Real Estate Case Study: boost of number of calls by 55% and tracking of sales reps’ conversations from mobiles

In real estate, employees are often working outside the office. For example, they can show the building process to a potential or existing customer. In these cases, sales reps use their mobile phones to communicate with customers, so the management can’t control such calls in any way. The solution from lifecell and Ringostat helped the Ukrainian developer to solve this issue. The company was also able to improve the effectiveness of ads, increase the number of calls and even boost sales.

Project details

Client: LEV Development property developer 

Region: Western Ukraine and Kyiv

Period: since April 2020 up to current date

LEV Development builds and sells residential and commercial real estate, as well as parking spaces. Moreover, the company’s customers can invest in apartments and hotel rooms. In this case, the administration is on the hotel’s side, and the investor simply makes a profit.

Since the purchase of real estate is expensive, customers usually think a little longer to make a final decision. It may take from two to three months, depending on various reasons. During this time, the future buyer can call and text LEV Development from time to time. Meanwhile, the company has to keep the entire communication with a customer.

The product has many features that sales reps try to explain in detail during the communication with customers. However, the buyer is not always able to quickly process the information. Thus, the company has to deal with objections. They are a crucial part of work in an unsettled/new investment property market.

That’s because the property may change during the building process, or new projects with similar competitive advantages appear in the region. Therefore, while promoting a product, LEV Development always records all comments and objections. The company tries to give answers to all possible questions and notes them in the CRM. The company also closely monitors the correctness of messages in ads.

One of the most important tasks is that LEV Development must be represented in all online channels. They have to be integrated with a CRM system so that sales reps can instantly respond to users’ questions and requests.

LEV Development promotes its services and products via ads in social networks, marketplaces, and real estate platforms, as well as in specialized, news and lifestyle media. The company also actively works with customer bases, choosing a communication strategy, depending on the stage of the lead in the funnel.

The developer communicates with its customers using several channels at once:

• via phone;
• on social networks;
• via messengers and chatbots;
• by email.

Potential customers usually call rather than text LEV Development. Calls are 80% of all requests. The site has a special form for a consultation, however, users fill it out only in 3% of cases. This situation is typical for the real estate niche in general and other areas with a high average check. The issue of trust is important here, so people prefer to call and make sure that the developer is reliable. In addition, by phone, you can quickly discuss all the questions that might be interesting: the availability of the desired apartment, payment by installments, etc.

Considering such a volume of calls and their importance for business, LEV Development was looking control tool rather than for a simple solution for connection. This would help to understand how sales reps communicate with customers: whether they miss calls and whether they understand the product.

Client’s tasks while connecting Ringostat were the following:

1. Integrating telephony system and recording conversations in good quality. Before using Ringostat, the client was faced with the fact that the customer and the sales rep did not hear each other well enough.
2. Recording of conversations from mobile phones in a virtual PBX. Thus, the management can track the entire history of communication with a customer: no matter what devices used employees to communicate.
3. Transferring calls to CRM and creating tasks for processing missed calls. Moreover, CRM should receive information about the advertising source of the lead and the housing estate that the customer was interested in.
4. Collecting data on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. The client needed data that shows the effectiveness of the launched advertising campaign. Indeed, before the start of cooperation, the developer “blindly” allocated the budget.

Project connection

“We used to work with another service for connection, however, we weren’t satisfied with its tech support team. And we also needed more features than simple telephony. We needed a tool for tracking sources of leads.

We like Ringostat for its wide features, easy integration with CRM, and call sampling. The digital environment is constantly changing, new tools for promotion appear. Therefore, it is important to be aware of the changes and quickly adapt to them. Ringostat support helps us with that task. Guys are always in touch and quickly make changes to the project.”

Alla BashkirovaHead of Digital Marketing LEV Development

The company connected Ringostat for the main site of the developer and three more housing estates. LEV Development also configured the integration with the CRM system. However, there was one more important task — control of calls made by sales reps via their mobile phones. After all, the company’s customers often call when the sales representative is outside the office. The developer used different solutions to record such calls, but the quality of the call recording was too poor. 

During the project setup, LEV Development said that they want to record and send such calls to the CRM. Moreover, the CRM system should receive information on the sales rep who accepted or made the call. That’s why Ringostat specialists advised LEV Development to activate the “Joint FMC Network” service from lifecell.

Prior to that, the client used the numbers of another mobile telephone network operator, however, the time for calls recording was limited. Having learned about lifecell’s capabilities, the developer switched to this operator, fully retaining their phone numbers, including the telephone prefix.

FMC advantages:

• unification of various branches of the company into a single telephone network, regardless of the size of the business. It also applies to mobile phone numbers and fixed-line numbers;
• internal short numbering 22*XXXXXX, including from three to six numbers for mobile and fixed phones — sales reps can use these numbers to communicate with each other; 
• unification of all telephone equipment used by the company into a single network;
• smart calls processing — recording, evaluating the quality of sales reps’ work, reports, choice of the call processing logic, and flexible call forwarding to GSM lines.

FMC also allows you to save on internal calls between employees.

“The FMC service helps companies reduce their telephony costs. Especially if company sales reps make a lot of internal calls from landline phones to smartphones. The amount of savings depends on the number of such calls. At the same time, we charge traffic per second.”

Dmitry Konovalovan expert in solutions and offers for corporate business at lifecell

How the solution works:

• the buyer calls the employee’s lifecell phone number;
• the call goes through the Ringostat virtual PBX;
• information about the call is recorded in our platform’s reports — the selections include tables and graphs;
• a call recording is attached to each conversation that you can listen to:

• 
• the call is forwarded to CRM, used by LEV Development;
• by the fact of the call, works the logic described below;
• the same scheme works for outbound calls.

For now, the following team of the client’s company works with the FMC service:

• sales reps;
• sales department manager;
• realtor relations officer.

Due to this, the company’s management sees calls from landline numbers and smartphones in one interface. And can easily monitor the entire history of communication with customers. 

Telephony building

All calls from customers are accepted by a single LEV Development sales department: 

• first, the call is simultaneously driven to the landline phones of six sales reps — all of them are connected to a virtual PBX;
• if employees do not answer within 20 seconds, the call will transfer to the sales reps’ mobile numbers connected to the FMC;
• if no one picks up the phone there, the call will go to the department manager’s phone, which is also connected to the FMC.

During non-working hours, an answering machine is turned on so that a potential customer can leave a request. Immediately after that, LEV Development will receive an email with a notification and a link to the recording.

When employees are at work, they use the Ringostat Smart Phone extension. When a customer calls, it expands to show more details on a customer: 

• his name, if it is already added to CRM — from Ringostat Smart Phone you can follow the link to the deal and contact card;
• how many times the customer has already called and visited the site;
• from which source, channel, campaign, and what keyword the potential buyer came from;
• which pages he viewed most often — so the employee immediately sees which property the customer is interested in, etc.

A callback form is also connected to all projects of LEV Development. The company chose a dark color scheme for it, available in Ringostat — this is how the callback matches the website design and looks like an organic part of it:

The callback is also built into the online registration form for consultation on the website. As soon as the user fills and sends it — Ringostat automatically dials an employee. Callback reaches the sales rep and then transfers a call to the customer. This allows you to contact the lead while he is still interested in your offer.

In addition, LEV Development uses advanced outbound connection settings. When a sales rep makes a call, a customer always sees a mobile number, even if an employee calls via the landline phone. The developer chose this option because he noticed that this scheme makes customers pick up the phone and call the company back.

Work with call tracking

In addition to communication solutions, LEV Development uses call tracking — a technology that determines the advertising source of a call. Dynamic call tracking is enabled for one of the LEV Development projects. It identifies specifications on the call, including source, channel, campaign, and keyword:

Example of Ringostat report that includes sources of calls

For other projects, the developer uses a static call tracking type. There is a special dedicated substitution number for each source. For example, a developer has one number for announcements on real estate platforms, another for mailings, etc.

The LEV Development marketer checks Ringostat reports and uploads the information to Google Spreadsheets. There, a specialist can define the most effective activities. After that, he calculates the budget and a cost of a lead.

How the integration with CRM works

The developer considered telephony and integration with the CRM system as his primary option. LEV Development used a similar integration even before connecting Ringostat. However, there was no information about the call driven to the CRM. Moreover, the deal did not include records of calls made via mobile phones.

After connecting telephony and FMC, the client set up integration with CRM. Its smart logic took over lots of routine tasks, previously made by sales reps:

• when a customer calls, a lead, task, and deal are immediately created in CRM;
• if the employee has already accepted the call, there creates a closed task with the link to the recording of a conversation;
• if the sales rep does not pick up the phone, the task with a deadline “to Call Back” is assigned to a responsible employee;
• data about the activity that led to the call is transferred to each deal;
• it shows the employee who answered the call, as well as the housing estate that interested a customer.

The same logic works for calls received and made from lifecell numbers. All such settings work by default when any client launches the integration of Ringostat + CRM. But LEV Development slightly optimized it for their business in the Ringostat account. It is possible due to the following matrix:

Results

1. For now, developer marketers understand how many new applications drive a particular ad. By defining the most effective campaigns and keywords, professionals can optimize ads to generate more revenue.
2. The company turned off ads that did not bring calls and invested the budget in the most successful sources.
3. Due to optimization, LEV Development receives more requests from customers. Comparing June 2021 to April 2020, the number of calls from the main site increased by 55%. And the number of targeted calls increased by 36%.
4. The developer has redistributed 10% of the budget for the channels and began to receive on average 10% more new applications for the same costs. Sales from Facebook increased by 20%.
5. Now, due to the FMC service from lifecell and Ringostat, the management can listen to calls from all phones used by sales reps. Thus, experts have discovered many useful insights:

• it makes sense to develop scripts for each type of call;
• sometimes the buyer does not fully understand the sales representative, however, specialists can always find the recordings of conversations, and this solves 99% of challenging situations;
• the most frequent questions asked by customers became clear now — experts sort out such questions and make answers and FAQ blocks using other marketing channels: for example, in posts on social networks.