Ted DeBettencourt:

We are not a chat company. We’re a company that’s going to get you 40% more leads. The way we do it just happens to be chat.

Chris Dreyer:

Sometimes the scripts, even though they’re human, they’re missing the EQ.

Ted DeBettencourt:

We do get them more leads than any type of generative AI. And I don’t even like calling it AI. It’s an if/then statement that you could literally build out on a spreadsheet. That’s what it is.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the elite legal marketing agency. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the legal industry. On these special Toolkit Tuesdays, 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. Now, this isn’t about selling you the latest software or getting kickbacks from affiliate links, it’s about bringing you the best so you can be the best for your firm, for your staff, for your clients, and for you. This is Toolkit Tuesday on PIM, your weekly guide to staying sharp in the legal world. Let’s get started. To get clients, speed is everything. Individuals on Google are shopping around and a 24-hour response time won’t cut it. Not 12 hours, not two hours, not even two minutes.

Ted DeBettencourt:

If we take more than 15 seconds to reply to a chat, we’ve already lost 20% of the chatters. Once we hit 30 seconds, we’re down to about 50%.

Chris Dreyer:

Chat is a great way to ramp up the number of cases coming into your firm. It can reduce friction and increase velocity. I know I’d rather skip that phone call and go straight to an instantaneous chat, but as Ted DeBettencourt shares with us today, not all chat services are created equal. Truth is most big chat companies use rigid scripts without much personalization. The low EQ can be frustrating for users. Ted co-founded Juvo Leads. It’s a boutique human powered lead gen company that serves over 1100 firms across the nation. They custom train real people can go off script and tailor the conversations to the firm’s needs. Ted explains how instant responses will grow your practice, the importance of iteration and why you got to follow up. Here’s Ted DeBettencourt, co-founder of Juvo Leads.

Ted DeBettencourt:

I was big on the debate team in undergrad at Providence College in Rhode Island. I thought the natural progression for that was to go to law school. After my first year taking a few writing classes, my writing professor said, “I don’t really think this is for you.” And I didn’t really like what I was doing on the law side, so it was only another two more years to get an MBA. They had a joint program. So I said, “All right, well I might as well keep getting the JD as well, but let me really focus on the business side.” So I left with both in three years and went right into business right after school.

Chris Dreyer:

So when was it that you met your partner, Nick? I think it was around 2012, 2013. How did that go about? How did you guys link up?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Sure. I had a small marketing agency. Weren’t very big. We had about 10 clients in the Boston area, mostly working with lawyers. Had a few home services, cosmetic dermatology. Sites like that. On the lead gen side. So we work in a work bar, so these were conflicting co-working spaces. So we used to always sneak over to each other’s free beer events after work and just hang out. And we were talking about problems I was having with my clients and that at the time was the chat product. We were trying all these different chat solutions for my clients and I kept trying to make changes to them, but they wouldn’t make any changes no matter what I’d said they would give me lip service, said, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll make these changes.” But they wouldn’t do it.

So eventually we got fed up and created a software platform so I could answer my own client’s chats. I just started with my five or 10 answering their own chats and quickly find out, that was pretty hard work and chats would come in 24/7, so the first month would literally get pinged at 2:00 AM and have to get up and answer chats, which was not fun. Hired a few people just on the agency side to answer chats and then realized we got really good at it. So we started to get a lot more chats and optimizing and getting more leads and where we’re getting using their now competitors. So we basically turned it into a company. So it was just a little software that he helped me with. We turned it into a company. Now we’re on around 1100 sites around the country.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s talk about in the legal vertical specific, we’ve got Ngage, we got Apex, we got Intaker, we got a number of these chats providers. How is Juvo Leads unique compared to these other providers?

Ted DeBettencourt:

I’m punching up so I can talk about Ngage. They’re owned by internet brands. This billion-dollar company, they claim to have 10,000-ish sites they work with. When we started, we built ourselves to compete with Ngage. So we do a lot of things different than them. So first off, there’s a lot of technical features, but essentially what it comes down to is when you use us versus an Ngage versus Apex, you’re going to get more leads and you’re going to have better conversations.

70% of all of our biggest clients are former Ngage or Apex users. We basically go to them and say, “Hey, try us free for 30 days because we could lead with a 30-day free trial. See how you like the conversation, see how many more leads you get.” 95% of people that tries us for the free trial stick with us. After all of our biggest firms, and I’m talking like 5, 6, 700 leads per month are saying, “Conversation’s a lot better and we’re getting a lot better leads.” So at the end of the day, our performance outstrips. We have a lot of features that we have that they don’t have. We iterate on a monthly basis. They’ve been the same programme for the past 15, 20 years, I don’t know about 10, 15 years now.

Chris Dreyer:

So a few things. So I’m very versed with all of these because we’ve had a number of clients use Ngage, Apex and just different providers. And the first what we were referring to guys is Conrad Sam put out an article that I think you guys should Google about Ngage selling leads. So if you have some spare time, read that. I don’t know how true or untrue that is. Having said that, it’s really looking like it was true that they were selling leads that weren’t accepted, so not a good business practice and a lot of trust lost there. The one thing that I’ve seen on Ngage and Apex is the scripts. Sometimes the scripts, even though they’re human, they’re missing the EQ. It’s like this person’s having the worst time of their life and there’s just a lack of EQ. It’s just a systematic robotic, they’re asking the questions. Is that one of the differentiators where, “Hey, you’re training your intake specialists on eq”? What makes your human powered intake stand out above those and get these extra conversations? Is it the training?

Ted DeBettencourt:

A little bit. Every chat that we have is manually reviewed and we score on a 10 point scale and our agents are hired, fired, promoted, demoted based on their biweekly chat score. So we pay a lot of attention to that. The other thing that for us is, and we pay double literally, we pay literally double what Ngage pays their agents. Ngage agents wouldn’t get hired by our company. They’re not qualified enough. So that’s on the operation side. But the other thing that we do differently when we work with a firm, we’re not just going to use a template chat script. We work with them to find out what leads they want, what leads they don’t want. So we’re not going to ask the dog bite case the same questions that we asked the car accident case. If we say, where did the accident occur and it was a slip and fall or it was a dog bite, it’s a little bit awkward. Those low EQ moments, emotional intelligence is what you’re referring to there. But the big differentiator between all human power chats is what happens when you go off script.

So what happens when they start asking questions that don’t really fall in line or this person starts really pressing like, “Hey, I just need the answer to this question.” That’s where we excel. So the proof in the pudding for us is when we’re live with the client for three or four months down the road and we check in every few months and just say, “How are things going?” Usually after the first 30 days and then periodically from there. And the most common response that I get, and it’s always pretty funny, is “Ted, I’m used to having a lot more feedback here and sending a lot of leads over because we didn’t like them.” We’re not having those conversations anymore because we’re happy with what we’re getting. So usually our check-ins are, “Hey, everything’s good.” And then they laugh and they say, “This wasn’t the way when we use our old chat provider.” Be it any of the two companies you’re talking about before.

Chris Dreyer:

Have you noticed that have an impact on things like reviews? Because some of our clients will get a negative review because of just the intake. Have you seen it transfer into potentially mitigating the reviews? And then as a totally separate question, how do you handle the referral situations when the firm doesn’t do that type of law?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Sure. Two things. One, we’ve been around about seven years now, I’ve never heard, we’ve never had a law firm complain and getting a negative review because of a chat interaction. So we’ve never had that and we’re doing thousands of chats a day. It’s never occurred. I’m not saying it couldn’t, but it hasn’t today. How do we handle chat? We never send leads from one firm to another firm. We don’t do that. We don’t think it’s ethically right, and I’m not even quite sure if it’s legally okay to do, but we would never do that.

So how we work with firms is we say, tell us what you want us to do with the leads that don’t fit the criteria that matches for a good lead. By default, we say they’re in our system, but we don’t send them to them. But maybe we’ll work with a firm that says, “Hey Ted, we do PI, but my cousin’s firm down the road does family law. So if they want us to, we can send the family law leads to them to forward along and we wouldn’t charge for those. But if they want us to not even send them at all, we wouldn’t. But we can’t even send across firms if they ask us to.

Chris Dreyer:

Got it. Got it. Makes sense. What makes human chat better than AI? Because there’s costs involved and where do you stack up? Do you have case studies, say against a Drift or an Intaker of Juvo versus these individuals?

Ted DeBettencourt:

I put Drift and Intercom more in kind of like the DIY chat. They have some basic if/then statements that you can run, but it really, Drift and Intercom are good when you have someone answering around the clock fast. We don’t really see that with a lot of the firms we’re using. We bump into Intaker on a lot of the smaller firms. They are a lot cheaper than us and they’re a lot cheaper than human powered because it’s a software tool. It’s a pretty cool software and I like using it. It doesn’t get you as many raw leads. Our angle as a company is we’re not a chat company. We’re a company that’s going to get you 40% more leads. The way we do it just happens to be chat because when we put chat on a website, we give everyone that free 30 day trial, if they’re not using chat before us, we show them they’re getting more leads, generally 45 to 50% more leads, as soon as you put human powered chat on it.

The key to chat, it’s a very simple game, say the right things, but more importantly, when someone asks a question, say it fast. If we take more than 15 seconds to reply to a chat, we’ve already lost 20% of the chatters. Once we hit 30 seconds, we’re down to about 50%. So for us, the name of the game is answer it Fast with a person by saying the right thing. So for us, it’s all about timeliness to reaction. Speaking of Intaker specifically, what we do there is we give anyone a free 30-day trial. We go back and forth with clients with them. Usually when the clients use us, they see about 40% more leads.

But we’ve had clients that we’ve gotten a hundred percent more leads for, mainly because we can take that lead a little bit further. So we have a client that we’re working on with now in California, they were using Intaker or they came to us, we’re actually booking appointments on five different people’s calendar, so you can’t do that based on the rules and what they say in the chat. So it’s an insurance firm. They have five or six different types of insurance. We’ll literally book a consult on the attorney’s calendar based on how the chat goes and what they say. So it’s a little bit more nuanced in most of our chats, but that’s a level of complication that you can’t do with a bot chat currently.

Chris Dreyer:

Got it. Got it. On the human versus AI, when I think of AI, I like to break it up into two. The first, the generative, which would be like the ChatGPT, where they’re formulating a response, it’s pulling from original information versus it’s the if/then so to speak, it’s the question choose option one, two or three, and then based upon your response, it’s the if/then it’s the logic based automation. That’s traditionally what a lot of CRMs and project management tools and things like that use very effectively. When we’re looking at this, my question has always been the time component and take a simply convert for mass torts. Stream volume. Sometimes these victims are sharing their life story and you don’t want to rush them off the phone and they even do the entire case sign up. So is Juvo Leads more effective for the single event, the car auto, or do you also test it against torts? Where do you stack up and where does Juvo Leads excel?

Ted DeBettencourt:

To date, most of our clients are in the single event car accident. We’re not just PI. So our second-biggest vertical, oddly enough, is bankruptcy. We’re huge in bankruptcy. We can show like 60% more leads when you put chat on versus not chat. In terms of mass torts, we have success there. It can cost more money than a SimplyConvert. The difference between us and a lot of the other chat companies, especially like a SimplyConvert, is we’ll set up custom questions for each mass tort, so if a firm’s running five or six, 10, we create custom chats scripts for each one of those custom qualification questions. So we can really customize it that way. But we do cost a little bit more than a SimplyConvert because it’s a person there. On the flip side, we do get them more leads than any type of generative AI. And I don’t even like calling it AI. It’s an if/then statement that you could literally build out on a spreadsheet. That’s what it is.

Chris Dreyer:

Right? I would agree with that. Typically, what I see is I see the Human and the oldest versions that have been engaged in impacts and you’ve kind shown where you are better trained, more effective in going off script, off the cuff, and then you have your intaker and SimplyConvert, which is the if then type AI. Where does… Everyone’s next question. I haven’t seen it, I’m sure someone’s trying to build it. Where does ChatGPT-

Ted DeBettencourt:

Everyone’s trying to build it.

Chris Dreyer:

Everyone’s trying to build it. Where does this fit in?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Sure. So right now, and we’re looking into it as much as everybody else’s. If Ngage and Apex aren’t and everybody else isn’t there, they’re doing themselves a disservice. So where it is currently is you can tap into the API, but you can’t make it… There’s two components to what we need to be able to do. We have to make it insensible and limitable. So right now you can’t do that, meaning I can’t create an individual instance for a particular client and train it using the data that we have based on that client experience. And by limiting, I mean we have to say, if someone comes in and starts talking about the Smurfs. I don’t know. Random reference. NBA TV, you can’t talk to them about the NBA game. You have to only bring the conversation back to the law firm. So you can’t do that. You can’t currently train ChatGPT to make it insensible or limitable for an individual account.

But then as soon as we can do it, then it’s going to be a race to be able to upload data. So it’s going to come down to who has the best data, historically on how to successfully answer chats for that law firm using the criteria that they provide. So it’s going to be an arms race to the data. Thankfully for our existing clients, we have a lot of legacy data knowing how they want us to answer chats, what people say and how we should answer based on that. So then it’s just going to be an arms race to upload that data and program it and customize it based on the data you have. So it’s going to be one of the human power chat companies. We’ll figure that out. Hopefully we’re the first ones. We’re already queuing our data and setting it up so that we can upload it to if not ChatGPT, the next version of it.

Chris Dreyer:

Amazing, amazing. We got lead tracking. Let’s talk about lead tracking and how that functions, and then let’s move over to integrations after that.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Aside from me and the chat provider, when I was starting, I was using CallRail, call tracking metrics for my clients. As an agency owner, they would just tell me, “Ted, make the phone ring.” And no matter how much I’d make the phone ring it, you needed to show how much the phone was ringing. So I used those two softwares and they’re still the biggest players in the space. So we quickly realized that call tracking is a pretty easy thing to build. We built the core of our call tracking in about two weeks. We’re built off the same backbone that CallRail is. It’s a company called Twilio. We also use another company called Bandwidth. A lot of people are in that space now.

It’s a very simple software. CallRail keeps getting more and more expensive. So if you were to sign up today, I think it’s like a hundred bucks a month. Our flip side is we offer call tracking for free. A lot of our clients like our call tracking because of the cost. Can’t beat free, and we give them free call tracking if they use us for chat, and we do all the same things that CallRail does. We’re not an IVR system, but we have call recording. We show you the source of the calls. And then we also, for clients that want to use our dashboard, we can track all their forms as well. A lot of our bigger clients, we just pass that data right to their CRM, HubSpot, Clio, whatever it is. But for the other ones, for our smaller clients, they log into our dashboard and see all their leads in one place.

Chris Dreyer:

Let’s talk about that dashboard. So does that pull in analytics and all the different granular attributions, or is it more just the lead and case type information?

Ted DeBettencourt:

We call it a lead dashboard. So it’s not, there’s a lot of people building dashboards for all different things. We’re very simple. Your chat leads are in there, your phone calls are in there, and your forms are in there. There’s no third party data. It’s all our data. A lot of our bigger firms, they say, “Hey, Ted, pass it to our existing systems.” So we want to work within your systems if you have them, but if not, you can use ours as a default.

Chris Dreyer:

And I would say that information at high levels the best information because a lot of times, many professional services agencies are going to give you a lot of smoke and mirrors with ranked tracking and visitors. When it doesn’t really contribute to anything, it’s like, “Oh, congratulations. You ranked number one for this phrase that doesn’t drive any traffic.” On the integrations, are we talking integrations to Litify? Filevine?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Filevine, yep.

Chris Dreyer:

Are we talking about a Lead Docket?

Ted DeBettencourt:

They’re part of Filevine, I think. We passed right to all the major CRMs. The only integration we ever couldn’t do and us nor anybody else, is the original Needles, which is not neo.

Chris Dreyer:

That’s cool. I’ve seen that one.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah, it’s a behemoth of a platform, but that’s the only one we haven’t been able to pass to.

Chris Dreyer:

Is there anything else you guys are working on?

Ted DeBettencourt:

So the new module that we’ve been kicking behind with is something we’re calling loss lead follow up. Essentially how it works is if a call comes into a firm and it’s either under a minute or it hits voicemail, we send a text message to that caller. One time. It’s a robot. It’s automatic. Simple, short message. “Hi, this is Amy from the name of your firm. Sorry I missed your call. Are you looking for help with X, Y, Z?” As soon as they reply, my human power chat agents take over. So we’re able to save a lot of nights and weekends calls, calls that come in after hours, calls that come in that the firm just doesn’t answer for whatever reason. We’re taking those missed calls and turning them into qualified leads for the firm. For a lot of the smaller firms or even firms that don’t really have the phone answering side locked in, we’re able to get them another 20, 30% of leads that they’re missing.

Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, that sounds significant. And that’s the first time I’ve heard of a chat doing that, so that’s amazing.

Ted DeBettencourt:

Yeah, we’re the only ones doing it.

Chris Dreyer:

A lot of revenue, a lot of revenue there. How can individuals get in touch with you and what’s next?

Ted DeBettencourt:

Awesome. Yeah, if you’re interested in finding up more, come to juvoleads.com. That’s J-U-V-O L-E-A-D S .com and chat with us or sign up for a free 30-day trial, and we’d be happy to show you how effective we are for your firm.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much Toted for sharing his insights on velocity and lead acquisition. Let’s get over to the takeaways, speed to lead. Add a chat widget to your website to allow prospective clients to get instant answers to their questions. Set up customized chat flows to get clients to the right attorney or referral partner.

Ted DeBettencourt:

So for us, the name of the game is answer it fast with a person by saying the right thing.

Chris Dreyer:

Learn from every interaction, regular review conversations between intake and your clients. Modify your scripts accordingly, or hire an agency to tackle it for you. But remember, chat needs to mirror the quality of customer service at your firm.

Ted DeBettencourt:

We have a lot of features that we have that they don’t have. We iterate on a monthly basis. They’ve been the same program for the past 15, 20 years.

Chris Dreyer:

Follow up, every single lead that comes to you has a cost. Don’t throw that money away after one call. If your outbound team gets a voicemail, reach out again. Your clients might not like the calls, that’s okay. Meet the clients where they feel comfortable, text them and do it quickly while your firm is still top of mind.

Ted DeBettencourt:

If a call comes into a firm and it’s either under a minute or it hits voicemail, we send a text message to that caller one time. It’s a robot. It’s automatic. Simple, short message. “Hi, this is Amy from the name of your firm. Sorry I missed your call. Are you looking for help with X, Y, Z?”

Chris Dreyer:

All right, everybody, I hope you added a few more tools to your kit. For more about Ted, head over to the show notes. While you’re there, leave me a five star review. I’ll be forever grateful. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. Catch you next time. I’m out.