How to ensure 100% response to incoming calls in real estate?

The phone rings in your office, all the agents are busy. The moment the contact is called back, he tells you that the mandate has just been given to another agency. Does this sound familiar? It's normal for all real estate players, and especially agencies, to be affected by the shortage of supply and competition from new digital players.

Optimizing the management of incoming requests is the best way to ensure the future growth of the company. This observation is shared by all real estate players, but few succeed. What are the symptoms and how to solve them? In this article, we have put together several tips that will help you improve your performance. To learn more about virtual agents and the reduction of support costs, you can read our white paper.

1. Know your call volume and type:

To different symptoms different remedies. If your volume is less than 300 calls per month or more than 2000, the technological solutions to be implemented are very different. The same goes for the type of call, starting with the level of qualification required. After surveying our clients and many agencies, statistics show that incoming calls are divided into three categories, almost equally divided.

• 35% of qualified calls from owners for visits or mandates
• 40% of calls concerning old cases or administrative follow-up
• 25% of unqualified sales calls (printers, computers, etc.)

Our advice: while call volumes are easy to calculate, the same cannot be said for the reason for the calls. We recommend that you use a 30 day period to identify the volumes of missed calls and their purpose. This will allow you to directly calculate the loss of revenue and the level of investment you can provide to increase your competitiveness.

2. Overflow or first instance: when and how?

Once you have calculated the volume of revenue-generating calls you are losing on a recurring basis, the next logical step is to start improving your statistics. Be careful though, this is not about putting an IVR or rerouting callers to each agents phone one after the other. The solution as always depends on your situation. Firstly, if your pick-up rate is above 90% you should evaluate a solution to manage call overflow or short-term rushes. If, on the other hand, your rate is lower (which is the case for many agencies) your choice should be oriented towards a first instance tool, i.e. one that will pre-qualify all calls before distributing them to advisors or even handling them in real time without human intervention. In both cases, a virtual agent animated by a conversational AI will be able to meet these needs.

3. Example of a scenario for winning mandates

A phone call is very often an emergency for the caller. Most of the incoming requests from real estate sellers can be handled autonomously when an agent is not available, so that no visit or mandate request is lost. This performance is possible thanks to a virtual agent able to understand natural language. To increase your response speed you could, for example, offer callers a scenario in which they set their own appointment times and leave their contact details. The simple scenario to set up would be to pre-qualify the request (visit, file follow-up, other) and to request a visit slot. As the virtual agent is connected to the employees' diaries, the slot is validated in real time. If not, a text message is sent with a link to select other availability.

In conclusion: it is important to offer maximum autonomy to customers as 72% of them prefer to get a quick autonomous answer rather than wait for contact with a customer service. Nevertheless, human contact remains essential to handle complex requests, which is why your virtual agent must be able to integrate your internal tools to transfer calls or create follow-up tickets in case of unavailability. By adapting to the new consumption patterns of their customers, companies that adopt these new technologies are outpacing their competitors in terms of responsiveness and service level.

To learn more about the use of virtual agents for real estate companies click here: The productivity and inbound call management solution for real estate companies