Live chat functions pay dividends by helping law firms generate more leads and conversions.

Imagine if every single person who viewed your web page became one of your clients. 

Sounds too good to be true, right?

While you might not be able to reach a 100% conversion rate, there are many tools out there that can get you closer. For law firms, live chat is one of the most effective options there is. 

Consider this: most customers will visit multiple firms’ sites before they decide who to hire, and it’s in your interest to stand out. Additionally, law firms provide a service to customers who may be anxious, confused, or in over their heads. They are seeking help because they don’t know how to proceed, and they want to work with a firm they feel they can trust. 

There’s no better way to inspire trust remotely than by offering personalized answers that are as easy as possible for the client to access. 

Generate More Leads

If you want to earn more customers, you need to make it as easy as possible for clients to reach you. This is why live chat has become an increasingly popular option for customer service operations. Traditionally, customers have to take multiple steps to reach your firm, such as locating their phone and making a call or opening an email to send a response. 

The problem is that both of these options introduce new barriers to conversion. Your potential client needs to locate their phone, which may require getting up from the couch or desk. It then requires actually placing the call. Although for some clients, this might be the preferred mode of communication, for others, the idea of contacting a stranger about a sensitive problem is just uncomfortable enough to encourage procrastination, which means you might not get the lead you’re looking for. 

Although email can feel more comfortable and private than a call, this medium can pressure a client to construct an entire narrative before reaching out. Additionally, email offers no sense of immediacy. Your client may not feel confident that they will receive a response, which can discourage reaching out.

How Live Chat Can Help

When it comes to generating leads, live chat represents the best of both worlds. This simple, friendly, low-stakes way for clients to engage with your firm offers the privacy of email along with the human engagement of a call. If that isn’t enough, it’s also easier for clients than either of these options. Live chat doesn’t require opening a new browser tab or picking up the phone—instead, the interaction happens directly on the portion of your website the client is engaging with already. 

Proof in the Pudding

All of these advantages are backed up in the data. In fact, live chat provides the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, and a recent Forrester study found that live chat leads to a revenue increase of 48% per chat hour and a 40% increase in conversion rate. 

Think of it like having a member of your sales team available 24/7 offer a friendly wave (and the promise of legal counsel) to anybody who looks your way. 

Humans Matter

When selecting a chat provider, it is important to distinguish between live chat and chat bots. Live chat functions are operated by a person who is available to answer questions, while chat bots run a script that imitates a human interaction. Chat bots are often employed by companies who field a large number of low-stake consumer interactions, and they can effectively route customers towards the link to initiate a return or offer a phone number for the appropriate agency. 

Chat bots are much less appropriate for law firms, whose clients likely are considering investing a significant amount of money in a service, and whose particular situations will cover a much wider range of situations. Since the goal is conversion, chat bots are not an appropriate substitute for live chat for law firms. Instead, choose live chat to communicate that a client can expect to receive personalized, considerate attention.

Many live chat providers available allow you to outsource reception duties, so you can remain available around the clock (without expecting anybody on our team to pull an all-nighter) . Ngage, Smith.ai, and Apex Chat all offer 24/7 professional chat monitoring. 

In the end, by using live chat you’re able to deliver trust right from the very start. Given the cost it takes to get someone to your website, the extra investment to get them to convert once there is well worth the investment.