Real estate is a business built on relationships and trust. The strength of your relationship with your brokerage ,developers, landlords, vendors, buyers, and tenants will drive your new and repeat business and can position you ahead of your competitors.
The foundation of building great relationships with your customers is delivering them an exceptional experience.
Customer experience is how your customers feel about your business based on one-off and cumulative interactions with your employees, your website, social channels, and products. If your customers feel good about you and your business, you will get repeat business and new business.
With real estate being incredibly competitive, delivering an excellent customer experience requires you to think about how your customer’s interact with your business from the first interaction to the proposal and a signed contract.
Getting this right requires walking in your customer’s shoes and understanding their journey.
Rapid technology innovations mean that customers are experiencing your brand differently than in the past. Whereas in the past a customer journey would be pretty straightforward, now customers have an incredible choice about how to find properties and find agents using property portals, agent rating websites, social channels, and apps.
Not understanding the customer mindset can result in a poor experience and potentially a lost deal. We have modelled the customer real estate experience using data we have collected over the past seven years (it’s a lot of data) and come up with five must-haves to make your customer experience a positive one.
1. Respond to every enquiry
Over 51% of customer emails do not get a response. Imagine how a customer feels when they send an enquiry to an agent and don’t get a personalised answer that makes them feel valued?
An excellent customer journey will send a branded and personalised response and make sure a follow-up call is locked in.
Delivering a great journey in the initial phase requires a solution which captures all enquiries from all sources, sends personalised responses, and creates tasks in your CRM for follow-up.
2. Capture your customers in research mode
In research mode, your customers are searching the Internet for properties that meet their needs, are in the right area and their price range. With technology, customer’s demand to be on top of new opportunities in real-time.
Innovative agents are using digital advertising to show buyers properties that match their needs with targeted ads on Facebook and Instagram. They are sending their existing buyers targeted emails with information about matching properties.
The secret to capturing your customers in research mode is targeting – not spam. A poorly targeted ad or email detracts from the customer experience. Make sure your real estate technology platform offers tight targeting on a customer level, not just a property level.
3. Nurture your customers with price change alerts and event notifications
There is nothing worse than being interested in a property and learning that the price has changed or the property sold and no longer in your price range.
A good customer experience nurtures your customers with notifications and alerts about their favourite properties. Great platforms (like Plezzel) use technology to send timely notifications to keep your prospects engaged.
4. Send critical information to convert
So once you have captured your customer’s attention, impressed them with personalised and branded email nurturing, engaged them with relevant ads and alerts, it is time to deliver more value to help them convert.
Sending documents like contracts, customer afterservices support and suburb profiles can help convert customers during this critical phase of the real estate buyer journey. Our research shows that customers are more likely to think favourably about your business if agents provide additional information to help their purchasing decision.
5. Engage your customers with updates alerts
Update Alerts is all about latest updates and communication. Our research shows that notifying customers about latest updates can significantly increase Sales at the right time about allocation, price increase, few units or plots left etc.
To deliver a great customer experience, your platform should automatically send targeted customers with the latest update alerts and information based on their interest level. A sophisticated approach will also retarget customers with this advertisements via Facebook and Instagram.
Great customer experiences need consistency, communication, personalisation, and technology. Take Time to Review Your Customers Journey.
Question of the day.
How is your customers journey like ?
How did your past clients meet you , was it online ,offline or a referral , sponsored ad or physical networking event?
Thanks for your attention and please Enjoy your day.
Dr Laide Okubena