A Personal Injury law firm’s intake department is the lifeblood of the firm. Without intake, signing up new cases for your firm can be a daunting task. Whether you have an in-house team or outsource your intake calls, the foundation that makes a great intake department is the same. There are many details that go into making sure your intake team is successful, so we will start with the basics.
The goal of a PI firm’s intake department should be to get enough information from a caller to make a solid decision and get the client signed up. Anything that falls outside of that scope is a secondary focus. To make sure your team has the right tools to succeed, we’re going to focus on five key foundational pieces: Lining out responsibilities, reporting, goals, on-going training, and technology. All five of these factors can make or break your intake team.
Responsibilities
Making sure you have clearly lined out the responsibilities of your intake team and the priority for those is critical. The next step is to make sure you communicate this to every team member and ensure they have a good understanding of expectations. It’s important to communicate basic job duties as well as responsibilities to the team and organization. If your law firm has core values they are expected to uphold, you want to make sure they know this is part of their role.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Does my team know which calls are top priority?
- Does my team know how I expect them to represent our personal injury law firm?
Reporting
With great responsibilities comes great reporting. There are so many reports that might be helpful but the key here is to focus on the top reports that will help run the day-to-day operation for intake. For management purposes, some reports I highly suggest are a daily newsfeed, weekly summary, and a rolling 6-week summary that shows overall numbers and, most importantly, conversion rate. These 3 reports are great for spotting any issues quickly and helping your managers stay tuned in with the health of the department.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Does my team know which reports we should be looking at daily, weekly, etc?
- Do they know how to spot issues and what steps to take if issues arise?
Goals
As Laurence J. Peter said, ““If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else.” I won’t waste time talking about the importance of setting goals. We all know goals are important, both personally and professionally. Your intake team is no different – they need to have goals and understand why those goals are so important. Once they know the goal, they need to constantly be talking about it and be able to easily access the stats that show whether or not they are reaching it. Another thing to consider is if you want to incentivize certain goals.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Does my team know the overall goal of the department?
- Does my team know the value of the goals to the law firm?
- Does my team know where they stand individually as a part of the overall goal?
Ongoing Training
Continual intake training is where a lot of law firms fall behind. Many people make the mistake of thinking that once the foundation is set, they are good to go forever. This could not be further from the truth. After you have a good foundation, on-going training is essential to long-term success. I recommend frequent team meetings (once a week at minimum) to stay aligned on goals, updates, and coaching. If your firm is not routinely listening to live calls and performing call audits, you are missing a great opportunity to help your team learn and grow.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Do my supervisors have frequent check-ins with team members?
- Is ongoing training a priority?
Technology
The world of technology is rapidly changing. With many more people working from home, your firm may have the option to hire people across the world to support your intake efforts. Whether you’re hiring local or three states away, ensuring your team has up-to-date technology is important. Everything from internet speed to noise-canceling microphones and headphones should be considered. Keeping up to date on technology is not just a great way to increase efficiency, but it also can help with morale. When the team knows you want to help make their work life a little easier, they are more willing to go that extra mile and deliver great service to clients.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Does my team have everything they need to perform their job to our firm’s standards?
- Create a technology checklist to ensure your team has up-to-date equipment to work most efficiently.
What’s Next?
After we have the foundation built for a great intake department, we are ready to take live calls and get more qualified injury cases signed. In our next Intake blog post, I will cover the Four I’s of Intake (Incident, Injuries, Insurance and Innocence) and how you can use those Four I’s to convert leads into signups more efficiently at your Personal Injury law firm. Stay tuned!
