You don’t need us to tell you that “convenience” is a big thing these days, as plenty of industries from banking to restaurants to grocery shopping look to find more ways of removing friction from the purchase cycle.
Once it was a stretch to book an appointment online, now not only is it commonplace, but the technology to allow both ease of booking and seamless integration into respective calendars is here.
What Appointment Booking Software Works the Best for Law Firms?
There are a bunch of platforms out there that purport to be complete solutions for online appointment booking, but what we found in unsuccessfully integrating for a number of law firms, is simply put, they’re not. In other words, they may integrate with a Google Calendar but not with Microsoft Mail. If they did, what we found was that there wasn’t two-way syncing. In other words, if I book a time with your injury lawyer at 10.30am via the phone, the booking app would not be updated synchronously. This, of course, ends in a mess with double bookings etc
Do You Have a Recommendation?
In light of the above issues, we built our own software just for law firms. It’s bespoke, allows the law firm themselves to manage the platform, and gives the potential client multiple ways of booking a time that suits the practice. For example, for mediation practices, we have the half or full day booking option that upon request of a potential client, triggers the app to find days or half days in your diary. We also have appointment settings for the firm to manage that can toggle between allowing the potential client to make a time and it is automatically added to the lawyers calendar, or alternatively, it won’t be added until such time as the lawyer vets the details of the appointment and once accepted, a notification is only then sent to the person to notify that the appointment has been accepted. (Important if you want to do conflict checks)
How Should Our Law Firm Best Prepare for Online Bookings?
It goes without saying, that law firms traditionally have been late adopters to technology generally, but this has changed significantly in the last 12 months with the sheer volume of tech start-ups in the industry.
Getting ready for online bookings requires buy-in from the firm, or in the very least a practice group within the firm ready and willing. If it’s the preference of your firm to roll it out within a practice group first, the best group will be that of which has legal consumers who will readily use the technology. In this case, consider either those practice areas that are transaction-driven or those that are time or emergency driven. For example in a general practice, in the case of the former, that may be conveyancing, or in the case of the latter, criminal law or personal injury law.
Where is the Best Place to Locate a “Get an Appointment” Button?
There’s plenty of locations on your law firm website design that you should consider running your appointment buttons. The most obvious is on your calls to action and on specific landing pages.
How Difficult is the Integration of Online Bookings?
It’s very easy. All we do is set up an account for your law firm, train your relevant staff members (practice manager etc) on how to add lawyers and integrate their calendars. We’ll then add the buttons on your website, or if you’re tech-savvy, your firm can do this yourself.
What Should Our Law Firm Do Next?
Simply reach out to us for a Free Demo 🙂
