm performs daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly.
Why is Tracking and Reporting Important?
Regardless of the size of your law firm, the intake process generates high volumes of data. By tracking the right metrics, it’s possible to:
- Monitor revenue sources
- Identify opportunities for practice growth
- Identify intake errors
- Make financial forecasts
Without comprehensive reporting, it’s easy to miss serious errors, affecting your firm’s profitability over time.
In the age of big data, it would be a mistake to avoid such an important source of information as legal intake. By analyzing and tracking the first interaction with potential clients, you can improve your conversion rates.
What Should You Be Tracking?
When arranging intake for your firm, you need to consider tracking the following metrics:
1. Calls Received
The number of calls you receive can show how well your lead generation efforts are working. This is a starting point for conversion rate analysis. You can also better track high-volume call days and times.
Additionally, you should be tracking the number of contact requests you receive online to gain insight into the preferred communication methods of your target audience.
2. Web/Chat Response Times
If your firm offers web contact forms, chat, email or any other online communication methods, you need to pay special attention to how quickly your team responds.
The ideal intake hold time for web forms is between 2-5 minutes. Anything slower can lead to client shopping and lost leads. For live chats, your intake team should aim to respond in under 45 seconds.
3. Outbound Calls Placed
Even if clients don’t go from contact to contract on the first call, it’s still possible to convert them later. How many calls does your intake team place to retarget a client?
Tracking the “calls placed” metric can help you measure how well the initial conversion efforts are working and where you might need to improve.
4. Calls by Marketing Source
To figure out which marketing tactics bring the best results, you need to track the calls’ source. The easiest way to do this is to create several phone numbers and use a unique number for each source.
During the intake process, you can analyze where clients with the highest potential are coming from and then adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
5. Duration of Call
Not all calls are equally valuable for a law firm. In general, the longer the call, the higher the chance you have to convert the potential client.
Tracking each call’s duration can help determine which marketing efforts bring clients with high conversion potential.
6. Call Outcomes
By tracking each call’s outcome (conversion, disqualified lead, the potential for a callback, etc.), you can see a bigger picture of how well your lead generation efforts are working.
Using this data and marketing source and duration metrics, you can gain valuable insight into campaign optimization possibilities.
7. Lead Intake Notes
By tracking lead intake notes, it’s possible to evaluate trends in lead behavior and lead quality by source.
With enough data, you can analyze this information to restructure the intake process as needed to maximize conversions.
Capitalizing on Legal Intake Reporting with a Legal Call Center
Arranging high-quality intake for your law firm is only the first step toward improving profitability. Using the data collected during the process is essential to conversion optimization.
By tracking all the necessary metrics and analyzing them in relation to your business goals, you can fully understand how your marketing efforts are performing.
If you are thinking about hiring a legal call center to support your intake process, make sure it provides all the above metrics in the form of comprehensive reports at your request. The call center should be creating these reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, depending on your needs.
Get in touch with Alert today to learn more about  legal answering services we can offer your law firm.
