How Law Firms Can Integrate Chat Bots
The cost of doing business in today’s world means you have to embrace technology if you don’t want your competitor’s will, and they are most likely to put you out of business.
New technologies like blockchain, AI, IoT, 5G, and more are all primed to disrupt well-established markets and industries and none more so than artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is slowly starting to creep its way into offices, boardrooms, waiting rooms, and more, picking up more of our daily tasks so staff can focus on clients and high-value jobs.
One industry that can benefit from chatbots is service and consultancy companies such as law firms. We all know that the legal system can be difficult, time-consuming, and tedious, and getting legal advice isn’t seen as natural or cost-effective for the average consumer.
Chatbots can help bridge the gap between clients, potential clients, and the lawyers themselves since chatbots are remarkably versatile and can be applied to almost any service industry if calibrated correctly.
So how could Chatbot’s improve a law firm’s offerings?
1. Offering 24/7 assistants
Your Chatbot does not need a break or a vacation like the human workforce, and when you’re with your skeleton staff or bogged down with cases, your Chatbot can pick up the slack. It works 24/7 to provide the customers with legal help whenever and from wherever they need it.
A chatbot can be trained like you would teach someone who is going to handle the live chats.
- You can provide scripted answers to a variety of questions
- Your Chatbot could recommend the correct lawyer for the case
- Answers to questions about specific practice areas and more
As time goes on, you can learn from the answers you get from people using the Chatbot. The Chatbot also learns via Artificial Intelligence and can add new questions people might have or be regularly asking.
2. Faster response times
Chatbots can understand a host of natural language questions and are quick to respond with practical and supportive legal information in simple English.
A user can chat with the Chatbot to get whatever information he or she needs in a conversational form. Prompt responses are great for clients looking for information or making basic queries.
The benefit of quick response times are in cases when someone comes to your website or social media accounts, and the staff is too busy a chatbot could pick up the slack and even save the customer from going to a competitor.
3. Improved data collection
Chatbots come equipped with tools that can be used to capture data, report on it, provide insights, and optimize its performance based on the results. After running your Chatbot each week, a legal firm can go through the conversation record to trace and evaluate the engagement process of the users.
It helps them in identifying users’ behavior of potential leads and common issues clients are having or inquiring about services. All this information can prove to be a precious asset and offer a new perspective for the firms and encourages them to enhance their commercial practices.
Chatbots can also collect a user’s email address and phone number and other valuable information you may need to process a query once it lands in the hands of a human lawyer. They are making for a better screening process for leads.
4. Better customer service
Chatbots for lawyers can also be used to engage and educate a client. You can set up the bot, so it has a customer service script or a lead generation scripts that prompt based on the users’ queries.
If your main goal is to provide customer service to the people that visit your lawyer website or blog, the customer service script is more set up to provide as many answers to potential questions a user might have.
5. Chatbots can improve lead generation
As mentioned in my previous point, a chatbot can be used to drive leads if calibrated correctly. Some people might not want to go through the hassle of calling a firm or even filling out a contact form and prefer a conversational approach via texting.
So if the chatbox comes up, they very well might start typing a question they have and then wind up leaving their contact details, as well as describing their legal problem.
If your Chatbot cannot answer the question due to its complexity or the user prompts to have the case taken up by a lawyer, the Chatbot can instantly redirect them to the correct person.
6. Educational purposes
If you produce regular content for your site, then you’ll know the power of content marketing. However, this content only serves users who actively search for the answers, while many don’t know the right questions to ask within search engines.
A chatbot can take the content you produce and recommend it to users within the conversation, which provides a new source of referral traffic and helps educate visitors, which in-turn can encourage them to become leads later on.
A lawyers new best friend
Your Chatbot could be designed to do one of all of these tasks mentioned above and e able to scale as your business grows. You could have a Chatbot explicitly developed for your business or use bots already designed for lawyers, so do you have an excuse not to try it out?
About the author
Ché Köhler is the co-founder of nichemarket, a South African Business Directory, and a digital marketing agency. He is an avid blogger who specializes in writing about marketing tech and cryptocurrency.
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