Choosing the best live chat for your law firm’s website may come down to pricing, support, and functionality. Before reviewing a few live chats you can use for your website, let’s look at a few key features to help in your decision making.
The first thing to understand is what you can do with live:
- Pre-chat Message: provide a pop-up to a visitor to prompt them toward clicking the button and starting the live chat session.
- Pre-chat script: provide a series of questions the visitor must answer before the live chat session begins.
- Proactive Live Chat: offering a live chat session to a visitor upon arrival.
- Reactive Chat: waiting for a visitor to initiate the live chat button.
- Unavailable Chat: when live agents are not available, an optional form is sent to the visitor to provide their email.
Next, in the marketing world, turning a website visitor into a paying customer (or client) is known as a conversion. Live chats are a great tool to increase conversions if you know how to use them.
Quick Tips for Live Chat
Take into consideration the following when choosing and setting up a live chat solution on your law firmès website:
- Who Will Be Responding to Chat Requests? Will you be handling the chat notifications or an assistant? There is also the option of hiring a virtual receptionist and outsourcing. Are you aware of the ethical implications to answer legal related questions?
- How Are Chats Being Answered? If you understand the ABA’s ethics rules for lawyers, you’ll know what kind of information you can or cannot collect during a live chat. If you have chosen a live chat with outsourced assistance, will they be given a script? Are they proficient in English? How should they handle sensitive information?
- What Are Your Costs? There are many live chat solutions available and prices range from completely free to high hourly rates for active chat agents. You may also find the option to pay per lead or to pay per chat.
Now that you have an idea what to look for in a live chat software for your website, let’s look at a few options.
Live Chat for Lawyer Websites
Overview: Client Chat Live offers live chat solutions for small business, medical practices, and legal practices.
Installation: Their installation team provides you with the HTML to include on your website and simple steps to get started.
Features:
- Proactive Pop-ups: invites visitors to start using the chat messenger
- Branded chat boxes
- Monthly chat reports (include all chats, summary of visitor details, and analytics)
- Custom scripts for their operators
- Live phone transfer
- CRM Integration
- 24/7 operator availability
Languages: Available in English and Spanish
Pricing: Contact the company for a free quote.
Overview: Legal 24/7 is a live chat provider dedicated exclusively to lawyers. They offer a team of trained operators capable of using legal language. They can also assist in designing custom chat scripts that suit your law firm’s style.
Installation: N/A
Features:
- Legal training operators with focus on conversion
- Live phone call transfer
- Live chat 24/7/365
- Branded chat boxes
- Analytics
- CRM integration
- Lead notification (email, phone call, etc.)
Languages: Available in English and Spanish
Pricing: Pay per lead. Contact the company for more details.
Overview: Apex Chat offers both live chat software and professional agents 24/7/365. They have agents specialized in personal injury, criminal defense, bankruptcy, family law, immigration, estate planning, and other legal areas. Apex Chat is a leading provider of live chat solutions for lawyers.
Installation: N/A
Features:
- Multiple chat agents available 24/7
- Live phone call transfer
- Practice area trained operators
- Pre-defined scripts
- Customizable messenger (for branding)
- CRM Integration
- Geo-mapping and routing
- Detailed reporting
Language: Available in English and Spanish
Pricing: Pay per lead, with the ability to cap billing. For more information, contact their sales team.
The following live chat providers are not specific for legal services.
Overview: Chat.io offers a highly functional live chat messenger for your website. You’ll see a simple chat messenger in the bottom right corner of your website with the option to add the chat agent’s image and personalized message. They also offer 14-day free trial.
Installation: After you sign up for your account, you’ll receive an HTML code to place on your attorney website. They offer easy-to-understand instructions for this task.
Features:
- Create canned messages
- Check chat status
- Share files
- Create smart or manual chat (for offline)
- Use on multiple websites and integrate into Facebook
- Receive chat ratings
- Access to agent profiles and transparency
- Only $10 per teammate/month
Please note, this chat service only offers access to their live chat software. If you need agents, you may have to outsource.
Other live chat software similar to Chat.io include:
These live chat services offer manual live chat solutions. If you don’t have the staff to manage your live chats, you can outsource and provide scripts or set up an autoresponder requesting contact information.
Overall, the benefits of using non-legal focused live chats would be their affordability. However, the inability to hire staff available 24/7 can lead to missed leads and prospective clients.
In contrast, the live chat services devoted to the legal industry include operators who can speak both Spanish and English. In addition, with pricing being pay-per-lead from talented operators focused on conversions, you’ll get exactly what you pay for.