Enhancing the customer experience in the real estate call center

Customer experience is already the main concern in most industries, already transforming relations between buyers and sellers for many goods and services. In 2019 about fifty-two percent of property buyers found the home they purchased on the Internet, whereas only five percent found a home by talking to a friend, a relation, or a neighbor. Digitization has transformed the way we trade with or acquire properties.

The Shift Towards Customer Experience

Customer experience has been the shift that took place in the real estate sector over time. Real estate was a traditional industry that adapted to new technology slower than other industries. This is the case with many other age-old businesses such as the banking industry, financial sector, and healthcare.

However, these industries are known to be rigid and ingrown, and usually hesitant to take risks or enact drastic changes.

7 Tips For Enhancing Customer Experience in Real Estate

Locate the Friction Spots on Your Website

Having a clunky, slow site with lots of friction is a sure-fire way to provide a bad customer experience. Friction is anything that prevents your customers from accomplishing their goals.

Example goal: I am hoping to use this website to look at properties to arrange a viewing appointment for next week.

Solutions to Friction

Eliminating friction is key. For example, the use of a scrolling photo block in the preview is not required as the customer browses the properties since this would lead to a lot of wasted clicks to view images. It helps them measure interest without moving away from the page itself, making the process efficient and inspiring other discoveries.

Read: How To Use House Buying Websites

Adapt to Demographics

Have you heard that millennials are 66% of first time home buyers? However, 52% of people search for their properties online while 99% of millennials use the web to research properties. For a successful purchase by millennials, you must offer a message on a plate in the way they want to consume it. This entails making use of social sites like social media and common messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

It is more about attracting the millennials and using these services to action other parts of the buying process. For example, you can use WhatsApp for customer service, where customers will be able to book appointments with estate agents or property viewings.

The Omnichannel Experience

The last few years have seen a great emphasis across industries on omnichannel experiences. That is not to say that the real estate industry is not unique here, but it is. While it has taken a slow approach, many real estate companies, stand out from their competitors quickly when they do it early.

The omnichannel in real estate would include providing self-service tools on your website such as FAQs and case studies for customers who do not want to speak to a salesperson. It runs across platforms – website, mobile apps, and onsite options, as well as different communication channels such as chatbots, live chat, WhatsApp, and email.

Build Strong Relationships

Sellers and buyers often have to liaise to transact business in the real estate industry. It’s not like retail, where the customer can put an item into a shopping cart and buy it within 2 minutes and it gets delivered to their doorstep in 2 days. It might take months or weeks to buy and sell properties. Also, with large amounts of money being changing hands and for a purchase that has such an impact, questions are expected, as well as adequate communication.

While all industries need to have good customer service, building strong relationships is key in real estate. However, as a real estate agent or company, you now play a major role in the customer’s major event of life. This is a big deal!

Utilize Automation and AI

Now is the time to not always use automation and AI. Such automation and implementation of AI simplify customer experiences, enhance the efficiency of businesses, and lead to cost reduction.

Here are some examples of automation and AI in real estate:

Smart inboxes sort and emphasize important messages so that no customer communication is missed, whether it is an email or WhatsApp message. Canned responses simplify communications with customers by pre-stating responses to common scenarios, enhancing precision and productivity. Multiple property listings will be avoided by automated duplicate detection as this saves SEO and site traffic quality.

Reduce Response Times

Customer experience, which is a killer for long response times. Most customers are usually forced to abandon their carts when they are forced to wait. They shift to the next company. By the time you send an email, that company could have responded faster and snapped up that customer.

How to reduce response times

It is really about making sure that you are well-networked and have a good overall view of everything. It makes no sense to hop from one app to another in searching for messages from a client as that is simply a recipe for missing the message of the crucial. All discussions should take place in one central location. All emails, live chats, chatbot logs, WhatsApp messages, and calls can accessed from a single platform.

Ensure that your website is relevant enough

Occasionally, we neglect to update our site. Other times, we update information on the website by replacing old information but leaving some of it hanging around. However, it is difficult to ensure that customers will continue to find the latest information.

If you neglect to update your site, customers may find outdated information. They can get confused because they may ask for services you no longer offer, and then they will feel like they’ve wasted their time.

Also Read: Always Learn All You Can On Real Estate Investing

Conclusion

Enhancing customer experience in real estate demands proactive strategies, from eliminating website friction spots to adapting seamlessly to diverse demographics and leveraging automation. Building robust relationships and maintaining updated, relevant websites are key facets in ensuring a seamless and satisfying journey for buyers and sellers alike.