3 Ways Real Estate Agents Can Improve Customer Service
As the cliche goes, customer is king. Even so, putting your customers’ needs first will help your business in many ways. To start with, happy customers are much more likely to develop loyalty to your business and become repeat customers. Not only will this bring you more business, but it will also save you around 5 times the amount it would otherwise cost to acquire new customers. In addition, happy customers also lead to referrals, which have much higher closing rates than other lead sources.
With these benefits in mind, it is important for real estate agents to constantly practice their customer service skills and find ways to be more customer oriented in their business. Here are a few pointers on how you can master customer service in real estate:
1. Be present
To be more customer-centric, it is important to first and foremost, be present for the customers. Oftentimes, this means being available and accessible for client enquiries by phone or email. When you are not available in person, your online presence also counts as an extension of your customer service. Social media, for example, is a good way for your clients to browse through some educational and entertaining contents related to real estate. Meanwhile, on your website, your clients can find a complete list of properties and the answers to any FAQs. In this digital era, your online presence can make a world of difference when it comes to providing excellent customer service.
2. Focus on how you can help
The basics of customer service are pretty simple. You should focus on how you can help, instead of why you cannot. As a real estate agent, the obvious task at hand is of course to help clients find corresponding properties to rent, buy, or sell. Though you will not be able to help everyone with this, it is still important to fw-bold what you can help with. For example, if you have a client looking for a place to rent in a specific area while you currently have no available property there, you could mention other properties within close proximity to the area that still fit their search criteria. Or perhaps, your client is looking to see if you also offer help with moving. Even if you can’t help them move yourself, you can still provide them with contacts to a good mover company.
3. Track every client interactions
It can be difficult to recall information about clients and your past interactions with them, especially if you’ve got a long list of clients. Rather than relying on your good memory, you should instead track all your client interactions diligently using a proper tool, such as a real estate CRM software. By tracking your client interactions, you will be able to quickly pull up your history of interactions with each client as a reference whenever needed. So the next time a client messages you out of the blue, you will not be caught off-guard not knowing who the client is and what your past interactions were like. Instead, you would be able to pick up right where you left off and perhaps ask how they are doing with their newborn baby.
Do these and you will be well on your way to improving your customer service as a real estate agent.