3 reasons why your proptech should include cloud telephony
The real estate market is changing.
With the rise of online sources of information, buyers and tenants can browse property, and allows sellers and landlords can check market prices. You’d think people don’t need to speak to estate agents anymore. But that’s not true; Rightmove states that estate agents who advertise on their site receive 5 x as many enquiries as those who do not.
But.
But how many calls do you miss?
How many times has a customer called and you transferred them around the business to reach the right person? How difficult is it to coordinate all your staff at your busiest periods of negotiations, viewings and appointments?
Cloud telephony is one technology that is helping estate agencies across the UK with customer experience management.
Here are three challenges unique to estate agents and how you can solve them with hosted telephony:
Challenge 1: When coordinating property buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants, every moment is critical.
Solution: Never miss a call. Never miss a customer.
Estate agents have the unique daily challenge of being at the centre of negotiations with high financial stakes. If you don’t have a hosted phone system, you could lose sellers and buyers who move on to the competition within minutes if they can not immediately reach an agent. But when you’re on the go, a hosted phone system does the work for you.
You can use auto-attendant options to route calls efficiently to the person with the most knowledge about the call or availability within hunt groups. You can specify this criteria through the online portal and adapt it daily. This optimal call diversion creates a consistently high standard of customer experience and ensures your customer can get the right answers the first time.
At the busiest periods, when estate agents are in the middle of crucial negotiations while also managing viewings and appointments out on the road, specific calls can be directed to voicemail. Additionally, you can use our voicemail-to-email function, enabling you to scan for urgent messages without having to listen to all of them.
Challenge 2: It can be difficult to manage enquiries across distributed offices in large estate agencies.
Solution: Control the entire system centrally. Control the customer experience.
Where multiple office locations and multiple office numbers are involved, a hosted PBX can quickly direct clients to the right agent at the right office. With a cloud telephony system, you can control the call paths of all offices through one central, online portal – which you can set remotely from anywhere, online. You can link multiple offices on the same system to ensure efficient call handling and improved internal communication. Customer experience management has never been easier.
When you integrate this with your CRM, a pop-up on screen appears for staff members to answer the phone with all the information about the client in front of them. This improves the customer experience, as you provide better answers with all the context you need, and customers will feel that your company knows them.
Cloud telephony is extremely easy to roll out across your company without any interruption to your business, with simple features and user portals to give you complete control that is impossible with a traditional phone system.
Challenge 3: Your business cards have office, extension and mobile numbers, and you need to be available regardless of which number your customer chooses to call.
Solution: Keep one number across devices. Keep your customer.
Our hosted telephony solution includes the ‘One Number Anywhere’ feature. Estate agents are constantly in and out of the office, and need to coordinate several appointments in one day. When you give your business cards to contacts, it can be difficult to keep track of all communications. We can assign you one single contact number, transferrable across desk handsets and mobile devices.
For hot desking agents can have a four-digit code that, once entered into the phone, pulling up their profile on any handset. This is especially useful for agents who are in and out of the office frequently and often set up meetings in different regions.
In conclusion, estate agents depend on being available to buyers, sellers, landlords and tenants at all times. At the busiest periods, a traditional phone system simply falls short of the coordination required for estate agent business. This coincides with a time in the real estate market where more and more enquiries are made, in conjunction with online research.
Written by: David Hughes, david.hughes@telefonix.co.uk
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