Answering service for UK conveyancers

In conveyancing, the phone is a cost rather than a pipeline

Most professional services win work on the phone. Conveyancing largely does not. The fee is agreed at the quote stage, and everything after that is a fixed price against an unfixed quantity of calls.

A single transaction generates chase calls from five directions. The client wants to know where things are. The estate agent wants to know where things are, usually on behalf of a client who has already asked you directly. The other side's solicitor is chasing enquiries. The broker is chasing the offer. The lender is chasing paperwork. None of those calls earn anything, all of them take a fee earner away from the file, and the busier the transaction the more of them there are.

That is why so many conveyancers end up quietly discouraging calls, pushing clients to a portal or an inbox, and letting the phone ring. It solves the interruption problem and creates a worse one, because poor communication is one of the most consistent drivers of complaints in conveyancing, and a client who cannot reach anybody escalates rather than gives up.

Most chase calls are process questions, not status requests

This is the observation the whole page rests on, and it is worth being precise about it.

When a client rings asking "where are we up to", a large share of what they actually want is not case-specific at all. They want to know how long searches usually take. What happens after exchange. Whether they need to do anything. What an enquiry is. When they will get a completion date. Why the other side has gone quiet. Whether it is normal that nothing has happened for a fortnight.

Every one of those is a general question about how conveyancing works, and every one is answerable from information you have already written down. A person answers them dozens of times a week, from memory, in almost identical words. That is the volume worth removing.

What a conveyancing answering service does on a call

Voco answers in your firm's name, in a voice you choose, and works from information you configure rather than improvising. Conveyancers use it to take the volume off the front desk without pushing callers to voicemail. On a typical call it will:

• Establish who is calling: client, estate agent, the other side, broker, lender or new enquiry
• Take the matter reference, or the property address where the caller does not have one
• Answer process questions from what you have configured, such as typical timescales, what each stage means and what happens next
• Capture case-specific requests in full, with what is being asked and by whom, and route them to the right fee earner
• Handle new quote enquiries and gather everything needed to price them
• Follow your escalation rules for anything time-critical
• Send your team a structured summary by SMS and email within seconds

What it does not do is tell anybody where their transaction has got to. It has no view of your case management system, and a confident wrong answer about whether contracts have been sent is worse than no answer at all. Status requests are captured and routed, not guessed at.

It does not give legal advice

Voco will not advise on enquiries raised by the other side, comment on whether a title issue matters, explain what an indemnity policy covers, offer a view on a lease term, or answer questions about stamp duty liability. It will not say whether a transaction will complete or when.

Where a caller presses for any of that, it says plainly that it cannot advise and that somebody from the firm will come back to them. Where it does not know something, it says so and takes details. It works only from what you have configured.

Callers can be told they are speaking to an AI assistant, and that is a setting you control.

Quote enquiries, priced properly the first time

The other high-volume call is somebody asking what it costs, and it is the one call in conveyancing that does win work.

It is also the one most often handled badly, because a useful quote needs a specific set of facts and a rushed call gets half of them. Voco can capture all of it: whether it is a purchase, a sale or both, the price, freehold or leasehold, whether there is a mortgage, whether it is new build, shared ownership or a right to buy, the expected timescale, and whether they are working to a chain deadline.

The enquiry arrives ready to quote rather than ready to chase, which matters because a quote request that takes two calls to pin down usually goes to whoever answered first.

Estate agent calls, routed and logged

Agents chase differently from clients. They chase more often, they chase across several transactions at once, and they chase on behalf of people who have already rung you.

Those calls can follow their own route, be captured against the matter and the agent, and be logged so you can see the pattern. Over a quarter that log tells you which referral relationships are generating disproportionate call volume against the fees they bring, which is a conversation most firms have never been able to have with evidence.

Exchange and completion day

The two days in any transaction when everybody rings at once are the two days your team can least afford to be on the phone.

Voco absorbs the volume rather than queuing it. Callers get an answer instead of an engaged tone, anything genuinely time-critical follows the escalation route you have set, and everything else is captured and waiting. On a completion day where four transactions are running at the same time, that is the difference between a difficult morning and a bad one.

Client care and the record

Every call is stored with a transcript and a recording, timestamped and attached to the caller and the matter reference. Where a client later says nobody returned their call, or an agent claims they were told something, the answer is a log rather than a recollection.

Call data is stored in UK and EU data centres. Voco Digitals Ltd is registered with the ICO. A data processing agreement is available covering your firm as controller and Voco as processor. Recordings and transcripts are encrypted in transit and at rest, retention periods are configurable, and deletion requests can be actioned against an individual caller. Set retention to align with your file retention policy rather than accepting a default.

Getting started

You can be live in minutes. Signing up walks you through a short setup flow covering your firm's details, your services, your hours and the questions your team answers most often.

The hour that matters here is the one spent writing your process answers. Typical search timescales, what each stage means, what happens after exchange, what a client needs to do and when. Those are the answers that remove the most call volume, and they are worth writing carefully rather than generically. Then set your escalation rules and test it on your own line.

There is no setup fee, no contract, and a 30 day money-back guarantee. Voco costs 29p a minute with no monthly fee, or a monthly plan if your call volume is steady.

Related: answering service for UK law firms, solicitors, estate agents, how call handling works.