In real estate, simply generating leads is just not enough. It is important to analyze the quality of these leads and build relationships with them. It is important to recognize each and every lead as a customer. However, the issue arises that these leads can come to you in real estate at any time of the day. Staying responsive to them 24×7 is not humanly possible.However, what is responsive is your company’s very own SMS bot. The SMS bot hype is still on the rise. SMS bots are being implemented by an increasing number of companies. This would, in the larger scenario, help shoot up your business’ customer engagement. More positive is customer engagement, more loyal are your customers to you. Before we get into why and how to get a brain for your business phone number in the form of an SMS bot, let us first understand what exactly an SMS bot is. What is a real estate SMS bot? First things first – What is an SMS bot? Take a scenario – when you call your bank, your first point of contact is a computer. This computer asks you to send it replies as number inputs via your keypad. For eg, Select 1 for Account Balance Type 2 for General Enquiries Choose 3 for Mobile Number Registration The list goes on. As and when you press the relevant numbers, the conversations flow. Once the computer has gained enough information, it can proceed in two ways. It either patches you through to an agent behind the phone or the conversation concludes when that is not deemed necessary. Very similar is anSMS Bot. Imagine all this conversation going on in messages. That is exactly what an SMS Bot is. It provides conversational content support to anyone making queries via text message on your company’s SMS enabled number. How is an SMS bot relevant to the real estate industry? Previously, listing properties or looking for properties on real estate websites was a tedious process. Making general inquiries was tough and time-consuming too. You had to talk to an agent on the phone or in person. The entire process would take up a lot of time owing to how many follow up calls one would have to make. Or the number of times one would have to visit their office to talk about it. Alternatively, many real estate businesses started providing the ease of filling up online forms. You could fill up your requirements, queries, etc in an online form and someone from the company would contact you in a day or two. Or maybe never. But how much of an ease is it really? Who really wants to sit and fill up a 20-30 fields long-form? How an SMS bot helps your customers get started? A majority of real estate leads are generated online. Accordingly, the first point of contact your lead will have with your company is your SMS bot. One might think how do these SMS bots actually kick off these conversations. SMS bots are very direct, to say the least. They instantly catch keywords in the person’s sent texts and helps them get started with their quests. In the real estate business, these questions may look something like this – Hi The SMS bot catches this keyword and texts back previously set answers to this keyword. Standard replies are – ‘Hey, how may I help you today?’ or ‘Hello, what are you looking for today?’ I want to buy a house. Usually, the SMS bot will catch the keyword ‘sell’ in the long sentence. It will then send a response fixed to this keyword. A sample response is – ‘Which area are you interested in?’ Jackson Heights, New York. The SMS bot would catch the location and accordingly ask follow-up questions. How many bedrooms would you require in the house? How many bathrooms would you require in the house? OR The customer could keep asking questions to the bot. For eg, Which areas in Manhattan are safe to live in? The SMS bot would then send amenu of items. Are there any current listings in Jackson Heights to buy? The SMS bot would fetch adynamic webhookand send the customer the follow-up text reply. This is just a sample of text follow that would take place once a customer asks the bot a question. The bot could ask follow-up questions in the form of textreplies. This helps set the tone of the conversation. Your leads get a direction in which to proceed ahead. The bots keep asking relevant questions or redirecting the leads to information they are looking for. Further details about why you need to get more excited about SMS bots An SMS bot can send replies either in the form text, dynamic webhooks, or menus. An entire workflow can be easily set up which takes care of every possible query or response from the customer. At the end of the process, all the information provided by the leads is usually logged into the company’s database, thus creating a portfolio of the lead. Alternatively, after collecting all requirements of the customer, these bots can also redirect the leads to the most relevant property listings for them to look at.

Let us have a more detailed discussion about why you need to get more excited about getting an SMS bot for your real estate business. SMS bots make your business omnipresent Imagine this – someone wants to purchase a property in Area X which is several miles away from their current residence in Area Y. They simultaneously need to purchase a new property and sell their old one. This is a major business opportunity for your company. Everyone involved in this scenario requires quick answers. However, here’s the twist – this someone is making these inquiries way past your business hours for the day. Additionally, night shift employees require several other amenities – snacks and beverages, security, a cab service, a completely functional office, and much more. An alternate and much simpler way to tackle this is by implementing an SMS bot on your business phone number. An omnipresent SMS bot would take care of all your leads 24×7. That too without Internet reliability. After collecting all relevant information from the lead, the SMS bot will either log the information in your CRM, or show the leads relevant property listings, or schedule property visits or simply do all of it. Generate highly qualified leads using SMS bots How many times does it happen in business that someone gets in touch with you, provides incomplete details, and then vanishes off the face of the Earth? An SMS bot would not only help in providing your leads the information about what they want but also give you what you want – better and highly qualified leads. The more precise information you have on your leads, higher are your chances of actually closing a deal with them. A happy customer is the one who feels valued and well understood. An SMS bot would not simply ask the lead of their contact information and then send a confirmation about a callback sometime soon. It will rather delve deeper. It will catch keywords in your customer’s replies. Then, it asks all relevant questions about the nature and extent of their query. A quick fact: National Association of Realtors found that 56% of buyers that find their home on the Internet are younger than 36 years old. Nurturing better and stronger customer relationships using SMS bots Filling up a long type form online won’t make your lead feel like they are being valued. More often, the information gathered from these forms is never actually worked upon by the company. Even if it is, the whole process is very mechanical and impersonal. SMS bots help you lay a very personal foundation for each of your customers. Since their first point of contact is a conversational bot which asks them all the relevant questions (besides answering the customer’s queries in the first place) they might not have even thought of, it allows your prospective customers to feel like the company is well interested and vested in their query and wishes to dig deeper to help them better. From the get-go, the lead feels valued. They would invest more trust in your company since it would assure them that their property or search for a property would be handled with care. Remember, for your company you might simply be selling properties, but for your customers, these properties are not just pieces of land but their current or future homes. Since the SMS bots would be friendly and attentive and asking all sorts of relevant questions, customers relationships are better nurtured. Complete conversational history – logging and tracking Imagine having to collect a plethora of information from the prospective customer on the phone or in-person and manually logging it into the system. On top of that, imagine the many blunders one would make in case there’s an error in the logging. An SMS bot assists in error-free and easier information logging. The complete conversation the bot has with the lead will be automatically logged into your CRM. This not only helps in creating a highly qualified customer base but also helps when an agent takes over the conversation. The agent would have all the previously fetched information in front of them. This would help them assist the customer better. A clueless support agent is of no use to anyone. With an integrated view of all the information, the agent would provide seamless assistance to the lead. Moreover, this also cuts down manual labor in terms of time and effort invested. No one from the company would have to dedicate a major part of their day to do boring and manual information logging since the SMS bot would do it for them. Automate scheduling and follow up processes with SMS bots Once the SMS bot has all relevant information it needs to understand the requirements of the customer, it will either patch the customer through to a qualified person in the company or redirect them to property listings. However, this is not all that it can do.

SMS bots help your leads schedule property viewings. They simply redirect the customer to a viewings scheduler system where they simply have to select the date and time they would be coming by the property to check it out. With the complete process highly automated, think of all the time and effort one could save. Generating new and highly qualified leads is automated. Logging information in your CRM is automated. The process of onboarding new sellers is automated. Nurturing better relationships with the customers is automated. Providing 24×7 customer support to your lead’s inquiries is automated. Your business is automated. Final Thoughts: Leave no customer behind There are no two thoughts about whether your real estate business needs an SMS bot or not. Your business will cut down on a lot of effort, money and time lost on coordinating with leads. With so much automation working in the background, your real estate business develops a brain of itself. The best part about this is that this brain is not all logical and impersonal. It is highly attentive, speaks the language of the leads, and friendly. Who wouldn’t want a compassionate brain automating a major portion of your real estate business? Explore the SMS Bot feature provided by JustCall here. Further reading: How to select the right CRM for your team? [A Step by Step Guide] How to turn your sales team into superheroes using VoIP Related