Producing title work and closing real estate transactions might not be the most glamorous calling, but it’s an important service that you offer the real estate community.
More and more, though, you’re feeling like something needs to change to make your title company work better. Your employees are all hard workers, but even they can only do so much to keep Realtors, home buyers, lawyers and bankers, among others, in the loop with the chaos surrounding them.
You need to get some help, but where to start? Another employee won’t necessarily solve anything, and besides, you have nowhere to put them.
How about a real estate answering service?
Signs That It’s Time for an Answering Service
Some businesses grow and grow and never attempt to outsource their call answering.
Others have less of a need for call answering, so they don’t look into answering services. But yours is a company that has call volumes that ebb and flow. During the busiest times of the day in the busiest part of the sales year, it’s everything you can do to keep the lines clear, but then December or another busy season comes and things can change quickly.
Still, that’s not always reason enough to add yet another expense to your books. Instead, watch for these signs that the time has come to outsource some of your calling to live telephone operators:
Clients complain that your menu tree is too confusing. There’s a lot that goes into putting a closing together, as you well know, which can make telephone menu trees really confusing. When you only want to ask who to send a document to or reschedule a closing, the time wasted in a menu tree may be enough to push your relationships with real estate professionals to the brink.
Callers have to be immediately put on hold so all the incoming traffic gets answered. Having a confusing menu tree isn’t great, but it’s potentially better than having to put everyone on hold when call volumes go up during the day. It might seem like the right thing to do, since everyone is acknowledged, but the old greet and hold often ends in the caller disconnecting, sometimes for good.
Your phone rings and rings during closings. Closings are incredibly overwhelming for both buyer and seller, there’s so much paperwork and plenty of stress since both parties have limited experience at the closing table.
When the phone starts to ring and it won’t stop because you’re short staffed or your voicemail is on the fritz, your buyer or seller may become upset. They may even walk away when the mix of stressors is just right.
Appointments are often double-booked or overlooked entirely. You do your best to keep the calendar straight, but when other members of your staff are also booking closings and other appointments, it can get messy fast.
A dedicated appointment scheduling tool can solve this problem, using software that updates in real-time so no one double books appointments. And don’t worry, it’ll interface with the calendar tool you’re already using!
As a business services company, you understand the value of turning over certain parts of your workload to specialists. Your telephone answering service may be one of those areas that will bring much more benefit than cost, whether you choose to give your answering service all your calls or just have them take the calls you can’t.
