Portal enquiries landed in a shared inbox in bursts, mostly evenings and weekends, and negotiators worked through them on Monday morning. By then the keen buyers had booked with the agency across the road. They wanted every enquiry answered within minutes, qualified, and in the diary.
Three things kept going wrong, and each cost the business time, money or a customer.
Three agents working as one desk: answer every enquiry from the portals, the website and WhatsApp, find out what the negotiator needs to know, and book the viewing into the right person's diary.
We connected the portals, the agency's CRM and the negotiators' calendars, and ran the agents alongside the shared inbox for a week with a negotiator reading every reply before it went. The agency asked for two changes: a warmer tone for first-time buyers, and a rule that any enquiry on a property under offer goes straight to the listing negotiator. Both were in by the second week, and the inbox was switched over on day ten.
Enquiries are answered inside five minutes whether they arrive at 9am or 11pm, and each one comes to the negotiator with the buyer's position already noted. Saturday diaries fill through the week rather than in a Friday phone marathon, and the agency books more viewings from the same number of leads. The branch manager sees the hot buyers flagged each morning instead of finding them in the inbox.
'The Monday morning inbox used to be a graveyard of people who'd already seen it with someone else. Now they've usually viewed with us by Saturday.'
Branch manager
Maintenance requests came in by phone, email and text and were tracked on a whiteboard. Tenants chased for updates, contractors turned up unannounced, and gas certificates lapsed twice in a year.
New enquiries sat in a shared inbox until someone had a gap, often two days. Prospective clients had usually instructed another firm by then. They wanted every enquiry qualified and booked the same day.
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