Case Study - Creating a business management system

The Challenge
After our success with Chuck, the heavy industrial contractor, Answer-All wanted to develop the concept of managing an office through answering services. Then Karen,
a well respected corporate attorney, came to Answer-All with a problem. Karen recently left a white shoe law firm in Denver to branch out on her own. She wanted clients to see her as the same professional with the same capabilities as she had at her big law firm. Her worst fear was to be viewed as a sole practitioner without professional resources.
Karen thought that an answering service might be able to help by covering the phones when she was busy. But, Karen also was thinking about hiring someone, at least part time, to handle her paperwork. We saw an opportunity. We set up a meeting to better understand Karen’s communication needs.

What we found was a very good corporate attorney that had very little understanding
of how to properly organize an office. Typical of a lot of corporate orphans. Karen had several corporate clients. Each of them had several legal matters for her to work on.
We recognized that Karen was just as much a project manager as Chuck was in his construction business. Each of Karen’s projects had paperwork, faxes, and emails exchanged with clients and other attorneys. In addition, she had a lot of fifteen to thirty minute calls to clients that were billable – some of which were negotiating sessions.

The Solution
We started by giving Karen a Fax number. Karen decided to forward her current fax
to the new fax number. Her clients would never notice the change. Then we reviewed
all the current clients Karen had. She set up master folders for Karen on her computer, then put together sub folders that were part of each project. Karen quickly caught on
to the filing system for all faxes coming in.

Then we set up her voice mail phone system. Each caller could leave a message or
push a button to connect directly with Karen. When a caller wanted to connect with Karen, the system would ask who is calling, dial Karen, and announce to her who
was on the phone. If Karen didn’t want to handle the call at that moment, she could simply push a button to send the caller back to voice mail. And, finally, we programmed the voice mail so a caller could at his option, get a live receptionist in an emergency to make sure that the message would get to Karen as quickly as possible.

But, we weren't done. We showed Karen how easy it was to pick up her messages,
then push a button to call back the person who left the message. No looking up
numbers. And, Karen could record the calls if she wanted to. All of the messages
and recorded calls would be emailed to Karen’s email account. Then Karen could
listen, file, or delete any of the messages that came in. Another feature that would
prove useful for Karen was the ability to place calls though her voice mail system.
Her main benefit was to be able to record any call she wanted, have a record of
what was said and know the amount of time spent on the call. It was all filed in
her computer record keeping file system.

One final thing we did was to set up an appointment calendar for Karen. The calendar
is web based and specifically for Karen. We had to help Karen define the types of appointments she made – initial consultation, four different types of client meetings,
court appointments, visiting a client at his office etc. Each of these basic types of appointments were assigned a time allocation. Then, Karen could make appointments.
Or when a client called they could transfer directly to a receptionist to make, confirm or change an appointment for Karen. All of the appointments were in real time. Eventually Karen wanted us to have our receptionists confirm appointments the day before. Easily done, and this kept Karen from wasting valuable time waiting on a client who was not going to show.

The Result:
Karen became ecstatic. Now she had the appearance of a very large professional
law firm, a client record keeping system that tracked all the activity and the content
for each client and each client’s project. Best of all, her cost per month was
substantially under the cost of hiring a full time assistant. 

[Back to Case Studies Main Page]