Ruby Receptionist is a gateway drug. It makes you feel so good that you move on to the hard stuff.
Ruby Receptionist is an answering service (keep reading for a bargain). It answers your phone. But—and this is important—the service doesn’t screw it up. Historically, answering services have been a disaster.
Answering services aren’t exactly a new type of business service. My father used one for his practice in the 1960s. But answering services have traditionally suffered from poor service. They hired low-wage employees, shoved them on the phone without any training, and hoped for the best.
In the old days, answering services were a quick way to do three things:
- lose a prospective client due to rudeness,
- lose track of someone due to wrong number errors in the message-taking process, and
- get error-filled information as a result of trusting the accuracy of messages gathered by the operator.
Answering services ended up with a much-deserved bad reputation. Lawyers were afraid to continue using them because of the havoc they wreaked and the damage they were capable of doing. After all, being on the front line, speaking directly to clients, is where the big mistakes are made. Answering services were right up front, where it matters, and they consistently failed to deliver.
The New Virtual Receptionist on the Block
Until, one day, along came Ruby Receptionist. Suddenly, there was a phone-answering, message-taking service that didn’t screw up. It didn’t make mistakes, and it didn’t alienate and annoy clients.
In fact, it did more than not annoy clients.
Ruby Receptionist made clients happy. The service was so nice that clients arriving at the office would say things like, “I loved talking to your receptionist. She made me feel so much better.” It took me a while to realize what they meant and what they were talking about. I had the whole cognitive dissonance thing going when I realized they were talking about our answering service “experiment.”
And that’s when we went all in. That’s when we stopped experimenting with Ruby, and we abandoned our in-house effort to answer the phone. We let Ruby Receptionist take care of every caller who wants to speak to a human. Why? Because Ruby Receptionist has been able to do it better for us than we could do it ourselves.
And that’s part of why I say Ruby Receptionist is a gateway drug. Using the service a little turns into using it a lot. It’s that good, and these receptionists don’t ask for sick days, holidays, and health insurance. They get the job done, and we continue to get compliments from clients about the way we answer the phone.
But there’s another reason Ruby Receptionist is a gateway drug. Using these virtual receptionists leads to more and more outsourcing of tasks, projects, and responsibilities. Ruby helps you build trust as you come to understand that it’s possible for an outside partner to handle sensitive, important pieces of your business without damaging your lawyer/client bond. With each client call, Ruby demonstrates that you can let go of some responsibilities and use your time to maximize your personal value.
Ruby Receptionist helped us appreciate the value of outsourcing bookkeeping, paralegal tasks, document management, technology support, marketing projects, legal research, document drafting, etc. Once you’ve see the effectiveness of one outsource partner, you realize the potential for outsourcing many other aspects of your practice.
Ruby Receptionist really is a gateway drug.
Why Outsourcing Matters
It’s not simply about freeing up your time. It’s not simply about finding subject matter experts who have optimized their systems for solving your problems. It’s not simply about having someone else who’s incentivized to manage the problem to a successful solution.
Outsourcing allows you to achieve an even bigger objective.
Outsourcing is a key approach to achieving variable costs.
Variable costs: that’s why outsourcing is critical to our practice. We want our expenses to rise and fall with our revenue. We want the expenses to go up in a good month and down in a bad month. That way, by not suffering the obligation of a big monthly nut, we still make a profit even in a bad month. By achieving variability, we end up profitable in good months and bad. For us, Ruby Receptionist was one of the early windows into the idea that we could reduce the stress and anxiety of the ups and downs of the business.
For us, outsourcing has been an essential part of achieving our vision of a law practice that’s healthy and that allows our team to live the lives they aspire to live. Outsourcing enables us to keep the team small, reduce the management headaches and responsibilities, and minimize stress so that it’s much more manageable.
P.S. When I mentioned to Ruby Receptionist that I planned to write this post, Ruby offered us something valuable to pass along to you and make it more affordable and easier to give outsourcing a try. Ruby is giving us free activation (that’s worth $95) plus $100 off the first bill (act quickly, because this is time limited). Check out the details here. Get started with Ruby Receptionist, and find out whether this gateway drug turns you into a full-blown outsourcing addict. It happened to me.
