Be prepared to deliver outstanding service in 2024
You’ve no doubt heard it all before in Real Estate; your clients, whether tenants or landlords, expect more from your staff, and in less time.
Failure to meet these expectations has dire consequences, from lost managements, bad online reviews, staff burnout, and ultimately…failure.
The trends that are shaping the world are coming for your real estate business. Are you ready to deliver outstanding service in 2024?
Artificial Intelligence: A Digital Revolution
Let’s address the giant elephant in the room: Artificial Intelligence. It’s not just schools that are scrambling to grapple with this new found power, real estate is too.
Don’t be fooled by people who say that real estate is too “personable” to be disrupted by A.I.
There is a race going on in real estate to be the first to deploy A.I., it is here, whether we like it or not, and as Joel Davis discussed at the 2023 STAFFLINK Conference, “only those who are prepared for AI will be able to use it”.
There is excitement and fear about what is possible in this space, and just like when outsourcing re-shaped the industry, businesses will probably have vastly different levels of success.
The key to unlocking A.I. effectively will be standardisation of process and digitisation of data. If you want to deliver outstanding service, and implement A.I to help you do so, start with these two goals.
NPS: Understanding Your Service Levels
It’s one thing to think you know what you’re good at. It’s another to actually know.
Implementing a Net Promoter Score (NPS) metric into your business is a good way to actually know.
If you don’t know what NPS is, it’s really quite simple. NPS is all about giving you feedback from your customers. It does this by asking them one simple question—”On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our agency to a friend or colleague?”.
If you want to know whether your business is meeting expectations, whether it is ready to deliver outstanding service, then NPS could be a great tool for you.
But it’s not just about getting a snapshot of customer satsifation levels, your NPS score can be used as a catalyst for informed business decisions and also can be a valuable lead source for your business.
Read more about the right way to approach NPS here.
Response Times: The Race to Meet Expectation
40 per cent of Australian consumers expect a response within an hour of making an enquiry and 53 per cent of real estate enquiries are made outside office hours, meaning real estate agents who don’t have automated response systems in place are letting potential clients down.
Not only that, but companies who don’t respond to leads within 5 minutes see their chances of converting that lead decrease by 400%.
So, it’s pretty important to get back to leads quickly, right? And presumably, sales agents in real estate understand this, right? Wrong! In Real Estate, 48% of buyer inquiries were never responded to.
If you want to deliver outstanding service, the best place to start is to give your team the capacity to actually focus on clients. This is what STAFFLINK specialise in.
So, what’s holding your sales agents back, and what can you do about it? Read more here.
Diminishing Numbers: More Property Managers Leaving the Industry
According to recent studies, 23% of Property Managers intend to resign in the next 12 months.
While this trend has many effects, including rising wages, and difficulties in recruitment and retention, one of the biggest impacts of the exodus of property management professionals from the industry is best seen from a local, business level.
Businesses who are understaffed will struggle to deliver outstanding service. Worst of all, the businesses who aren’t delivering a high standard of service often have more stressful working environments as clients become angry that their needs aren’t being met.
This can lead to increased burden and stress on the remaining property managers – a self-perpetuating cycle that is hard to break.
While there is no short-term solution to the industry wide challenge of recruitment, there are things that individual businesses can do.
Increasing the capacity of your team so that they can handle larger workloads is one way of dealing with a staff shortage.
But you need the right systems, processes, and tech in place to increase your PM’s capacity.
With the right support, your property managers can handle larger portfolios, with less stress, and still deliver outstanding service.
Are you ready to deliver outstanding service?
We can complain about the rising expectations of customers and how much harder they make life for us.
But the problem with that is, 1) no one cares, and 2) you are also a customer with rising expectations.
When was the last time you had to go to a bank branch? Or received a paper bill? Or were happy with a business getting back to you in 3 to 4 working days?
Times have changed, expectations have changed, let’s move on and start focusing on what is actually important: delivering outstanding service that not only meets but exceeds customer expectation.
