It’s OK to say it: Good real estate customer service isn’t just good for the client. Like a bit of chocolate, it’s good for you too.

But this goes unsaid. Why? My guess is the understandable priority placed on clients in real estate. On having earned their trust. Converting. And ideally being their ‘property person’ for the long haul. In keeping burnout at bay, realtors should think about client retention like this rather: Real estate customer service that’s convenient for you and clients means you’re at your best while delivering for those clients. Now that’s a deal worth closing. 

As an estate agent on the move, ways to make your customer service convenient for everyone involved are what I liken to the triple S’s of simplifying, sanity-checking, and speeding up.

Keep reading to see what I’m on about in this shorter read with some insights from none other than Forrest Gump (and his mama!) along the way.

Real estate customer service: Simplifying

“Stupid is as stupid does.” -Forrest Gump

Simplifying agent-side customer service means better managing how client communication and activity are getting to you. If you’re checking a few email accounts, maybe even a couple phone numbers and phones – one for work, and one personal – and then your socials on top of that, you’re making this harder than it has to be. 

Leads are a different beast in real estate because of how off-hours and even personal the nurturing process can be. There’s a story behind every home being sold. And another for why someone wants to live in this neighbourhood or on that street. Getting these stories texted or emailed to you in bits is standard fare.

Realtor tools like our Social inbox can help. No gimmicks. This tool combines all your clients’ stories (and demands!) across email, website chat, and social activity onto one platform; Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in particular. This means both tracking and responding to client communication work like it were happening all in one place – which, if you think about it, is how it should be.

You also won’t lose leads with the Social inbox because contact information from the latest lead automatically syncs to your CRM. Communication. Simplified. Like I said. And this leads to our second S.

Real estate customer service: Sanity-checking

“Always be able to look back and say, at least I didn’t lead no humdrum life.” -Forrest Gump

Estate agents answering the same questions every day – if not hour – is a great way to test one’s sanity. For an agent on the move? Fuhgeddaboudit. But you know who can (and wants to) answer those samey questions hour after hour? Today’s top realtor tool: chatbots.

Fast becoming real estate’s sanity saviours, chatbot smarts have come a long way from the clunky, empty-headed bots of old.

2024's chatbots are time-savers that work like an e-doppelgänger or digital version of yourself, answering prospects conversationally when you’re busy or away and actually lightening your email inbox in the process, not adding to it. Chatbots nowadays can also:

• Display property details visually and any listing page multimedia – to include virtual staging
• Qualify leads so you know which leads are action-ready and if buyers also have a property to sell
• Let prospects book property viewings or any agent meet without email

All from right there inside the chatbot.

But here’s where things get interesting. Let’s say your newest listing piques the interest of an online prospect. Having asked a few neighbourly questions, your chatbot knows this prospect is serious and qualifies it as a high-quality lead. And now that lead wants to talk to you, the property agent. Sweet!

Nobody connects warming prospects and property agents like Serviceform does. This is thanks to a signature feature of our Chatbots called Automated lead routing. Auto-what-a? Automated. Lead. Routing. Check it out:

We put leads in touch with a property’s agent in real time. No emails. No back and forth. No third-party administrator. Just you and your new client. (Fingers crossed!)

When a prospect’s on-page interest is highest and wants to connect, you get a direct SMS notification – just as if the lead is already texting you. Then you respond when it’s convenient for you (the whole sanity thing, remember?) but as a real estate customer service best practice: the sooner, the better. As The Close reveals, not only can real estate prospects prefer texting as a primary communication method, but the medium greatly improves lead response times.

So stop answering the same listing page questions and wasting time on lower-quality leads! While the digital customer experience is summed up in one convenient conversational flow, how about yours? The agent’s digital experience? In a word, it’s hands-off. This is because you’ve already put in the hard work of making the listing. So why sell that listing again and again when our sanity-checking Chatbot does that for you?

Real estate customer service: Speeding up

“Mama says they was my magic shoes. They could take me anywhere.” -Forrest Gump

Better real estate customer service on the agent side of things also means making things faster. But we’re going to need more than magic shoes to get the job done. To do this, focus on your most important conversion events and how those events can be managed in fewer steps. Getting a client to book a property viewing, for example, marks a digital customer experience milestone. Well? Speed. It. Up.

Faster bookings means easier bookings. And no extra steps or email back and forth. Ourly, Serviceform’s evolution of modern meeting schedulers, does all of the above. It can live both on its own as a meeting scheduler and actually inside our Chatbots. The best part? It’s uniquely scalable and actually designed with flexibility and big teams in mind.

All this means real estate prospects are actively booking property viewings when their interest in a property is keenest. Research from The Real Estate Trainer shows online leads go cold in about 5 minutes! This bears repeating: 5 minutes. That’s all you have. So get your calendar for booking in front of real estate leads then and there, on this or that property page.

Ourly: Meeting scheduler is one real estate customer service tool that makes for a big step in reclaiming your day-to-day as a busy agent. With so many benefits baked in, let our many realtor tools like this one help you become the stress-vanquishing, strategy-savvy realtor Forrest would want you to be.

Wrapping up

After you’ve simplified the number of devices and platforms you communicate with clients on, then made the number of marketing activities around your listings fewer – or to say, saner – and ultimately sped up conversion by short-cutting how bookings are made, are you not a better agent at the end of the day? A happier agent? Because you will be. And so too will your clients.

Real estate customer service tools that work for both client and agent aren’t all that many. And digital customer experience has suffered as a result. But it doesn’t have to. Great customer service is very much a reality thanks to newer tools designed around both prospects and on-the-run real estate agents.

Again, pick up our Social inbox for easy-is-as-easy-does client communication. Then reduce friction in your real estate sales funnel with our Automated lead routing. And, my goodness, check out Ourly, the prettiest, most flexible (big teams!) meeting scheduler you haven’t seen.

Before you go, Forrest has just one more nugget of wisdom to share:

“Mama always had a ways of explaining things, so I could understand them.” -Forrest Gump

Like mama Gump, Serviceform understands people. And we’re super friendly. We specialise in techy solutions for real estate agencies and brokerages not great with tech or lacking the resources to go techy alone. Don’t be shy to connect with Mari today and let’s see what we discover in our free website review: