4 Real Estate Customer Experience Killers: Avoiding Strikeouts and Foul Balls
When it comes to the real estate customer experience, relationships are everything. Clients need to have a great deal of trust in you in order to move ahead with a real estate deal. While you might not be able to knock it out of the park every time, it's crucial that you know how to avoid striking out. Here are four factors that might be keeping you from connecting with your client and securing a win.
1. Not Responding Promptly
Real estate clients expect a quick response — if they don't get one, they'll move on to the competition. If you don't get back to a client right away, you just whiffed on a golden opportunity to win their business. First impressions are everything, and it's important to convey in your first interaction with a client that you're available and responsive. That message is essential for building the trust that will make them comfortable with committing to a purchase.
Fortunately, there's a way to boost your performance in this area. As any baseball team manager knows, adding an MVP to your roster can make an immediate impact. A cloud-based communications system can give you just this sort of timely advantage. With mobile access to your office extension on your smartphone or laptop, you can take a call or return a message right away no matter where you are. Visual voicemail allows you to keep discreet tabs on incoming messages while showing a home to a prospective client. The software provides a text-based transcription of your voicemail so that you can easily prioritize your responses once you have a moment to make calls. This way, you can make sure your clients get the message that you're available and focused on attending to their needs.
2. Not Presenting as a Professional
A positive first impression is important, but it only goes so far. Since buying a home is one of the biggest decisions a person can make, a potential client needs to be sure that they have someone on their team who is reliable throughout the entire process. That's why it's important for a real estate agent to consistently demonstrate professionalism and accountability at every step, responding to and even anticipating the client's needs from start to finish. A real estate agent that is sporadically incommunicado or uses unreliable business communications tools is losing before they even step up to the plate.
You can provide the professional presence that your clients expect by investing in a business communications system that is dependable, offering maximum uptime and stellar 24/7 support. Backup features can keep your business running even in emergencies, ensuring that your clients have a smooth experience and the deals keep moving to completion. You'll also have the flexibility to scale your business communications up or down as needed, comfortably accommodating peak periods with a stress-free solution. All the while, your clients will receive the consistent service and reliable communication they have come to expect.
When closing a deal, you need to deliver a memorable experience that wows your clients. If you don't, you may miss out on lucrative referrals or repeat business down the line — and the last thing you want to do is leave runners on base.
3. Not Streamlining the Real Estate Customer Experience
It's also important to streamline the real estate customer experience for your clients, making it easy and enjoyable to do business with you. If your clients have trouble accessing documents or have to wait for you to locate the right information while trying to navigate what is already an often complex and confusing process, they may get frustrated. As a result, it may be tough for you to put runs on the board.
Fortunately, there are some smart solutions for real estate available to help you avoid just this sort of low-scoring scenario. You can easily share documents with clients both at your desk and from a mobile device by sending them a lease from Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive that they can review at their convenience. A cloud-based communications system can also integrate behind the scenes with a CRM like Salesforce, providing you with streamlined access to your client records and displaying their information during a call so that you can provide them with consistently professional and timely service at every turn.
4. Missing Out on Innovative Solutions for Real Estate
Customer experience is increasingly becoming a differentiator in many industries, including real estate. When closing a deal, you need to deliver a memorable experience that wows your clients. If you don't, you may miss out on lucrative referrals or repeat business down the line — and the last thing you want to do is leave runners on base. A tech-savvy competitor could also swoop in to meet this demand in the market, laying claim to a client base that values the convenience and efficiency that innovative tech solutions can offer.
One way you can help secure the win is by offering virtual home tours. Time is of the essence in a red-hot real estate market, and many clients feel pressured to pounce on a good opportunity right away. But with busy professional and family lives, they can't always be there in person to evaluate a property. This is especially tricky for clients who may be relocating to a different city. By providing virtual home tours, you can give them a personalized, on-demand look at what could be the home of their dreams. You can also conduct meetings between buyers and sellers via video conference, enabling them to develop a greater rapport and level of comfort than they could over email or phone.
It's a competitive market out there, but real estate agents can boost their chances of winning by offering an excellent real estate customer experience. With robust business communications tools on your roster, you won't face the risk of striking out.
Do you want to learn more about how cloud-based communications can help real estate agents hit a home run? Check out Vonage Business.
