How to Get the Most Out of Online Portals

Oct 31, 2023

What are estate agents without new leads?

You used to pay newspapers to advertise your for-sale stock, but in the digital age, the vast majority of your new applicants are generated online. The biggest chunk of those leads likely come via the big three online portals, a key part of the industry and your business. Your agency probably spends £100s or £1,000s a month listing your sales and lettings properties on these portals to generate leads.

How can you be sure your customer-facing staff are getting the most out of the leads these online portals are bringing in?

That’s where Callwell comes in. This innovative online tool doesn’t just help you instantly respond to enquiries. It helps your team manage and prioritise every lead from every portal, so you never have to worry about losing track of enquiries.

If the online property portals are the bridge connecting you and your enquiries, Callwell is the supercar that makes getting over that bridge quicker (and easier) than ever.

Speed isn’t everything

We know how important leads are to your agency and Callwell lets you have a conversation with an enquirer in seconds. But not every conversation is made equal, not every phone call will lead to business straight away, and not every enquiry will always turn into a strong lead, no matter how good your team are. That’s why Callwell Pro helps you organise and analyse your leads as soon as they come in. It lets you keep track of every detail, from how your enquirer found you, to how long your negotiators have spoken with them , to when your staff last contacted them.

Running any business requires constant vigilance on spend and what’s giving a good (or any) return on investment. Paying to list your properties on online portals likely is one of your biggest monthly spends. With Callwell’s ROI calculator, you can see where your best leads are coming from – whether it’s your own site, OnTheMarket, Zoopla, or Rightmove, or anywhere else you might collect engaged leads from.

Callwell is made and managed by estate agents for estate agents – with decades of experience in the industry we know how important it is to make sure your finances are as efficient and effective as your sales and lettings teams. You might get the feeling that one online portal is pulling its weight more than another, or that one is letting you down. With Callwell, you can be sure of data-backed insights collected automatically by your team’s conversations and conversions.

You’ve likely accepted the necessary cost that you’re expected to spend every month on the online portals, but one of our early users took the reports Callwell generated and approached one of the portals that wasn’t giving the expected return on investment. His multi-branch lettings agency made the decision to cut that unnecessary cost and he found no drop in business.

Engaging with every lead is key

One of the biggest talking points we hear from agents up and down the UK is “email leads aren’t worth getting to; if they really cared they’d call or come in”. If you’ve ever thought this, we’ve got one thing to say:

Are you sure?

Is it worth missing those all-important valuation leads or tainting a potential relationship with a landlord with a growing property portfolio? We know that for your sales staff, going through every email and checking whether each one is relevant might seem tedious. But there’s real value in the data gathered, and with Callwell, every conversation is lined up ready for your staff, making it easier than ever to get through leads each day.

Every customer is different, and individual customers can change what they might need you for in months if not weeks. If you get an email asking for a viewing on a rental property, six months later that person might be looking to buy or they might have inherited a house from a loved one that they now wish to sell. If, when they reach out to you initially, you’ve responded quickly and had a good conversation even if it does only take a minute or two, they’ll remember that they mattered – and first impressions are everything.

For your customer-facing staff, whether it’s in sales or in lettings, they don’t have to be transforming leads into customers alone. We can’t promise that we’ll turn every lead into a customer – that’s your job – but what we can promise is that we’ll give your team the best tools to help them get repeat business, better enquiries, and better response times.

If you’re interested in turbo-boosting your team, get in touch with us today.

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.