The three options, and how each one fails
Every firm answering its own calls has three choices, and each breaks differently.
Hiring a receptionist gives you the most control. It also means paying for a full day of cover to handle calls that arrive in bursts, and losing the role entirely when that person is sick, on holiday or leaves.
An answering service is the cheapest, and takes a message. For a firm, a message is usually not enough: the details that decide whether a matter is viable are gathered in the first two minutes or not at all.
Outsourced intake sits between them. Not the cheapest, and not meant to be. The argument for it is coverage across hours you cannot staff, at a cost that works for call volumes that do not justify a hire.
When hiring is the better answer
If your call volume is steady through the working day, if the person answering also does substantive work between calls, and if you rarely take calls out of hours, hire. You will get more from one good person than from any outsourced arrangement.
We would rather say that than sell you something you do not need.
When outsourcing wins
When calls arrive in bursts. When the ones that matter come in the evening or at the weekend. When a meaningful share of callers speak Spanish. When you are running advertising and cannot predict the response. Those are the conditions a fixed hire handles badly and outsourcing handles well.
What you keep control of either way
The intake script, the escalation rules, what counts as urgent, and what a complete record contains. Those are set by your firm before the first call and revised whenever you want them revised. If it helps to see the detail, this is what a complete intake record contains.
What it costs to compare properly
Compare against your fully loaded cost, not a salary. Recruitment, the training you repeat each time someone leaves, the supervisor time, holiday and sickness cover, and the calls currently going unanswered.
Most firms have never added up the last item, and it is usually the one that decides the comparison. We have set out what legal intake outsourcing costs and what drives the price.
Talk to us
If you are weighing this up, we will tell you which way we think it falls for your firm, including when the answer is to hire. Talk to us about your call volume.
