The human touch: balancing automation and personalized service

Moving home is exciting, emotional, and at times… stressful. Clients want you to make the experience as smooth as possible. Balancing automation and personalized service is key for real estate businesses. While tech has done the industry a world of good, it requires care so that it doesn’t come at the expense of the human touch. 

For instance, chatbots are great at starting conversations but not so great at responding to personal questions. They can’t comfort people when they share concerns about noisy neighborhoods or future developments in the area. But a human can.

It’s not a case of automation vs. personalization. Both are essential to provide an efficient and effective service. Getting the balance right is about knowing when to automate and when to provide real, human client service. Let’s take a closer look.

The benefits of automation for real estate companies

Automation can seem intimidating – what if you lose the human touch and give clients a poor experience? But this concern will quickly fade after creating your first workflow. Automation simplifies work by automating tedious tasks and alerting agents when needed. It helps the human element as agents have fewer distractions taking their focus away from clients.

The benefits for real estate companies:

• Productivity – spend less time on repetitive tasks, sending the same emails and texts, etc., and focus on activities that help you grow your business.
• Improved clarity & communication – looking at your client workflows shows exactly where they are in the process, and what needs to happen next. 
• Learn more about your clients– automation tools collect data and make it easy to collect customer feedback. This helps you identify areas for improvement to become more customer-centric.

The benefits for clients:

• A more personalized experience– segmenting clients helps you create better content, more suited to their needs. Automation can also adapt workflows based on clients’ preferred communication methods. 
• Faster process– clients get all the information they need precisely when they’re supposed to get it.
• A more efficient experience– every client is different. Still, none of them want stacks of emails and piles of paperwork to deal with. Automation can tidy up processes and make them easier to digest.

Balancing automation and personalized service with the human touch in real estate

1. Be accessible to customers 24/7

Customers will always have questions and concerns when looking to move. And they want to speak to a person about them… not a voicemail service or bot. 

Having a real-estate-centric answering service – backed by real people – means you can welcome callers, screen them, book appointments, provide live chat assistance, and connect them to you via video calls. Clients can speak to a real person 24/7 giving them the human touch required for a successful real estate business.

2. Map out workflows for every service

Trying to build a workflow in a CRM from scratch isn’t easy. It’s common to notice areas for improvement as you map out processes –  but it can get overwhelming fast. It is easier and faster to map out all of your services in flowchart software or with pen and paper first. 

Review the workflows with your team to agree that they’ll make a great customer experience, and then build the workflows in your CRM.

3. Automate and adjust to find the right balance of automation and personalization

Your process will likely evolve as you learn what clients like or don’t like about your service.

Steps you can take to help you find the right balance:

• Segment your audience– the more specific your communication is to your clients’ needs, the better. 
• Learn customers’ preferences– during the screening phase, learn about their preferred method of communication. Some may prefer texts while others prefer emails.
• Collect customer feedback– get in the habit of sending out customer surveys to spot areas for improvement.
• Monitor & adjust– customer feedback and changes in the market will alert you to areas you may be able to improve.

It’s normal to find bottlenecks in your workflows. Clients may unsubscribe from your emails at a certain point or you might keep getting a phone call at certain points of your workflow. These are signs that people are losing interest, getting confused, or a need isn’t being met. Assess the data and use it to make adjustments.

Finding the right balance takes continuous improvement. But the juice is worth the squeeze – for you and your clients.

Want to see how you can capture more leads 24/7 and grow your property business with a live answering service? Book a free 15-minute consultation today.