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Real Estate Answering Service
Use Virtual Assistants to Answer All Incoming Calls, Live, Up to 24x7x365
Goal:
The goal of your Real Estate Answering Service is to handle all incoming calls, including up to 24×7 inbound call receiving.
This should include comprehensive call reporting, including call recordings, call statistics, and ongoing feedback & optimization, to ensure your Answering Service is handling calls up to your standards.
The ultimate goal with this type of round-the-clock Answering Service is twofold:
#1. Capture More Leads. If you never miss a call, you should never miss a potential opportunity that enters your funnel via phone or text.
#2. Provide Exceptional Customer Service. If you’re the only Real Estate Business competing in your niche who answers calls 24×7, how will that influence your market’s perception?
How It Works:
Setting up your own Real Estate Answering Service is tricky.
There are two main components you can consider:
• Your own dedicated Virtual Assistant(s),
and / or…
• A 3rd party Answering Service.
On one hand, using your own dedicated Virtual Assistants to answer calls (at least during business hours) is going to provide the best possible experience to both you & your callers.
That’s because your dedicated VAs will function almost the same as having your own in-house receptionist.
On the other hand, a 3rd party Answering Service is going to be able to provide coverage over a much wider range of hours (including up to 24×7) for a much lower price (since you don’t pay their Agents to sit & wait for calls, you only pay for Live Call Minutes).
The downside of a 3rd party Answering Service is that it will be much less custom tailored to your unique situation. The Answering Service Call Reps will not be available for miscellaneous tasks after their Live Call has ended. They are literally just there to answer the call, go through the simple Script and FAQs, then take any notes before moving on.
Your dedicated Virtual Assistant, on the other hand, is much more similar to a Personal Assistant or in-house receptionist, in that they will be dedicated to your Real Estate Business for a pre-defined shift, regardless of whether or not they’re on a live call.
Your Answering Service Virtual Assistants can handle pretty much any type of inbound call, to Warm Inbound Leads, to Customer Service, and more.
Regardless of your situation, the first step is to determine the best way to integrate outsourced virtual assistants into your call handling processes. We can work any hours you require and depending on your own phone systems, we can even live-transfer calls directly to you as if we were sitting in the office. We can provide call center veterans, skilled in salesmanship or customer service – depending on your requirements.
That said, there are obviously certain types of inbound calls that are more appropriate to answer in-house, locally, if at all possible. We can work with you to determine the best combination of outsourced call receiving & in-house, local call routing. Plus, we can even help train your dedicated virtual assistant(s) and develop scripts for common call types.
Pros:
Never miss a call again.
Get your calls answered live (as much as 24x7x365) by a trained, dedicated human resource who is familiar with your business & campaign objectives.
Capture more Warm Inbound Leads, improve your closing ratio, and provide better, more accessible client support.
Cons:
A Real Estate Answering Service is not necessarily appropriate to answer 100% of your inbound calls (some calls will be better routed directly to your local staff).
Plus, it requires frequent monitoring & optimization to ensure consistently high quality performance.
Work Estimate:
The Work Estimate for your Real Estate Answering Service depends on what combination you’ve decided upon, regarding in-house Virtual Assistants vs. using a 3rd party Answering Service.
For an in-house VA, you can pretty much do the Work Estimate math based on the hours of coverage you require. For example, Mon – Fri, 9am – 5pm is 40 Work Hours Per Week, or about 160 Work Hours Per Month.
In most cases, you can get away with using Overseas VAs for this role, but if it’s sales-intensive, you might even consider a US-based VA, who can function as an Inside Sales Agent (ISA) during down-time.
On the other side of the coin, one of the greatest values in outsourcing your inbound call receiving to an established 3rd party Answering Service is that you’ll have the perk of resource sharing.
If your call volume is insufficient to justify a full-time worker, but you’d still like full-time coverage (160 hours / month, 8×5) … or even round-the-clock coverage (24x7x365), there’s no replacement for an Answering Service where you just pay for actual Live Call Minutes.
Typically, with this type of arranagement, you can expect to pay somewhere in the ballpark of $1 – $2 Per Minute, perhaps with an additional monthly subscription fee.
This means you can get full-time (or even round-the-clock) coverage for the cost of a part-time worker, without sacrificing quality.
The best approach if you have a decent call volume is combining a dedicated Virtual Assistant for peak hours, who can also make call-backs & perform other administrative duties… with an after-hours 3rd party Answering Service to pick up any additional inbound calls when your dedicated Virtual Assistant is off-shift.