By now, we all know that practicing law in real life bears almost no resemblance to what we see on TV. If you were to believe Hollywood, all lawyers have shiny offices where they prop their feet up on a rich mahogany desk and flip through the calls coming in from clients on various lines, which have been dutifully vetted and routed by dedicated assistants sitting right outside.
In reality, you’d be hard-pressed to find many lawyers whose lives actually look like that. Today’s lawyer is mobile, taking calls on cell phones and working from laptops while on vacation or running between meetings. Some don’t even have offices at all, choosing to work from home or the closest coffee shop to save the overhead costs on office space they’ll never use.
The biggest problem has been finding a way to have the mobile lifestyle without losing the professional image you get from the formal office. When you rely on mobile devices, you may compromise professionalism, and when you rely on desk phones, you run the risk of missing important calls. Balancing professionalism and mobility is a juggling act that has been nearly impossible to pull off. Until now.
Meet Tresta, the cloud-based business phone system that will change the way you practice law. Sure, lawyers have been using cell phones for ages, but never like this. Tresta allows you to have all the features of the fancy office phone system, but without all the expensive hardware or the IT staff, for less than the cost of your weekly Starbucks intake. And it’s all on your mobile device.
It may seem too good to be true, but it’s not. Pretty much anything you could do on your traditional office phone system, you can do with Tresta. You simply set up and manage your phone system online through their intuitive interface, and then access it from anywhere, anytime, on any device. Because it’s cloud-based, it goes where you go.
Tresta replaces traditional receptionists with what they call auto attendants, and they exist to make your life easier while giving your callers the full, professional experience.
In your auto attendant, you can set up greetings and menu prompts that give your callers options for routing their calls to the right place — whether that’s to a specific individual, a team you create, or to voicemail (more on these features in a bit). With Tresta, no matter why your caller is calling, he or she will be greeted professionally and guided through your system. If you want calls routed to an answering service, their sister company offers a fantastic product called PATLive. These folks have been mastering the legal answering service game for 30 years, so you know you’ll always be in good hands.
If you’re not at your computer, no worries. Tresta offers dedicated iPhone and Android apps, so you can just as easily access your system on the go.
Now, for the features that make your Tresta phone system so great:
- Your number. Tresta comes with one free phone number, either toll free or in the area code of your choice. If you’re already in business and want to bring your current number with you to avoid disruption, you can.
- Greetings and prompts. No one likes speaking to a robot. Tresta lets you record customized prompts and greetings for your auto attendant options. They’ll even record them for you if you want to sound extra professional.
- Extensions. You can assign four-digit extensions to all your staff, meaning that callers can still reach everyone through the main number you use to advertise, just as they would in a traditional office, even though your employees can answer from their own phones.
- Groups. With Tresta, you can create hunt groups or user groups, which allow calls routed to certain options to simul-ring on multiple phones at once. For example, if someone selects the menu prompt for new clients, that call will be routed to every number you’ve set to handle matter intake, and it will ring on all those phones until the first person answers.
- Voicemail. Voicemails are delivered to you via email for you to read at your convenience, and you can record a custom greeting for each line.
- Call recording. Tresta lets you record any or all of your calls, with unlimited storage (just another perk of the cloud).
- Call forwarding. The calls you receive through Tresta are forwarded to your mobile device. If you know you’re going to be unavailable, you can simply have them forwarded to a different person in your absence.
All these features add up to your clients never having to be angry about their calls not being answered, and you never having to worry about missing important calls. If that’s not a win-win, I’m not sure what is.
And if all that weren’t enough, there’s still more to come. Tresta soon plans to offer a host of additional useful features like:
- IP phones;
- Call routing based on customized schedules for each user or group; and
- Analytics on the number of calls going to specific numbers, the duration of calls, and data reporting broken down by users and groups.
That’s all the complexity and sophistication that historically only large businesses with deep pockets could afford, now available to anyone with a cell phone and $15/month to spare.
You read that right. Tresta costs just $15 per user per month, and that includes setup assistance (though it’s so user-friendly you probably won’t need it), one phone number, no contracts, unlimited 24/7 customer support with real live people, and all of Tresta’s features. Nothing costs extra — every feature listed above comes in the flat price. If you want to add a second user, you’ll pay $30 per month. Three users is $45 a month. It’s really that simple. And you can even try it free for 30 days if you’re still not sure.
Tresta is the phone system you need to help you achieve that ever-elusive work/life balance and finally be truly free of the office. You get the professional presentation while maintaining your freedom, all without breaking the bank. For $15 a month, you can’t afford not to do this. We promise we won’t tell that you just took that call in yoga pants.