Client Case Study with The Millar Law Firm

Rather read it instead? Here’s the video transcript:

INTRODUCTION:

In today’s video, I’m going to be talking with Jonathan Goudy from The Millar Law Firm.

They are a personal injury law firm based in Atlanta, Georgia, in the USA.

The Millar Law Firm has been using Melu’s human live chat service since October 2020, primarily for lead generation.

It’s been hugely successful, so let’s get into it and hear about Jonathan’s experience.

Lee: Hey, well thank you for coming. It’d be really good to hear about how you have found Melu. What’s the service been like for your business, how did you find us originally, and why did you find us? What was it you needed and why did you come look for us in the first place?

Jonathan: That’s a good question. So around October 2020, we decided that we wanted to find a new chat vendor because we were realising that the chat vendors that we’ve used in the past and the current one we were using did not have English-speaking chat agents, which is it’s fine for the most degree, but when your audience and the people coming to your website only speak English and they’re chatting, they’re communicating with somebody that doesn’t speak English, there’s a lot of reliance on templates.

And we noticed a lot of significant errors that were in these chat conversations that were frustrating our users to the point where users would leave our website completely angry and not wanting anything to do with our business.

And so we decided to go on the hunt. We were like, “Let’s go look for a better chat company that has primary English speakers as chat agents.” We literally looked at 50 different chat vendors around the world, and that’s typically anytime we go hunting for a new vendor, we look at as many as possible. We don’t just look at 5 or 10 only. So yeah, and you guys in Oxford, UK we were looking at English-speaking chat companies in United Kingdom and you guys were one that really popped out and I think actually the only one that popped out.

But out of all the companies that we interviewed, and met with, you guys were the only ones that had English-speaking only chat agents. And, so that was just the intro, obviously there’s more to chat than just speaking the same language. But what we noticed though was because you’re not a massive chat company, you’re more of a smaller chat company that your agents became really familiar with our business and then it was as if like they were able to, it’s as if they’re like pretty much employees responding to our users on our website. And that was huge because, it’s kind of like we have internal employees responding to people on our website at midnight or 3:00 AM or 6:00 PM, whenever we’re out of the office and even when we’re in the office and we’re busy.

So that’s when we kind of really fell in love with Melu and it’s really cool. The one thing I really love about Melu too is, they’re not intrusive. You guys aren’t intrusive about getting our users to chat and you definitely, the conversion rate is definitely really high, but you’re not blocking our phone number you’re not blocking other channels of conversion that other chat agencies would do in the past.

And that was another big point as we started to realise the chats were way more authentic, whereas a user who wants to call will still see our call button will call us and will not be forced to chat us.

We also noticed a couple other things with Melu that I really liked. The one thing that we really loved is that because you guys don’t charge per chat [Jonathan meant to say ‘lead*’, not ‘chat’], we realised we weren’t getting fake chats anymore. That all the chats were actually real people. And that was huge. Some companies we’ve questioned the integrity of the chat conversations if this was a bot or if this was a competitor or if this was maybe even someone hired within the chat company. And we know the internet has a lot of fake things on it and so you don’t know if it’s a bot chatting. And we would get charged for that chat [lead] and we would try to petition it, they wouldn’t care. So with you guys, you know, there’s no “we’re going to charge you per chat [lead]” which is really kind of unique for the industry.

* Most companies in the US charge per lead.

And so we noticed all of our chats coming in after we hired you guys were very authentic real people and there was nothing unethical about it. So, it was really impressive and it just spoke volumes.

And the other main thing hat I love too is, it’s like the first time I could go on our website and I can actually start chatting. I could be like, “Hey, this is Jonathan from the marketing department, how’s everything going?” and then you, the team out in Oxford will actually know like, “Oh hey, how are you?”. And actually have a real conversation with me. I could even say like, “Hey, can you send this to Lee?” and they will send that message to Lee. So that’s very unusual. That’s difficult to find.

Like, again, most of these companies if you start chatting like that, they’ll start throwing up these templates because they don’t know the English language. So again, it’s like, it’s kind of everything we were looking for with a chat company is, kind of Melu hit all the spots. So yeah, it took a lot of diving. We’re not in the UK so we had to search other countries and it’s been great. So yeah.

Lee: That’s great. Well that’s really good to hear. And I think the fact you mentioned a couple of key points I could pull out from there is the whole fact that it’s casting your net wider. The live chat isn’t going to replace people making phone calls. It’s not even going to replace people filling in any kind of lead forms that you have on your website either.

Jonathan: Correct.

Lee: It’s just another way for people to connect with you in a way that suits them rather than it kind of being forced that they have to only do it by phone or email or whatever.

Jonathan: Yeah. So again, there’s a lot of components to a website and there are some chat companies that have got, they got really good at creating a popup and creating a popup banner, dropdown banner over the header, side pop outs. And that’s great if all you want is people to chat, but getting people to call actually for our field, our industry, the phone call actually tends to result in the highest conversion to a case because the person’s able to talk with an attorney.

Lee: Sure.

Jonathan: And, so we don’t want to disrupt or block that, but again some of these other chat companies, they’ll obsess over conversion and they’ll even say, “Well yeah, we have Filipino speakers chatting with your your potential clients, but our conversion’s way higher.” And I’m like, “Well actually no, our phone conversion’s way lower because you’re blocking our phone number.” Or, in some of the instances we noticed that, well yeah, your conversion’s way higher because you’re charging us for all the bots that are chatting with us. Or stuff like that.

Lee: Yeah.

Jonathan: So yeah, I mean, when we signed up with Melu, we actually did compare a lot of data because we look at everything really closely. We’re like, okay, how many chats are we getting per month with this company compared to Melu? And, Melu is maybe a little bit lower, they were a little bit lower than a few of the other companies, but we noticed that our case conversion rate was higher and that’s because we were getting actual real people as the chat’s coming in and we weren’t getting a bunch of bots, so.

Lee: Sure.

Jonathan: That’s pretty big. It’s not always about like, well, we got a hundred chats with you and we got 89 chats with with Melu so we need to hire you because your chat stands out better. But actually while we signed 10 cases with Melu and we only signed five cases with this guy, there’s a matter of like, were the chats, the a hundred chats really authentic? Were they real?

Lee: Yeah.

Jonathan: So, and yeah, so there’s that that we pay attention to.

Lee: Excellent. Yeah. And obviously with the phone calls being so important that’s the main thing that we are doing by our live chat is to get someone so that they can speak to an attorney. So even though we can’t help them necessarily with their exact question on the live chat we can then take their details, get them through so that someone in your intake team can literally get back to them straight away.

And it’s that speed and efficiency of that, because maybe they don’t want to call at that time but they want to get into the process of someone calling them as soon as possible.

Jonathan: So there’s the speed and the efficiency, that has been really impressive by Melu. I definitely would agree with that. But I would also say like when you start chatting someone on a website, you want to know that that’s a real person and that’s a real person that understands your request. And that’s where Melu really hits it out of the ballpark.

And especially we have a lot of articles, educational articles on our website about laws in the state of Georgia and we have people that will come and they’ll ask really complex questions to the chat agents at Melu and we’ve been so impressed because Melu will be able to have a real conversation with the user and why they’re asking that question. Whereas, you can’t just build a template for every single question that a person’s going to ask on your website.

And that’s what would happen when you have a Filipino or somebody that speaks primarily Spanish, chatting. They can’t just rely on a template if the question is completely different than what’s on a, you just can’t build a question for every single, sorry, you can’t build a template for every question.

Lee: Yeah. You need that human element, that common sense as to what this is about and what the person wants. And you can only do that with people.

Jonathan: Correct. Yeah.

Lee: Obviously, natively English-speaking people as well.

Jonathan: Yeah. And to be honest, if you have Spanish-speaking, if you have your primary audience is Spanish speakers, then hire a Spanish-speaking chat company. If your primary audience is Filipinos, hire a Filipino chat company. Our primary audience is English-speaking they don’t speak any other language. And, so we really wanted to find an English-speaking company and it’s nothing racist, it’s just this is communication, which is a big part of marketing. We’re trying to communicate with our users very effectively.

And so we would go to chat companies and we would be like, “Okay, can you tell us where your chat agents are?”, and a lot of them would come up with a blanket statement. They’re like, well we’re headquartered in New York. Okay, but where are your chat? Are your chat agents in New York? And they’d say, “Well, we can’t answer that question.” I’m like, “Well, why can’t you answer that question? It’s a really simple question.”

Melu was really honest with us. Yes, they’re in the office certain times sometime, in fact I think they’re in the office most of the time when you guys hired us. But the pandemic obviously changed the dynamic of things. So, yeah having an honest chat company that’s not going to lie to you, that’s not going to try to hide the fact that their agents are getting paid $1 per hour, so stuff like that.

Lee: Absolutely. Yeah. And so that’s fantastic feedback. Thank you so much for that, Jonathan. One more quick question, and this is kind of aimed at anyone who’s watching this, who’s based in the US like you are, how have you found the process of working with a company that is across the pond as it were, on a different time zone in a different country? Because I’m sure, I mean we have quite a few clients in the US now but it’d be great to get more and I’m sure some of them might think, “well how can we work with a company in the UK when they’re five or six hours ahead of us?” Is that going to work?

Jonathan: I’ve always said this because you guys are out of Oxford. I’m like, you guys know English better than us here in the United States.

(both chuckle)

So, it’s actually been really, really awesome to be honest with you, the quality of people that work for you. I mean, it has to speak volumes about your city and your area. And it’s not just that, I like the fact that our hours are a little different. I mean obviously you cover our website 24-hours but we tend to get most of our chats in the hours where your agents, it’s daytime where you and your company is.

Lee: Sure.

Jonathan: So, that’s a huge benefit. I mean honestly, I don’t really, I mean, because you guys speak so well, our language I don’t really recognise, “Oh, well they’re in another country. They’re across the world.” So, it hasn’t really been anything negative in any way. If anything it’s been more positive again because you guys tend to know the language better than us. So, but for the most part, I mean I think the only thing that I kind of laugh at sometimes is in the UK you guys, some of the I mean what we would finish the word with a “z”, you guys would finish with an “s” like, and like there’s been like one or two occasions where your chat agents and I don’t blame them. Because I mean that’s how they, they’ll say like expertise, they’ll say it with an “s” instead of where but…

Lee: Yeah.

Jonathan: But I don’t think anyone catches that and I don’t think anyone really cares because they’re having a conversation with a real person that knows their needs and knows what they’re looking for when they’re on our website. So I actually, I would highly recommend it. I try to recommend it to a lot of my friends out here that have their own websites. I’m like, “Guys, you need like a good chat company that can communicate with your users.” Because again, not everyone wants to call not everyone wants to fill out a form and if they just have a quick little request they want to chat and they don’t want to chat with somebody that’s just responding, with templates that don’t really answer or fulfill their needs.

Lee: Yeah. Well it’s almost like using a chatbot then, isn’t it? If it’s that robotic a response from a template or even just like a very basic script, you don’t know you are speaking to a real person and I think that’s the benefit of having that much more human element to it.

Jonathan: Yeah. But that’s a good question, a good thought too on the human element too. We did look at AI chat bots that were, kind of the machine learning, the new cool stuff on the block. And we did test that out and we found that it wasn’t as successful because it’s like we realise that users really do want to talk to a real person and they don’t always want to, if they’re just responding to a bot, I mean they’re not going to be as satisfied compared to as talking with a human.

Lee: Exactly.

Jonathan: Yeah. Because that is kind of the new trend coming into the chat world is everyone wants to design bots that can have conversations so we can eliminate people. And I feel like when it comes to communication if you start getting into replacing humans with bots, it’s going to get really ugly, so.

Lee: Yeah. And also there’s the fact that even though the bots might well work well in fooling someone that they’re a real person, it’s that feeling that you still want to speak to a real person and that feeling that, the whole point of this is connecting your visitors with a good attorney, someone that they can trust with a serious case. And that is built on that relationship, on that trust. And if that’s lost early on in the conversation because you’ve just put a chat bot in front of them there’s a chance there that they’re never going to come back.

Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ve seen that. So they literally don’t.

Lee: Yeah, I mean, well you’ll have seen in the transcript there’s plenty of chats to start. “Are you a real person?”

Jonathan: Are you a real person? And the moment they’re not, they’re gone and again I mean some people would be okay with a bot. So I’m not saying like a bot’s the worst idea ever, but there is a percentage that would prefer to just talk with a person.

Lee: Absolutely. Yep, yeah, yeah. Well that, I mean that’s how we make our business – it’s all about that real person interaction. And certainly here in the UK it makes a huge difference because we’re a little bit behind with regards to use of chats, live chat, but we’ve kind of had our little chatbot revolution where suddenly it was the thing to do. And so many people have realised that actually it doesn’t work in the way they expected. It’s cheap, it’s easy to implement but actually the end user, the visitor that they’re trying to attract is kind of put off by it.

So we’re now at this point where the real human element will take over, I believe.

Jonathan: Yeah. And if you can, I mean, again, it’s communications, right? It’s customer service and if you can have a robot or a bot create a product and you can replace the human there, I think that’s awesome. That’s probably perfect and ideal. But, having a robot or a bot replace a human to communicate with another human, I mean that, it could get really bad, if you don’t structure it correctly.

Lee: Sure.

Jonathan: And maybe in 20 years chat will change where the bots are way smarter than they are now and they can actually have full real conversations. But yeah, for website chat, there’s a ways to go for that.

Lee: Yeah. And also it’s about the business as well. I think there are plenty of businesses where the chatbot is appropriate, but there are certain ones where there needs to be that human empathy, that caring nature that just doesn’t come across when it’s a chatbot.

Jonathan: Well, and that’s the beauty of, again I know I speak high volumes of you guys at Melu, but that’s also kind of the beauty, because beauty of you guys, because we do have people that are in really tough situations in their life on our website. And when they start chatting with us, they kind of want to feel the empathy or kind of our expression that we care about them.

Lee: Sure.

Jonathan: And Melu does a phenomenal job doing that. And the other thing too when people start chatting with you on your website, they literally do believe it’s somebody on your team. If I’m on Apple.com and I start chatting I’m assuming that the person is an employee of Apple.com.

Lee: Sure.

Jonathan: And so I want them to, so this fully represents your business in every way. And so if you’re reading these chat transcripts after the chats come in and you’re like, “Oh, these conversations are awful because these people don’t know the language,” it’s a dent to your business. It’s a dent to your brand identity. It’s going to have its negative effect. So yeah.

Lee: Sure. Absolutely. Well, I think that’s our time done. I thank you so much for all of your feedback and obviously for using Melu for this amount of time. And we’re coming up to our second year anniversary. Hopefully we’ll be working with you for many more years.

Jonathan: Great journey.

Lee: It has, it has, and we’ve made little tweaks along the way. We’ve improved the FAQs that our operators use to answer the questions. You’ve been great at giving us feedback and actually talking us through ways we can improve what we do. So it improves what you get from it. So thank you. Thank you for that.

Jonathan: Thank you.