Call Answering for Estate Agents

We have had a surge of interest from estate agents lately with how busy the housing market has been recently!

Many offices are struggling to keep up with the number of calls coming through at the moment in relation to house viewings. But what happens if your staff are too busy to answer enquiry calls that actually make your business money?

We have seen multiple cases where a caller has been ringing to get a quote to sell their house, no one had answered the phone and so they have just tried the next agent they had in mind.

We recently took on a large estate agents in Belfast as a Call Answering client, they have multiple staff members and properties all over Belfast.

Due to the pandemic, our client had resorted to working from home even though they have a premises just outside Belfast City Centre. To stay in line with current restrictions and protect their staff, they decided to work on a hybrid basis. Half of their team are still working in the office, while the other half are at home. Their calls were forwarded to all members of staff to answer between them, due to the sheer volume of callers.

You can imagine this got quite messy. Their customer service massively suffered as callers couldn’t get through to who they needed to speak with, whether it was sales, letting or block management.

They decided to streamline their calls by having them forwarded to our reception and then all messages are sent to the correct departments. This involved putting a simple call forward on via their own telecoms company.

Our receptionists answer the phone with their company name and familiarise our clients’ properties so we can answer most questions.

For this particular client, we tell their callers that whoever they’re looking for will give them a call back.

Our receptionists take note of the callers name, the property in question, their query and their number. We then send the email with all the callers details to the correct person.

This means that all callers speak to an actual person on the other end of the phone rather than an answering machine. This also allows all agents to get back to messages in their own preferred order. Our client started with our standard package, which is £30 a month with 25 minutes included. We monitored how many calls we were receiving and worked out a larger package with more minutes inclusive to save the client the extra charges each month.

For more information our packages, click here!