Using Cloud Telephony to Build a Better Customer Experience in the Real Estate Industry

Real estate is a vertical that has not witnessed the penetration of technology the way some of the other industries have. However, research shows that when it comes to real estate decisions, one of the first things that a potential buyer or renter does is to research the property, the builder, the locality, etc. online even before getting in touch with the agent or the developer.

This shift in the consumer’s mindset has led to almost every real estate business investing in an online presence. Typically, we’ve seen that this means a website that has basic information and maybe some digital ads.

After the basic research has happened, the renter or the buyer wants to talk to the real estate agency or the developer involved to understand more and to take the conversation forward. A phone call is usually the first point of contact for a potential lead.

This is a buyer’s (or a renter’s) market. With the number of options available, every missed opportunity to be available when a customer reaches out is a missed opportunity for the business. This being the typical buyer’s journey, here’s how Exotel can help a real estate business use cloud telephony to improve the customer experience thereby leading to a faster sale.

Prevent lead leakage

There are two potential ways in which a customer can get in touch with you:

Reach you via a listed phone number

We’ve seen that this is one of the most preferred ways of getting in touch with a business. When someone tries to reach you, it is essential that their call always gets answered and they are able to speak to the right person.

To ensure that your customers get their calls answered in the shortest time possible, there are a few things you can do. This average response time is a very important factor that businesses measure. Using Exotel, you can devise your system flow in a way that all your agents receive a call simultaneously. Read how Anarock, a real estate advisory, uses Exotel to create this experience for their customers in a way where it not only rings all the agents simultaneously but also routes the call to the respective agents depending on the query.

Read about the Parallel Ringing feature

As much as calls play a vital role in communication, it is a herculean task to keep tab of all the calls and its particulars. All the calls routed via Exotel are recorded and they are accessible on the dashboard for future references and also for training purposes.

Leave their contact information on your website

There a few ways to keep your contact form interesting.

Click to call – Having a click to call option on the website can connect a prospective customer and your agent when they are right in the middle of their decision-making process. It is also a simple and effective way to ensure that it is easy for the customer to reach out to you when it matters the most.

Read how click to call works

Dynamic caller ID – One of the drawbacks of calling people back based on the information you collect on your website is that the majority of the calls go unanswered. Dynamic caller ID is a way for you to optimize the numbers that your teams call from to get the maximum pick-up rate.

Improve the customer experience

Making life easy for the customer is how you can improve a customer’s experience with any company.

Personalized customer communication:

Integrating your business phone system with your CRM ensures that your customers receive highly relevant and personalized communication instead of a one size fits all approach. Given the number of SMS we receive from brands, unless the communication is useful and relevant, it goes completely ignored.

Communication can also be customized to suit the language that the customer is most comfortable with. For example, you can give customers the option to choose their language of communication and connect them to the right agents accordingly as well.

Distributed call centers:

If you are a large real estate developer with projects all across the country, you can provide your customers a better experience by running a distributed call center that is spread across the country but is able to service customers of a region in the most effective manner possible. This is not just cost-efficient but also easy to manage.

Make the most of your ad spends

Ads are a very important avenue of customer acquisition. However, it is also important to understand what kind of ads work best and on which medium. This means tracking the performance of all your ads and optimizing the outcome by investing more in what works.

While tracking ad performance might be easier in the case of digital ad campaigns, how do you understand which of your other ad streams work better? One way is to use unique virtual numbers in each of your ad campaigns and based on the number of calls you receive and the quality of leads that come in, you can pick a winner.

Say, you advertise on billboards, television ads, print ads, and bus banners. You can use a different virtual number in all the three mediums to analyze the results.

To get a better understanding, read about how you can track marketing ROI.

Whether you’re a small real estate agency with a few agents or a large developer with projects all over the country, communication is the key to both understanding customer needs and creating a better customer experience overall.

Why Companies are Unable to Achieve Efficiency with Traditional Communication Methods

• Downtimes at an alarming regularity

• Hardware and software integration takes a long time

• Data security is a huge issue

• Communication cannot be scaled along with the business growth

• Set up times are high

These are just a few problems associated with on-prem communication methods. When you compare a traditional PBX with a cloud based PBX (the comparison is in the link), cloud telephony emerges a clear winner.  

The ease of setting up and affordability is the reasons for the success of cloud telephony. With everything becoming digital, gone are the days where real estate was just about face-to-face interaction with the brokers. It is time to embrace change.