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Want to engage your website visitors and gain clients for your practice—and save time while doing it? Live chat for attorneys and law firms makes it easy.
Legal professionals of all kinds use chat services to optimize their client communication online. It’s the key to attracting visitors, collecting information from them, and turning them into leads.
It’s also a great way to stand out. In a crowded market—in the US, there’s approximately one lawyer for every 240 residents—live chat imbues your online presence with a human, responsive, personal element that gives you an edge over the competition. After all, although chat is many consumers’ preferred communication channel, only a small minority of businesses use it.
Best of all, with the right live chat provider, you can rest assured client communication is handled 24/7 by trained professionals dedicated to delighting your visitors.
The numbers behind live chat, at a glance
- 42% of all customers prefer chat over other communication channels, including email (23%) and social media outreach (6%).
- 73% of consumers are satisfied with their experiences on live chat—the highest level of all customer service channels.
- Live chat prospects are 4.6 times more likely than others to convert into clients.
- Just 14% of companies currently have live chat on their websites.
How does live chat grow your legal practice?
Chat can be especially useful for attorneys and law firms. Why? Because it engages potential new clients where and when they’re often most receptive—even if they don’t realize it.
The fact is that many legal consumers feel reluctant to talk to attorneys; they’d rather conduct their own research first and contact a lawyer as a last resort. Live chat engages visitors in the research stage, offering information, building trust, addressing concerns, and breaking down barriers between legal professionals and their potential clients.
It’s more than sales or a perfunctory customer service tool. Chat can establish genuine human connections and bring visitors immediate value.
Here are a few ways live chat can empower your potential clients:
- Provide friendly reassurance during a stressful or uncertain moment in a prospective client’s life (e.g. divorce, death of a parent, or dissolution of a business)
- Answer frequently asked questions and provide resources for new visitors
- Address your sales objections and pain points (e.g. pricing)
- Provide an alternative to other, more time- and energy-intensive communication channels such as phone and email (ideal for those with phone anxiety)
Need to ensure your prospective new clients are the right fit for your practice? Chat can help with that, too.
At Ruby, our highly-trained live chat specialists are experts at lead qualification, using proprietary tools to gather the information you need to make informed decisions about following up with your website visitors. Each live chat interaction is tagged and saved with a transcript, along with personal details and contact information, so you can see who contacted your firm and why, along with any relevant details (such as location and case information) they provided.
Here’s a two-minute overview of how it works:
What chat can mean for your bottom line
Imagine your website attracts about 100 visitors per day. In one day, let’s say 20 of those visitors want to get in touch with your office. Approximately 12 of those people will try to contact you during business hours (9 am–5 pm). The other eight will attempt to get in touch during the evening, middle of the night, or early morning.
Without live chat:
100 unique visitors come to your company’s website every day.
20 of them decide they want to learn more.
10 try to call your office, but only 6 call during business hours.
10 consider filling out a contact form but only 2% do.
Without live chat, you’re only able to engage with 6% of your site visitors at the moment when they’re most interested in your services—and that’s if your office can respond in time. Keep in mind that most people will move on if they have to wait longer than an hour—let alone five minutes—to hear back.
With live chat:
100 unique visitors come to your company’s website every day.
20 of them decide they want to learn more.
10 try to call your office, but only 6 call during business hours.
10 will consider filling out an online form or participating in a live chat. And since 73% of
customers prefer live chat, 7 engage, and conversations begin.
With professionally-managed live chat you can make personal connections with 13% of your site visitors when they’re feeling receptive—more than doubling your daily conversion rate.
If your average case is worth $4,000, that’s an additional $28,000 of revenue potential per day created with the simple addition of live chat to your website.
Keep in mind that chat is one touchpoint among many. Combine live chat capabilities with on-demand receptionist services, and you’ll never miss an opportunity again. If ten people call your office—including four after-hours—almost all of them are guaranteed to speak to a real person, either a member of your staff or a virtual receptionist.
Learn more in Ruby’s guide to live chat.
Ready to start making deeper, more personal connections?
