5 ways reporting can shape the way you do business

Aug 9, 2024

In an ever-changing market like the housing market it’s important to stay on top of changes as they happen.

You might live and die by your subscription to The Negotiator newsletter. And though relying on industry news to find out what to expect over the next few months can be helpful, solely having that be the only source you let shape the way you run your business is missing one vital piece of the puzzle…

…Your own day-to-day activities.

From negotiators working alone or with a small team to the massive corporations with a branch in every town, by not analysing the work your team do you’re likely missing opportunities for growth.

And it’s not just for growing your business; assessing and acting on your discoveries can have many benefits across your organisation. So here are five ways that analytical reporting can shape the way you do business.

Smarter Spending

Reporting is undoubtably a time-investment, but it’s an investment that can give instant returns in the form of cost savings.

How certain are you that every penny you’re spending in your business is worth it? Sure, that extra packet of biscuits or that coffee machine might just be there to keep your staff smiling, but your bigger investments – like your website, your listings on online portals, your advertising in general – should be bringing more money into the business than they’re costing.

If you’re tracking leads as soon as they come in, you might quickly discover that some of your most valuable customers are coming from one specific place or that you’re not getting leads from one of your biggest expenses.

Management

Managing a team, no matter the industry, can be a challenge. If you have a Sales and Lettings branch, just keeping track of each team member’s daily to-do list is hard enough, add on top of that, facilitating growth and development, and helping them give the best service they can to your customers.

This is where reporting can really help. With strong KPIs in place for your team and a process to help you track each of these easily, you can ensure that every team member is on the right track.

Tracking trends

As we said earlier, industry magazines don’t have to be your only source to track trends within the sector – you can be your own source! You’ll have a much better time reacting to your business’s successes and changes than you will responding to general industry trends.

Understanding what impacts success, and sharing that with your team, can help you make the best of every situation. And if you start to see numbers declining, you’ll be able to recognise that changes need to be made long before it’s too late to do so.

Growth

We’ve already discussed how reporting can help you save money, but it can also help you decide how you spend money. Whether it’s about finding areas that need investment to improve them, or where you’re already finding huge success, by tracking and analysing these parts of your business you can start to find real, concrete pathways to growth.

But investing is only one part of growing your estate agency. Reporting can also help you identify sales opportunities from leads and customers. By gaining further insight into the market, and your customers, you can also begin to help encourage more business from the data you have on leads.

This means, from marketing to sales, with a broad view of your reporting, you can gain useful insights and close more sales.

Share your insights

In the property market, you’re there to support sellers and buyers, renters and landlords, and if you have your own insights into the industry, you have content that will be useful to them.

We can all say that “many people look to sell their house around January/February” but it could be that you see more people looking to downsize in your area in October, or you see an uptick in rental enquiries around March.

All these insights are useful to sellers and landlords who might not get the opportunity to assess the industry as much as you can. And this doesn’t just stop in day-to-day conversations – if you want to present yourself as an expert to your customers, by utilising your own reporting you gain an unparalleled insight into your local market.

Taking the time to report on all angles of your business gives you a huge amount of possibilities, and we’ve seen our users implement transformative change thanks to the backing of our data.

With Callwell Pro, you don’t just get complete control over your leads; you get insights that give you the power to analyse your leads, your staff, and your business. This includes seeing how many leads you’re receiving and from which sources, how many leads are actioned daily(and even hourly), and how many of them are being missed, it even lets you see call durations and outcomes instantly. Our reporting system is designed to get you the insights you want, in a well-presented, understandable and actionable way.  

And don’t worry, Callwell can update your CRM with all of that information. If you want to find out more about what Callwell Pro can do, get in touch with us today at sales@callwell.co.uk.

Enquiry alerts

Callwell Alerts allows you to notify key personnel, by email, if a lead has not been called by the local branch. The alerts are easy to setup by your company administrator.

Examples of alerts commonly used:

  • Any enquiry not called back within 1 hour - Branch manager receives email.
  • Branch managers receiving an alert if the Callwell Score below a set threshold.
  • Business owners receive an alert if the Callwell Score falls below a very low threshold.

Callwell Alerts are included as part of your Callwell Pro package.

Scheduled calls with Morning Caller

Approximately 50% of leads are received between 6pm and 9am the next morning and generally, we are at our most productive during the first 90 minutes of our working day. Which makes it even harder to call all your over-night leads before your competitor.

Callwell's Morning Caller schedules your over-night enquiries to start calling your branch at 10 minutes after your Callwell opening time and then one lead will call every 10 minutes from that point onwards.

Ensuring you and your team deal with those hard to come by leads quickly and efficiently, while maximising your ability to carry out business.

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Inbound calls and ad tracker

Callwell does a brilliant job in helping agent with lead management of their portal and web email enquiries, but what about the Phone Calls?  

Callwell can also help with these.  We give you a dedicated number you can use for the portals and your own website leads.  This can be the same number or a dedicated number for each if you want to see the volumes and quality from each.  This number connects to your branch number or a mobile number if you wish. 

The call shows in your Callwell Enquiry Screen in the same way as an email.  If the caller has also emailed then we can show you caller details.  Then simply answer the phone in the usual way.  

From this system you can also send SMS text auto responders, follows ups and ask additional questions.  

Just another helpful tool from Callwell - allowing you to make that first great impression, first time every time.  

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Email integrations

Send automated messages through our integration with Mailchimp.

ROI indicator

Our ROI indicator is clever! Used on a regular basis, this feature will help you understand exactly what you are getting from the portals you use.

For example, if you upload the details of the completions last month, the amount each ‘deal’ is worth and the amount paid for the source or portal, our report will show you your ‘Return on Investment’.

Your report will be stored on Callwell and can be retrieved at any time. The report is designed to be printed as a PDF for management or board meetings (or perhaps meetings with your portal provider!).

Team insights

Callwell team insights provides you with the ability to review the individual KPIs of each staff member in real time. For each individual the Performance screen shows:

  • Callwell score: The Average Callwell Score achieved
  • Enquiries: Number of enquiries the individual has clicked to ‘claim’
  • Calls (attempted) and (successful): The total number of each type of call
  • Total call time and average call time: Total time spent on calls and the average time for each call
  • Average review score: Where reviews is switched on the average star rating for reviews received

Performance included as part of your Callwell Pro package.

Live management reporting

Live Management Reports provide you with headline statistics and ensure you never lose touch of branch activity. We will provide you with a URL link that instantly presents  the number of leads received, broken down into enquiry types.

Within seconds you can filter out your valuation numbers and check whether contact has been made. This not only highlights leads received during working hours, but will give you detail on contacts made to those out-of-hours enquiries.

Scoring and leaderboards

Real-time customer service leaderboards

Callwell Score – each lead is given 1,000 point, a point is lost during working hours for every minute a lead is not both claimed or called, only a successful call will count. 

Callwell Scoring is optional and can be turned on or off. Your team can view a Callwell Score league table in real-time, at branch level and area level, leveraging their competitive nature to drive improved customer experience.

Your senior management can benchmark the overall Callwell Score against that of competitors, see Company Report. The performance of individual colleagues can be viewed, in the team insights report.

Statistics dashboard & reports

We provide real-time data analysis through Callwell's dashboard to help you manage your performance.

Missed enquiry alerts

Callwell Alerts allows you to notify key personnel, by email, if a lead has not been called by the local branch. The alerts are easy to setup by your company administrator.

Examples of alerts commonly used:

  1. Any enquiry not called back within 1 hour - Branch manager receives email.
  2. Branch managers receiving an alert if the Callwell Score below a set threshold.
  3. Business owners receive an alert if the Callwell Score falls below a very low threshold.

Email and SMS auto responders

Callwell auto responders help you stay in contact with you customers 24/7.

As soon as the customer makes an enquiry, they receive an email or text message with a message of your choice. The messages can be configured to be sent during the hours that you specify, for example, you may want a slightly different wording on the message that you send over the weekend to those during the week.

All auto responders can be branded with your logo.

Lead qualification

Callwell auto responders help you stay in contact with you customers 24/7. As soon as the customer makes an enquiry, they receive an email or text message asking them to click on a link and complete a simple form. When they click submit Callwell will update the system with the information, immediately. This feature enables you to gather the essential information you require in order to prioritise the customers you speak to.

Callwell automatically replies to a new enquiry, by SMS or email, asking predetermined questions regarding rental budget and household income, then we qualify the tenant allowing you to prioritise who to call first.

This feature is completely flexible and can sent at the times of day you choose, asking the questions that are important to your business. You can also brand the message with your logo.

Lead assign

Callwell Assign ensures to never forget which lead to give to which negotiator to follow up on and you’ll never have to print an enquiry again.

Enquiry type identified

Enquiry type & source of the lead displayed in the enquiry dashboard.

Depending upon which dropdown selections the customer has made, there are 22 definitions of enquiry type. These include Vendor, Landlord, Tenant, Viewing, First time buyers etc. All types are displayed in our easy-to -read format.

We also include the source of the lead, your own website, portals, or other advertising sources, our aim to give you full visibility on where an enquiry comes from and the type of enquiry.

Internal messenger

Callwell Messenger provides the user the ability to pass a lead, message, reminder or referral to a colleague in their office or another branch.

  • Enter the Name and Telephone number and choose the Type of the lead.

 

  • Choose the branch or users you would like the message to go to. Then add your text.

 

  • Once you click Create, the message will appear on the Callwell Enquiry screen of the branch or user you choose.

Full contact history

Recording all your call outcomes through Callwell means all your history is in one place.

Manual call back

Manual Calling enables a user to call customers using the Callwell system.

The feature is simple to use; open an enquiry and click Call Now and you’ll receive a call back from Callwell, press 1 and you’ll be in touch with your customer.

Record the outcome of your call and this will put the enquiry in your name, Call history will also update. Manual calls will come out of your allocated call minutes, and these will differ depending if you have Callwell Pro or Callwell Essentials.

All your leads in one place

Incoming customer emails, from all of the sources that you invest in, are displayed in a consistent easy-to-read format. The leads are all in one place and displayed in date and time order.

You can see at a glance the leads actioned, how they have been actioned, who’s actioned them.  If the action was via a call you can also see in Call History the call duration, and the number of times the call was attempted.

You can also see clearly the details from the original lead about the vendor or applicant, the property they were interested in and any notes that they added to the enquiry.

Instant calls

Instant Calls – if an email enquiry is sent during working hours, the Callwell system will ring your branch number, once a member of staff picks up the phone they will hear an automated message telling them the source of the lead, and the enquirers name, they are then asked to press 1 to be connected.

They then have approx. 20 seconds before the phone will ring at the applicant/vendors end, this gives you time to look at your Callwell dashboard to see all details about the enquiry.

This delivers several advantages, the phone will ring your branch seconds after the enquiry has been sent giving you a much greater chance of getting through to the person.

The speed of call will also get you in front of many other agents that don’t have this type of system, the sweet spot especially for valuation enquiries is to call back within 30 minutes or run the risk of missing out.