Out here on the now frozen prairie just about any reasonably modern technology could be considered “new” – in my small town, most folks are still using dial-up and most of the “innovators” are looking at 256K DSL as being where the cutting edge starts – so, from my perspective, writing about new technology is a fairly broad topic.
Rather than present the 10,000 foot view of technology since the turn of the century (out here, that often feels like the turn of the 19th rather than the 21st), I thought I’d look at a couple of new technological additions to my practice – one that was a real winner right out of the box even if the idea is decades old and one that has real potential just as soon as I figure out how to leverage the information it gives me.
The something old that’s still relatively new to me is my virtual receptionist service – every year I learn new ways I can use this service to get more working hours out of each day. In 2011, I made the switch from an auto-attendant service (you know the old “you have reached the law firm of … please press 1 to …”) to a virtual receptionist service. I know, I know, big hairy deal it’s still just a way to manage that bog-standard, 20th century communication medium, the POTS (plain ol’ telephone service). The big deal that first year was that when I switched from an automated greeting, to an real human voice attached to an actual, thinking human being my hangup rate went from 50% to less than 2% – basically I doubled the number of potential clients I talked to over the course of a month. This last year found me developing scripts for my receptionist team so that they can field the simple questions – directions to my office, hours of operations, gathering basic contact information, and screening for solicitors. By trusting them to be smart enough to put a call through when a script is not appropriate, or when the caller was an actual client, I reduced the number times my train of thought got derailed each day and enjoyed an uptick in productivity.
As for the something so new that I’m really not sure how to categorize it, I give you Rexter. Rexter is a SaaS networking aggregator – which, as near as I can tell means that it is the love child of CRM, social media networking, and HAL-9000. Basically it takes information about your contacts from your social networking and e-mail activities and evaluates the “strength” of your contacts and recommends which contacts you should be reaching out to today, tomorrow, next week. The basic idea, in a nutshell, is that busy professionals make 1000’s of contacts, some are one-off things and others really bring in business – what Rexter does is help winnow out the moneymakers and reminds you when to check-in with them so you maintain “top of mind” awareness. The cool thing is that it does its magic without requiring huge user input – the biggest challenge is entering your contacts but if you use Outlook, LInkedIn, or Gmail, there’s a button for that – those of us who stubbornly maintain a imap or popd mail server will either have to enter things manually or finally succumb and join the rest of the corporate world. Once your contacts are in place, it is simply a matter of logging on to the web site and seeing who you should drop a line to today – or better still set your Rexter account up to automatically e-mail your call sheet to you.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.