Business
4 Ways Intake Turnover Hurts Your Firm
Losing intake employees isn’t just frustrating; it can also be a major contributing cause of lost revenue. After all, when an intake professional leaves, you’re not just losing an employee, but someone your callers trusted enough to become clients.
That can take time to replace, and the period in between bringing a replacement up to speed can be damaging in a number of other ways. In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the key ways that intake turnover can hurt a legal firm.
Losing Leads
A new intake staff member has to learn how to do the job correctly, but that’s not something that a potential client will understand. Legal clients rightly have high expectations and expect that they’ll be treated with professionalism every step of the way. While it’s understandable that a new recruit might fumble some elements of the intake process, it’s also understandable that the potential client will simply move on to the next law firm on the list.
In other words, while it’s not guaranteed, it can lead to lost revenue, and that prospect should be enough to convince law firms that their talented intake professionals are worth keeping hold of.
Wasted Training Time
Getting an intake employee fully up to speed takes time. According to experts, legal intake staff training takes, on average, around 3 – 6 months, with 4 months being the sweet spot in which they know enough to handle prospective clients with care, without feeling like the training has been rushed. Four months is a long time to be training someone, yet when they leave, all that time, effort, and learning goes out of the window. While it’s not realistic to think that an employee will stay with the firm forever, the goal should be to have them stay with you for as long as possible.
Diminished Client Experience
People can be forgiving of below-level standards when everything is going well, but that’s usually not the position that most legal clients find themselves in. They’re in crisis, and that makes them less receptive to any errors — or even lack of confidence — that new intake personnel typically show. Ultimately, it makes the client experience poorer in a way that seems subtle and not overly important, but which can have an impact.
Increased Hiring Costs
Hiring costs can be high, especially in the legal field. Every step of the process involves spending money that could otherwise be used to enhance profit margins. Given how long it takes to get new employees up to speed, it’s in the firm’s interest to make sure they stay once they’re in position. Even going through a couple of intake staff per year can dramatically increase hiring costs, since the firm will essentially always be in hiring mode. As such, hiring an experienced, vetted candidate is essential for keeping costs down and minimizing the risk of the other downsides that come from hiring the wrong employee, such as decreasing team morale and increasing the workload of the firm’s attorneys.