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As all estate agents know, phone calls are a key part of an estate agents daily schedule. Whether you are checking in with vendors and buyers or chasing up the solicitors responsible for conveyancing, it is highly likely that you will reach for your phone. Your estate agency will want a reliable phone system that it can rely on to manage the all-important phone calls that are at the centre of your business. For some estate agents this means using an old traditional phone system, while for others their VoIP phone system will be their port of call. In this article, we explore why VoIP works for estate agents and the reasons why we believe that every successful and forward-thinking estate agent should adopt VoIP in their office/offices.
Reduce the Cost of Your Estate Agency’s Phone System with Hosted VoIP
Staying competitive in the estate agency sector is far from easy, the impact of online estate agents with their tempting fixed fees and lower commissions has been significant for many high street estate agencies. There is now an imperative to reduce business costs, starting with many of their core overheads which includes phone systems.
Lower Phone System Installation Costs
Adopting a VoIP phone system for estate agents is a great way to significantly reduce the overall cost of your phone system. The installation costs of your new VoIP phone system will be minimal, your estate agency will only require VoIP phone handsets and a broadband connection to get started. Expensive central phone units (also known as a PBX) will become a thing of the past as will physical phone wiring and phone sockets.
Lower Call Costs
VoIP offers significantly lower call costs when compared to landline phone service providers. UK calls typically cost £0.015/min with a VoIP phone system whereas on a traditional landline they often cost between £0.090/min and £0.220+/min. When you are making as many calls as your estate agencies does this can make a significant difference to your costs and release money so you can spend it in other areas of your business.
Free Calls Between Offices/Branches
If your estate agency has multiple offices as many estate agents do, a VoIP phone system will allow your staff to make free calls between your offices. Your estate agents and support staff can stay in touch via the phone without being concerned about calls costs. This l=also lowers the total cost of ownership for a VoIP system.
Improve Your Customer Service And Become The Estate Agent Of Choice
As an estate agent, you recognise the importance of great customer service and its role in helping you to secure instructions. Adopting VoIP will help you deliver great customer service for each and every customer with the range of useful features available as part of a hosted VoIP phone system.
Stop Missing Calls
If you miss a call from a customer, you could be missing out on valuable business. Every call that you miss could be answered by one of your customers which can often result in them securing the instruction. VoIP systems include call forwarding, whereby you can forward calls received on your main number to a mobile/s of your choice, allowing an estate agent who is out on appointments to take calls on their mobile if they are available between appointments.
Your staff can have the same extension number on their desk and on their mobile, this effectively twins their mobile to their desk phone. Estate agents can then make calls from the office number when they are out on the road and other staff can call their usual phone extension number to reach them even when they are out on appointments.
In the event that all your agents are busy, you can place your customers in a queue instead of directing them to an engaged tone or your voicemail allowing them to speak to the next available agent.
Route Your Calls To The Right Team/Person
You can also use an auto attendant to direct customers to the correct department/people in your estate agency, this ensures that your customers save time and have a great customer experience. Many estate agents choose to set separate numbers for sales and lettings and maintenance, this is not only helpful to customers as they can speak to the right people, it also helps you to monitor and track your performance and call volumes for each area of your agency.
If you have regional offices, your can create a branded automated phone menu to route your calls to the correct office. For example, a multi-office estate agent based in West London could have a menu with Uxbridge as option one, Hayes as option two and Ruislip as option three.
Grow Your Estate Agency With A Flexible VoIP Phone System
Traditional landline phone systems can be very inflexible and frustrating when you want to complete a simple task such as adding a new phone for a new staff member or adding a new phone number. Helpfully, a hosted VoIP system is very different and empowers your business to concentrate on growing rather than being distracted by the hassle of phone systems.
Easily Add A New Phone For A New Staff Member
If a new staff member is set to join your business, it is likely that you will need to setup a new phone for them. This is easy with VoIP, simply order a new VoIP handset and connect it to the internet without installing new phone lines or paying for expensive telephone engineer visits. At CFone we also pride ourselves on the speed and quality of our service, in almost all cases we can send a pre-configured VoIP handset to your office within one business day.
Register And Activate A New Phone Number
You may need to register and activate a new phone number for your estate agency for a variety of reasons, you could be opening a new department or launching a new office in a different area. In both cases, registering and activating a new phone number is as easy as creating a new email address. Simply login to your client portal, select your new phone number and we’ll do the rest.
Understand And Learn Your Phone Calls With Call Statistics
In order to improve your customer service, you need to be able to understand and learn from your phone calls. The in-built call statistics feature of VoIP allows you to monitor call volumes, most popular days and times of the day for calls, calls answered, most popular numbers and the performance of your estate agents and letting agents so you can help them to achieve their targets. You can also email your call statistics to the management team so they can monitor the performance of each office/branch and estate agent to measure who is contributing the most business and which is taking the least.
Improve Your Customer Service And Prevent Mistakes With Call Recording
Call recording will also enable you to access recordings of every call made via your phone system in our secure customer portal. This allows you to learn from each and every call and provide advice to individual agents to help them improve their performance.
In the event that you require evidence of what is said between your customers and agents, the call recordings will be ready and waiting for you in the customer portal. This is often a critical feature if an offer is made and a dispute arises regarding the offer amount, with VoIP you will be able to replay the recording, check what was said and avoid costly mistakes.
VoIP For Estate Agents With CFone
CFone is the VoIP provider of choice for estate agents. We can help your estate agency save money with a hosted VoIP phone system. You can expect to have a reliable and feature packed phone system. Not all VoIP providers provide the high levels of customer service and support that our customers rely on to keep their estate agency running. We have earned a great reputation for providing business phone systems that your estate agents can rely on.
Call our team today on: 020 8573 1177 or contact us to discuss your phone system requirements.
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