An interview with Pritpal Chahal, Solicitor and Practice Manager at Askews Legal LLP on behalf of Legal Futures Associate Moneypenny
The stamp duty holiday has created a welcome boom for conveyancing teams and a glut of enquiries from buyers keen to take advantage of the savings. In such a highly competitive field of law, providing quotes quickly and handling enquiries efficiently is a point of potential advantage – but it’s not without its challenges.
For Pritpal Chahal at Askews Legal LLP, an innovative approach to lead capture has helped to increase the efficiency of conveyancing lead management, improve client care and make his existing spend on call handling work harder. He said: “Like lots of firms, we were struggling to keep on top of all the conveyancing enquiries we were receiving and knew we needed dedicated resource to improve the process – instead of it being simply when team members had the time. From our own internal discussions we realised that by making some changes to call handling we could remove the burden from our team and set us on the path to improve efficiency and client care simultaneously.
“Our outsourced call handling partner was already gathering key information from callers so we decided that if we asked a few additional questions– we’d be able to remove the need for one of our team to call them back.”
Working with Askews’ outsourcing call handling provider Moneypenny, Pritpal amended the call handling script to include property value, property postcode and purchase type which would save his team the initial call back and remove one step from the client journey.
Pritpal said: “It soon became clear that if our call handlers were gathering this information, they should also have access to our Perfect Portal account so they could generate a quote at the same time. The seamless efficiency of this approach has meant that all enquiries are responded too very promptly and that our team only needs to get involved for follow-ups. It’s often a case of fastest finger first in this area of law and these simple changes have helped us to put client care and responsiveness front and centre.”
Pritpal’s ingenious approach to problem solving and improving client care is just one example of how a challenging market can lead to product and service innovation. He said: “We fully accept that even with this greatly improved process we won’t win every quote, so we plan to use the same approach to gather intelligence as to the reasons why. If it reveals things we need to change or improve, that’s what we’ll do. Being responsive and ensuring an excellent experience from the very first point of contact has always been a key objective of ours. It’s great to know that by making just a few simple changes and thinking about how we could enhance the tools we already have, we’ve been able to meet our client care ambitions and improve efficiency too.”
Askew Legal LLP’s outsourced call handling and outbound call support is provided by Moneypenny.
