There is a lot of mistrust around salespeople, and nobody sees more of that than the real estate agent. Some people even expect to be cheated when they need to buy or sell a property. When they look, they do as much as possible to avoid speaking to an agent simply for fear of being sold a bad property that needs maintenance they can't afford. There's a stigma that real estate agents are "out to get" their clients and you know that's not true. The question becomes: how can you change that? The answer lies in marketing automation, and subtle changes to the way you communicate with clients.
Creating a customer experience is a focus in a lot of industries. Customer engagement, as well as the overall attitude of businesses, are vital to the construction of that experience. There are things that real estate agents can do to help demystify the real estate world for the everyday person. Make clients feel at home and comfortable with your business. In the end, that's what a great customer experience serves to do. It gives your customers a feeling of familiarity and comfort. One way to improve your customer experience is to allocate some of the routine tasks using a software for real estate agents that offers automation. Here are some examples of tasks that you could automate using software for real estate agents:
- Greetings – Greetings are an important part of your process. If you collect the email address and name of a prospective client, when they email you you'll be able to send them an automated greeting letting them know that their message was received and that you'll respond as quickly as possible. This will assure them that, even if it takes a little time, their concerns have been heard and you'll respond soon.
- Instant support – Through a chat program, your support staff can consistently catch questions as they happen, stopping your site from losing traffic because of the lack of immediate support online. You'll be able to assist customers with a text-based chat where they can ask questions, request help and more.
- Messages, the customer's way – "The customer is always right" is a mantra popular in all parts of the service industry. Because of that, having the versatility to give customers updates through the communication channel of their preference is ideal. With over 15 channels, we enable you to communicate the way your customers want and target specific groups with different messages and message types, all custom built in an easy to use drag and drop editor.
- Gather data on the fly – By setting up a contact management tool and visitor tracking, you can collect anonymous data on the activities your prospects take on your site, as well as where they came from and what campaigns they interact with. This will allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing, as well as something much more important. It will give you the power to marry their anonymous browsing with the information they give you when they email or call you, giving you a clear picture of what they need, where they want to move to or from, and how you can best assist them, all automatically populated in a customer profile that you can use to build a rapport faster and more effectively.
- Updates as they happen – Automation grants you the power to supply your customers with updates to the areas they want to watch without any time buffer. This means that they'll be able to receive emails or SMS messages when a new property goes up. This way they can get excited, look into a property and be proactive, instead of waiting for everything to be handled. That means that you can close more often without feeling the same urgency to always close your sales. This takes pressure off you and off the customer.
There are so many more ways you can automate existing processes to improve a customer experience or even create new processes to serve as customer experience enhancers. These are just a few ideas to get you rolling. To find a list of the features our automation platform offers, check out our marketing automation page.
