Can Lawyers Use Messengers and Chatbots To Convert More Leads

Question

I’m thinking of using a messenger-bot for people who interact with my Facebook page. Do you have any tips for converting leads into clients using a chatbot?

Answer and Advice

I’m a personal injury lawyer. I was actually having a conversation with Seth Price about this today on my podcast talking about chatbots. The technology isn’t quite there yet to replace an actual person.

We have a free chat service that we give to our clients. We also let lawyers use it. It’s a free chat box that goes on your website and it’s monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week but it’s a real person. The only goal that the people running that chat box have is to qualify the lead. We need to make sure that they’re in the correct geographical area, that they’re the right practice area and that they (if it’s a criminal defense case) have been arrested or (if it’s a personal injury case) that they have been injured. Then after they have qualified the lead, their only job is to get their contact information and pass that information off to the lawyer.

You could kind of do that with a chatbot. I guess you could ask, like “what’s your name” and “have you been injured”? I think the AI isn’t there yet.

We’re doing it right now with a diminished value campaign and we’re actually doing it in the form of a quiz but that’s essentially what chatbots are. Chatbots are basically quizzes and depending on the answers, you get a certain output. We’re doing one right now with a diminished value campaign in Indiana. The basic idea is that we’re trying to get these property damage cases. The lawyer doesn’t actually want to handle the property damage cases, but the idea is that there’s probably injury leads in there and he’s correct because we have gotten a few cases out of it.

What happens is they go to this page and it asks were you in a car accident within the last two years? Was the accident your fault? Was the vehicle leased? Do you still have the vehicle? Then they ask if they were injured. Depending on the answers, they are either sent a message that says, “I’m sorry you don’t qualify for diminished value” or they’re sent a free cheatsheet that teaches them how to claim diminished value. If they mentioned that they were injured they are taken to a page that says “You may be entitled to compensation for lost wages, pain and suffering, medical bills and more. Enter your information and an attorney will contact you.”

The outcome of these cases depends on the answers the people provide to the questions. What we don’t want to do is send the attorney all these leads of people that qualify for diminished value but were not injured or even worse don’t qualify for diminished value and we’re not injured and make it so that the attorney has to deal with all those.

That’s one way that we could do it, but I don’t know. Facebook is using a messenger-bot right now. When you try to contact Facebook support they’re using a messenger-bot and it doesn’t work that great. My thinking is that if Facebook can’t get it right with the billions of dollars that they have I’m not going to be able to get it right. I don’t really mess with it yet. I’m going to wait until the technology catches up a little bit before I start using bots. I use bots for my intake stuff, for people that have already bought stuff for me but the leads are too valuable for personal injury lawyers where I wouldn’t risk that with a bot. I would make sure they have a real person handling those.