The Problems With a Typical PI Intake Team
The Problems With a Typical PI Intake Team
Most intake desks fail in the same seven places: nobody owns speed to lead after lunch, almost no calls are reviewed, scrubbing happens after the dial instead of before it, new hires learn on real callers, the reporting was borrowed from a sales pipeline, multiple brands share one desk with no rules, and every resignation resets the floor.
None of those are lead quality problems.
The leads are not the problem. The desk is.
Speed to lead is good in the morning and nobody checks the afternoon
The first hour of the day looks fine. Two agents are fresh, the queue is short, calls go out within a minute.
By 3pm one agent is on a long call with a caller who will not qualify, one is at lunch, and the new leads sit. Nobody is watching, because watching means opening a report that gets run on Friday.
The damage is invisible in a weekly average. It is obvious on a live screen.
That is why the Floor exists: who is on a call, who is free, who is stuck, on one screen, with listen, whisper and barge. A manager can take over a call instead of hearing about it on Monday.
Five calls a month get reviewed, and everyone knows which five
The typical QA process is a manager pulling a handful of recordings when something goes wrong.
Agents learn the shape of that quickly. They are careful on the calls they think will be pulled.
Reviewing a sample tells you about the sample. It tells you nothing about the call at 4:40pm where an agent skipped the treatment question.
The alternative is grading everything. Every call transcribed and graded overnight against the firm's own rubric, not a vendor's idea of a good call. Your rules, not ours.
If the rubric says the agent must confirm the date of loss, the property damage, the treatment status and the retainer explanation, those are the four things scored. Change the rubric, change the grading.
Compliance gets checked after the dial, or not at all
This is the one that stays quiet until it does not.
A list arrives from a vendor. Someone looks at the spreadsheet, decides it looks fine, and loads it. Nobody checks internal DNC. Nobody checks litigator lists. Nobody checks what time it is in the caller's state.
And when the question comes later — were you allowed to make that call — the firm goes looking for a web form screenshot in an email thread.
Compliance before the dial is a different posture. DNC, litigator and calling-window checks run on the whole list, whether or not campaigns are used. The consent certificate is claimed and kept with the lead, beside the recording, so the proof you were allowed to make the call sits where the call sits.
Compliance is not an upsell. Litigator and DNC scrubbing, call review and AI training are included in the seat price, not priced separately once you depend on them.
New agents learn intake on real callers
The standard onboarding is a binder, a headset, and a seat next to whoever is free.
So the first twenty calls a new hire takes are real people who have just been in a collision. Those calls are the practice.
Nobody should learn intake on a real client.
The course behind our Agents and Training products is 13 modules, 17 lessons and 185 teaching slides, plus two guides written for the firm rather than the agent. It ends in a 50-question capstone with an 80% pass mark. There is a state MVA module, because motor vehicle intake changes depending on where the caller was.
Role-play is scored by an AI caller that objects, hesitates and changes its mind, on the same rubric as a real call. It never needs a calendar slot, which is the reason role-play normally stops after week one.
Agents we place have spent five days on this before a firm interviews them: three on the course, two shadowing our floor. Trained before day one. Replacements are held to the same standard.
The reporting is a sales pipeline with the words changed
Intake managers inherit dashboards built for sales teams. Opportunities. Stages. Quota attainment.
None of that answers the questions a partner actually asks.
The questions are: how fast did we call, how many reached a decision, how many were disqualified and for what reason, how many qualified, and what the signed rate looks like by source and by agent.
Reporting that says intake, not a sales pipeline with the words changed. When a source is underperforming you want to know whether it is the source or the agent who happened to take most of its calls. Those are two different problems with two different fixes.
One desk, several brands, no rules
This is where call centers and marketing companies get hurt.
One agent answers for four brands. Each brand has a different retainer, a different intake form, different qualifying criteria and a different firm to place the case with. The agent is keeping that in their head, or on a laminated sheet.
Campaign ownership fixes it at the campaign level. Retainer, intake form, qualifying criteria and invoicing all read off one answer. A state picker narrows to firms actually licensed there, and shared states split to the agreed share. When a campaign hits its cap it stops being offered, so orders close themselves.
Single-brand firms can leave routing switched off entirely and turn it on later with one setting.
Every resignation resets the floor
Intake turnover is normal. The problem is that a typical desk stores its standards in the people who are leaving.
When the knowledge lives in a rubric, a course and a recorded library of graded calls, a departure costs you a person, not a method.
Agents we place work for your firm, your hours, your systems. They work for you, not for us. We are not running your desk, and we do not supervise it.
How do you tell whether it is the leads or the desk?
Three checks, and you can run all of them this week.
Pull your speed to lead by hour of day, not by day. Look at 2pm to 5pm.
Count how many calls were reviewed last month against how many were made.
Take one list you have already called and run it against DNC and litigator checks. See what comes back.
If the first two look bad, the desk is the problem. If the third comes back with hits, that is a different conversation and it is more urgent.
What to do next
Book a 30-minute call. Thirty minutes on your own numbers, not a sandbox. Bring a list and we will run the scrub on it, then replay a consent certificate end to end so you can see what is stored and where.
If you would rather look first, there are two recorded tours: Everything, Fast at 0:47 and The Full Tour at 2:41. There is also a free course preview on a demo firm — lessons, scored role-play and the capstone.
Pricing is published. A seat is $150 per month. Talk time is $0.12 per minute, SMS $0.03 per segment, MMS $0.05, a phone number $3.00 per month. Setup for your firm is $750, one time. Training licensed to your own people is $50 per seat per month, two seats minimum — an intake manager and an agent. No platform fee, no minimum, no per-conversation surcharge.
It is the CRM, not a dialer bolted onto one. Your own carrier subaccount, numbers and storage. Recordings and data stay yours.
Setup takes days: numbers provisioned, caller ID registered, first scrub run.
To start, book the demo at inquire2esquire.com and bring the list you are least sure about.
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Recorded from the product. Every person, lead and phone number in them is invented.