Chris O'Brien:
But in reality, we can handle 100,000 calls at the exact same time.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the ranking's traffic in cases other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver. Do me a favor and hit that follow button right now to subscribe. You'll be the first to get every new episode delivered straight to you the moment it drops, giving you the edge. On these special toolkit episodes, we dive deep into conversations with the leading vendors in the legal sphere, the masterminds behind the technologies, services and strategies that help law firms not just survive, but thrive in today's competitive landscape. This is Toolkit Thursday on PIM. Your weekly guide is staying sharp in the legal world. Let's get started.
Pick up the phone. A missed call is not just a missed opportunity, it is revenue leaking out of your marketing funnel and driving up your cost. Not to mention driving us marketing agencies nuts. Yet incredibly, most firms don't have this simple action dialed in, whether it's inconsistent human call centers or simply accepting some calls will slip through the cracks, the cost of dropping the ball is just too high. What if I told you there's finally a solution to seal those marketing leaks once and for all? A cutting edge system that leverages artificial intelligence to guarantee you never miss another call. The wait time is basically zero and every prospect gets a platinum level experience right from their first interaction.
In this interview, I'm joined by Chris O'Brien, co-founder of CaptureNow, the legal industry's first and only automated AI call solution. We'll dive deep in their innovative technology and explore how firms can maximize marketing by capturing 100% of leads, deliver unmatched client experience consistently and at unlimited scale, empower staff to focus on high impact activities instead of reactive intake. If you want an advantage that almost seems unfair, this episode is for you. With CaptureNow blow pass competitors and truly convert more sign cases from your advertising spend, Chris O'Brien explains his journey to becoming co-founder of CaptureNow.
Chris O'Brien:
So started off at a college, worked for a case management provider called Client Profiles that later became Aderant Total Office. Spent about eight years there really just learning the business, understanding the operations of a law firm and the thing that kept coming up for me is when working with personal injury clients, they needed a better way to be able to handle their leads and the management of new potential clients. And so I kept trying to kind of make this case management system work in that environment and for those specific needs and just could never kind of hit the mark.
So I left that business and started Captorra, which was the first intake CRM platform designed specifically for personal injury law firms. Quite frankly, experienced really great success there. Built that business up to about 350 clients. Successfully exited that business, sold that to the great folks at Martindale-Avvo and then Gary Falkowitz and I partnered up to create ICE, Intake Conversion Experts, which was the first intake call center environment that actually qualified and retained clients on behalf of the law firms that we represented and also experienced great success there. Had a good exit from that business as well, and then jumped into now this new business, new venture that Gary, myself and Michael Mogill are partnered on, which is CaptureNow, which is basically a AI-based phone answering tool. Again, designed mostly for personal injury law firms, but also extends really well into other consumer-based law firms as well.
Chris Dreyer:
That's amazing. And I wanted to tee up for the audience your background. Right. I think it's like the ultimate team kind of assembled between yourself, Gary, Michael and just understanding the space, the pains, the problems that you solve. So let's start with some of the features, some of the benefits of CaptureNow. I'm a marketer. Right. So there's nothing worse than when I run that weekly report and I get on call round, I'm like 21 missed calls this week. Wonderful. There's nothing worse. Let's talk about that.
Chris O'Brien:
I could talk about it firsthand. And owning and operating that call center environment, our biggest challenge was answering the phone. So just full transparency, we missed calls. It just was impossible to be able to staff for every burst that you could possibly have, and it's what kept us up at night. That and then actual client saying, can I get that call recording? Because that was always a challenge as well. You could never control what those agents are going to say on the phone and how they're representing the firms that we're representing. So all of that was certainly a challenge for us.
And that's what made CaptureNow really great for Gary and I to jump into in design is because those huge concerns that we had at ICE are completely removed with CaptureNow. Answers the phone on the first ring every single time, it never says something stupid. We don't have to motivate it and get them into work and train them. It's a prescribed solution that does exactly what it's intended to do and that's capture every incoming lead. And now we have a new solution that handles existing client calls and about 25 to 30 seconds gives them a really fantastic experience, gets their information in the hands of the case manager so they can then handle that client appropriately.
Chris Dreyer:
Just a couple things to point out. The first one, well Chris, I thought that I hired the third party intake system to handle those calls and to not miss calls. So the reality is even if that's their sole focus and their niche, it's a challenge just from a utilization perspective.
Chris O'Brien:
Listen, we're all facing staffing challenges right now and have been for a number of years, and for us to kind of take our staffing challenges and say we're just going to outsource this to another group, we have to realize that they're having staffing challenges as well and theirs get exacerbated because a bunch of firms are then kind of handing their problems over to these call centers. Truth be told, I really feel for them. It's a very challenging environment to be able to staff right now. It's a very challenging environment to motivate, a challenging environment to kind of get folks to do what you want them to do. So I get the need. I get our desire as kind of firm owners to be able to make sure that we think we're doing the responsible thing by kind of outsourcing some of that work that we can't fulfill inside. But at the end of the day, we're really just kind of handing our problems off to others and they're experiencing the same challenges that we were.
With CaptureNow all that goes away because it is completely automated. It's a technology solution that answers the phone for you without the need for human interaction. One of the funniest things that we have with our clients now is that they'll call us just like they would a call center and say, "We're going to have a staff meeting on Friday, so you're going to see an increased amount of volume from us on Friday." And I always chuckle and say, "Okay, well we'll turn the knobs up to be able to handle a little bit more horsepower on Friday for you," but in reality we can handle 100,000 calls at the exact same time, capture all the information, insert it directly into your CRM, send a post-call text to the client or to the caller so that they know that their call's been handled appropriately. All of it's just done in an automatic fashion for the firm. It's really a fantastic, fantastic option.
Chris Dreyer:
That's incredible and I want to dig in more to that soon. I kind of want to circle back, one of the things we talked about was the missed calls, but the other one that just kills me as a consumer is when I call a restaurant, whether it's to make a reservation or what have you, and if it rings more than three or four times, I don't know if it's the DI personality in me, I just get super impatient and I'm just done. Right. I get frustrated. So talk to me about this other silent killer, just the ring time and how that plays into intake.
Chris O'Brien:
Yeah, absolutely, and that is the biggest thing. We're all impatient today. We all want immediacy. We all want to be able to have our needs met right away. The ideal implementation of CaptureNow of course is to give your staff the appropriate few rings to be able to answer that phone call. If they can't answer it, once you forward it to us, we answer it immediately. If you were to be working with an answering service, you need to build in ring time for them to be able to answer the call as well. So with that challenge of that kind of transferring and then giving them an allotted time to be able to do that, you really need to shrink your ability to be able to handle those calls initially.
What we see unfortunately a lot of times is that when you transfer your calls over to that answering service, they're not able to pick it up in the ample amount of ring time for you as I as consumers will disengage from that call and in many cases they never even let you know that call existed. So ideally if I get a missed call on my cell phone, I don't know who it is, many times I'll call that number back if it's not marked as a spam call. But you're not even having that opportunity to call those folks back because they're not transparent with you that they missed a call because they don't want to highlight the fact that they're not able to pick up the phone in time. So that's really, the killer to me isn't just the ring time, it's also the lack of transparency that you actually missed a phone call.
Chris Dreyer:
Sticking on that, the automatic, like not missing calls and just answering all of them. You mentioned like 100,000 at once. Have you seen, just the marketer in me has got to ask, Local Services Ads? For example, at the very top of Google, the best virtual real estate currently, their ranking factors are region, response, and reviews. Response from what I've seen working with our clients is if you miss calls trying to do Google screen Local Services Ads, it's just a graveyard. You're done. Have you seen clients that have worked with CaptureNow have an impact on the LSA perspective?
Chris O'Brien:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And there's a configuration that we set up with LSA specifically. A lot of our answers can be yes or no kind of responses from the caller and from an LSA standpoint, they like a little bit longer of answers and they like a little bit more dialogue back and forth. So for LSAs, if we know it's being utilized in that environment, we'll create more open-ended questions so that it creates more of a conversation flow which scores better from a Google perspective. Certainly the phone answering, we have that in spades, it just answers right away and they're able to kind of get a great score from that immediately. But as far as that conversation aspect of it, we kind of extend those questions to be able to get a better score from Google there as well. So very much from an LSA perspective, been a popular use case for us.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's say you have a Spanish speaker or different languages. Does CaptureNow recognize the different languages? Because your intake specialist, maybe they only speak English, maybe then they have to transfer to someone that speaks Spanish. How does that work?
Chris O'Brien:
Yeah. So we just have English and Spanish support. We do not have other languages right now, but exactly as you intend. If the person identifies themselves as a Spanish speaker, then they get the same experience just spoken in Spanish. The default is English of course, but definitely have Spanish-speaking support as well, but have not extended to other languages just yet. And truth be told, that's probably a further down the road option for us to add other language support.
Chris Dreyer:
Talk to me about the individual recognizes that it's AI. Are there individuals that have a bad experience? I can tell you when I'm on the Bank of America and I'm getting the prompts, sometimes they just feel never ending on the prompts and I end up after the third or fourth prompt, I'm like operator, operator, yelling it over and over. So tell me about the experience of just the consumer working with an AI.
Chris O'Brien:
Yeah, so first and foremost, I mean it's a great voice but we don't hide from the fact that it's AI. There's certainly some big businesses that I've called where it's almost like they're trying to kind of make it seem like it's a human and that's just not what we're doing. You definitely can tell it's AI. From a engagement perspective for new leads, it's a very kind of prescribed quick ability to be able to capture all the contacts, information, the case type they're calling about, and then the quick qualifying questions that you want to be able to have answered to make sure that this is a good lead or a bad lead and that flows very quickly. It takes about two minutes and we see the consumers engage tremendously through that process. It's basically the first step of engaging the law firm. So that has gone really well.
Where we also have a great experience now is with the existing clients. We released a caller IQ feature about six months ago, which basically is a tight integration into the firm's case management system. So if an inbound call comes in from a number, it looks at number up directly inside the case management system, identifies what role this person plays in regards to the firm. So is this an existing client? If it's an existing client, it would greet them by name based on the name that's inside of the case management system and then gives them a specific call experience based on their role. So as an example, if they're an existing client it would say, hi Chris, welcome back. Are you calling to receive an update on your case? Are you calling to provide us information about your case or would you like your case manager to call you back?
And so they have those three options. The total call takes about 25 seconds, so it's a great experience for the caller. It's not like they're getting a answering service where they're asking them to say their name and spell their name and say their last name and spell their last name. Really treating them like a stranger, keeping them on the line for four minutes and then still not kind of meeting their needs at the end of the call. Typically, the consumers, they want to talk to their case manager right away. If they can't talk to their case manager, they love the experience CaptureNow is giving them through the caller IQ.
Chris Dreyer:
I think when the technology answers by my name, I know that they have data on me, at least I feel more comforted like, okay, they're looking up my profile. Another thing is price. Right. So a few of the things that you mentioned, just in terms of these third party setups, they may charge per minute or per call and then you have varying levels, like you said, your client experience. How does pricing match up versus other solutions, whether they're outsourced or in-house?
Chris Obrien:
Yeah, so typically we end up being about 30% of what a traditional answering service would be. All of our calls are on a fixed price per call. It's a 1.95 per call through CaptureNow. There's no per minute charge. There's no charge for the whole time or anything along those lines. It's just a price per call. Very predictable, very easy, and again, you don't have to worry about those long calls that kind of get out of hand with a call agent and all of a sudden you getting build $30 for a simple phone call.
Chris Dreyer:
And then talk to me about application. Could it be an extension with a third party? Like say, hey, the first experience is CaptureNow and then live transfer to maybe a call center and then they're not dealing with the same amount of volume. Maybe they can prioritize it because they're not doing the vetting experience. Could that be a scenario where it could actually complement the third party?
Chris O'Brien:
Yeah, yeah, most definitely. So CaptureNow, it's very nimble in how you can set it up. I'll go through kind of the three most popular ways that we see it being utilized. First and foremost, the most popular way is as a backup to your existing staff. Actually the Capture, the now in CaptureNow stands for nights, overflow, and weekends. And that's how it is primarily set up. So we get turned on at nights, we get turned on for overflow during the day if your staff can't pick up the phone. And then of course on weekends. And so that's the primary way that we would see it. During the day, maybe you give your staff four rings or about 20 seconds to be able to pick up the phone. If they can't, then it hits CaptureNow to make sure that every call, of course is captured and handled.
And then on nights and weekends it would just ring directly to us. So when you leave the office, you forward your calls to the number that we provide and it rings directly to us. Another very popular way that we see it being utilized is during the day for existing clients. Again mentioning that staffing crunch that we have a lot of firms experiencing right now, they're, I'm sure you'll love to hear this as the marketer, they are prioritizing their intake calls to make sure that any new person that is trying to reach out to their firm, that they're able to handle themselves with a live voice in the office that can qualify and retain that client right away, which should be the gold standard for everybody doing intake.
So they are basically putting an IVR on the front end of CaptureNow that says, are you a new client? Are you an existing client? Are you calling about something else? If they identify themselves as a new client, that goes directly to their intake staff inside the firm. If they're an existing client, then that would go into the CaptureNow's caller IQ experience, which is able to capture that call, document the reason for the call, and then actually integrates those phone records directly into their case management system.
And then the third experience, as you said, is as a complete capture solution on the front end to make sure that every one of your calls gets captured and answered by CaptureNow and then based on certain factors within that call, we can then live transfer it to either your internal staff or to a third party call center that can then retain those clients for you. And we see that Chris, in environments where maybe a firm has a high lead volume, but a low qualification percentage, think of employment, something along those lines where they're going to get a lot of calls but they only maybe want three or 4% of those calls rather than having to staff up their own call center or staff up another call center to be able to handle those. CaptureNow gives them a very inexpensive way to get a look at the lead before they identify if they want to spend resources to be able to call those folks back or accept those live transfers.
Chris Dreyer:
I'm just putting myself in the shoes of a PI attorney in terms of the intake, like the in-house versus the AI. So on one hand maybe you could speak to the consistency of the consistent experience, but on the other hand, have you seen any situations from an EQ perspective or does the AI kind of mitigate the need for the same EQ because they know they're dealing with technology?
Chris O'Brien:
So it definitely eliminates that kind of emotional intelligent aspect of the calls. I'll tell you one thing, going back to my days of owning and operating the call center, it is amazing how call center reps almost, I'm not sure if they become numb or they're just numb people, but it's amazing that they could hear the most terrible emotional story and there's just dead pan, no reaction, no empathy, no anything. And it's almost like is this person alive kind of a thing. And you can try to train it into them, but it just doesn't work. Either the people have it or they don't. And I was shocked at just the lack of empathy that some individuals just have and call center can't control that. You can't train that into people. It's just who they are. That's really a hiring aspect.
Going back to our AI solution, we're not trying to fool people into believing that it's human. We do build in some empathy kind of statements, but they're really more transitionary statements than trying to elicit real empathy. We don't want to insult the intelligence of the caller by trying to make them think that this robot is then providing them empathy. So we'll build in some, sorry to hear that, but it's not with some deep rich emotion where we're really trying to empathize with that person. So largely it reduces kind of the need for that EQ.
Chris Dreyer:
Got it. Got it. So we've talked about kind of the setup, the pricing, some of the differences in consistencies and those missed calls and the wait time. Maybe you could talk to me about the post-call. So after the call is done, let's take it a couple different, let's say you have a qualified, how does the transfer work and then talk about just that post-call experience.
Chris O'Brien:
Yeah, so when we first launched the solution, it was very much phone answering and that's kind of what we came to market with. It answered the phone calls, it basically gave you a transcript. But as the product has evolved, it's really evolved largely into a technology automation solution as much as a phone answering solution. So going through really the two separate scenarios for you. Let's say it's a first time caller to your office calling about a new potential case. We're going to basically handle that call. When that call is handled, the questions that are asked based on each case type that is built into the system, those can have qualifiers or prioritization associated with those. So if they answer affirmatively or to injuries or to not being at fault, what have you, that can be set up where that call would be live transferred to any number that you designate.
It can get live transferred into your staff, to somebody's cell phone that's on call, or to a third party call center for them to be able to handle that call after we've kind of prioritized it or pre-qualified it for them. Once that call is done, of course it would complete that transfer to the other individual, but the caller would still receive a post-call text that would let them know that we have all their information and we've just transferred your call to a representative from the firm or however you want. It's customizable, but hitting them with that post-call text and to allow them to know that their call of course was handled. And then what the next step is, is critically important.
When firms aren't live transferring, what we see there a lot is that you'll send a simple V-card that says, we'll be calling you momentarily. Please download our V-card so that you'll know it's us when we're calling you back in just a few minutes. And that level of kind of post-call communication, we see freezes that caller, they don't look for that next number. They'll go ahead and give you five to 10 minutes to make sure that you call them back before calling another firm. There's still urgency. They're not going to give you a day or anything along those lines, but it does give you enough time to be able to adequately receive that transcript and then call those individuals back.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's say I'm a referral firm, either. Or I get a call that's out of my jurisdiction and I've got referral partners, maybe a state nearby. And on the live transfer perspective, sometimes there's like if there's not a web hook to the CRM, the live transfer occurs and it's basically starting the whole intake process over. Right. They get asked these redundant questions, it's not as good for the consumer and they just don't have a lot of information. Can the transfer, like say if I'm working with another firm that does, let's just say nursing home abuse and I don't do nursing home and I'm going to send it to Smith Clinesmith or a firm like that, did they get information and context around the call from the tech?
Chris O'Brien:
So not in the live transfer. The live transfer is just a live transfer that goes over to them. However, we do provide an email transcript that if that set up in your rules that you send all nursing home abuse to Smith Clinesmith, it would absolutely send a transcript of the call. Basically all the contact information, the case type, the questions and answers about the case type that that caller was presented with. They would get an email with that information so when they get that live transfer, they'd have a corresponding email that was available for them to look at. And then one thing I didn't mention is also we integrate all those new leads into whichever CRM the law firm is utilizing. So whatever they use for lead management, if it's a new lead that comes in, those are all through API, just integrated directly into that lead management system.
Chris Dreyer:
Excellent, excellent. So I'd say some of the CRMs, whether it's like a lead docket, would probably have hooks that could help with those transfers too.
Chris O'Brien:
Absolutely. Yeah, 100%.
Chris Dreyer:
AI is not as taboo as it was, right? Because you've got all these great technologies emerging. I guess what are the questions like for those listening that are a bit skeptical, like I don't want a robot answering my calls. What would you say to that?
Chris O'Brien:
A couple things here. One, first and foremost, when we launched the solution, it was AI and when we actually kind of backed away from that, and then two months after we launched the solution ChatGPT came out and AI became all the rage. So initially we were also a little bit tepid as saying, do we want to call it AI? But now it's become so highly accepted. From the standpoint of having an AI or essentially a voice bot be able to answer the calls, what I would tell you first and foremost is it's used in all experiences that we have with all other businesses that we're dealing with. You mentioned ordering pizza now. Even calling Domino's, you're getting an AI to be able to order your pizza at this point. Certainly your airlines, your hotels, credit cards, we're dealing with it everywhere. So from that standpoint, it's not a shock for a caller to be able to experience that.
What I would tell you is what's scary is the other end, and that's trusting these humans to be able to, one, pick up the phone, not say something silly on the phone to be able to pronounce the firm's name correctly, to not put the caller on hold, to not take what should be a 30-second call and make it into a five-minute call. That's where the real risk is with these firms. And the one thing that I would, going back a number of years, what we wanted to do as kind of a firm owner is to kind of trick the caller into believing whoever's answering the phone is actually still a representative or an employee of the law firm that they're calling.
At this point, that is a very scary assumption that I would want my clients to make. If I was working with an answering service, I would want them to disclose we are an answering service for the law firm. We are not an employer direct representative for the law firm because the calls are, some of them are really just kind of off the rails. And anybody that isn't listening to your calls, I would challenge you to listen to some of the calls that are being answered by your answering service. It's a challenging environment and it's not the representation that you'd want folks, new callers or existing clients to be receiving when they're calling your office.
Chris Dreyer:
I've experienced this. I have a few firms that did Lejeune tort and it's like they're on the phone for three hours, right, talking about their experience and their story and how it's impacted them. And if you're paying an in-house professional, I mean first of all, their utilization's done. Right. How many calls are they going to answer for the day and just the cost associated with that as opposed to, hey, I understand this is AI. I'm not going to tell AI and the software my life story, I'll give them the necessary information for the live transfer. And it kind of weeds through a lot of that.
Chris O'Brien:
Yep, absolutely. Like you said, utilization, it's a challenge and you want your reps to be compassionate, but you also need to be able to get off the phone and answer that next call.
Chris Dreyer:
Where can people go to learn more about CaptureNow and connect with you?
Chris O'Brien:
Yeah, just typical website CaptureNow.com. My email address is Chris@CaptureNow.com. Certainly would love to hear from anybody, do a demonstration, show them CaptureNow in action, let them experience it for themselves.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks to Chris for all this insights today. Let's hit the recap. Time for the takeaways. First up, capture every lead. Every marketing dollar you invest needs to deliver maximum return. Every call that goes unanswered is a double financial hit. Missed calls are literally missed opportunities and wasted ad spend. Consider a tool like CaptureNow to pick up any calls that falls through the cracks.
Chris O'Brien:
The killer to me isn't just the ring time, it's also the lack of transparency, that you actually missed a phone call.
Chris Dreyer:
Up next, stay consistent even as you scale. An amazing first impression is important and challenging, especially as your firm grows. Human agents can vary in professionalism and empathy and they have very real limits to the volume of calls they can handle during a spike. CaptureNow allows firms human capital to operate at its highest and best use. Intake staff can invest more time in each qualified lead while AI captures every call. User experience is consistent no matter how many calls come through.
Chris O'Brien:
One of the funniest things that we have with our clients now is that they'll call us just like they would a call center and say, "You're going to see an increased amount of volume from us on Friday." And I always talk and say, "Okay, well we'll turn the knobs up to be able to handle a little bit more horsepower on Friday for you." But in reality, we can handle 100,000 calls at the exact same time. It's just done in an automatic fashion.
Chris Dreyer:
And the final takeaway, eliminate call wait times completely. One of the biggest frustrations is having to wait to be heard. Increased customer wait time is a silent killer. It leads to missed opportunities and a poor client experience right from the start. With CaptureNow, call wait times becomes a thing of the past and our demand-led world eliminating call wait times is truly a differentiating advantage. While competitors let leads slip through the cracks, CaptureNow allows firms to consistently deliver a seamless, responsive experience that callers have to come to expect from a modern business.
Chris O'Brien:
We answer it immediately. If you were to be working with an answering service, you need to build in ring time for them to be able to answer the call as well.
Chris Dreyer:
All right everybody. That's it for today. I hope we added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Chris and CaptureNow head over to the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button. I'd sincerely appreciate it and I know you don't want to miss out on our next episode. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I'm out.
