Maintaining a cordial relationship with your customers after closing the deal is critical, especially in the real estate business. Post sales process in the real estate industry needs an absolute smooth handover by the sales teams to the post sales team while the buyer has booked their flat and is now eagerly waiting to move in. A robust real estate CRM helps builders to track all customer activities on one platform, provide them a consistent experience, track their future payment schedule till possession and exceed expectations to increase positive word of mouth.
Here are few benefits of why having a post sales function is very critical to be an inbuilt part of your existing CRM:
A faster transition from sales to customer satisfaction: Once the booking amount is credited, your customer interacts with your post sales team for the very first time, hence moving from a well-defined, automated sales process that a Lead Management System offers to a less-structured onboarding process to a different platform and different set of people might throw your buyers off the course. A platform that has an inbuilt post-sales CRM will assist you in quickly and successfully filling these gaps if your team is seeing any hiccups in the handoff from sales to post sales.
Seamless mapping of the customer’s journey: Most SaaS companies desire to have a customer journey map in place so that they can see the steps your buyer takes before finally buying the flat. Typically, a customer’s journey in closing a deal is approx 1-3 months depending on the budget and purpose of buying. It is a time taking process to build each of your customer’s journey maps. And imagine if you have to create this journey twice or if there is a loss of data while migration or integration with another independent post sales solution! Having a solution that takes care of the end to end journey, proactively assists you for payment reminders, gives you all background and history of the customer during the buying process, will lessen your burden from late payments, and also enable an above par customer experience.
Simple to recognise customer milestones: A post-sales module is typically more data-driven than behavioural in nature. There are many complex challenges to solve – payment schedule, issuing demand and interest letters, maintaining the formats as authorised by the banks, managing unit cancellation and shifting, loan management, issuing possession letters and many more.. At each stage, you need to analyse each of your customer’s payment patterns, and also maintain continuous engagement so that the customer is not lost in between. Having a collaborative tool with fundamental features like automated reminders and follow up, provision for letter formats to remove redundant work of manually issuing demand and interest letters, maintaining tasks and notes with due dates, solves most of your major problems.
Now that we have looked at the business use-cases, let’s go through key features of a robust post-sales module functions in the CRM:
Booking & Payment Collections. Online & Offline payment receipts: Builders and customers prefer speed bookings and hence both the segments have moved towards digital payment options. The CRM of your choice should cater to your customer’s preferred choice of payment option and have them well integrated to the platform. Additionally, payment receipts should be sent at one click of a button to their preferred mode of communication.
Document creation and management: A really effective post-sales module will enable the team to create, print and send allotment letters through email to your customers at record speed. You can upload customer documents in a central place with role based access to your team, and manage your documents at a click of a button.
Post Booking Email / SMS updates: A very common occurrence to deal and be prepared in the residential real estate is unit cancellation or unit shifting. A robust post sales module will have features to manage unit cancellation or unit movement from the platform, will have a record of all unit changes and their payment refunds in one place without disturbing the customer’s previous records without any hassle. Proactive communication by sending real time project status updates to your customers, sending emails when their units are nearing possession, after unit changes, enhances the customer’s trust on the builder’s brand.
Send demand & interest letters, possession letters: Generating, maintaining different formats of banks & sending demand letters and interest letters through automation from the CRM reduces a lot of human errors and brings efficiency in the processes. An advanced CRM will let you send letters directly from the platform as well as send automated reminders who have passed their payment due dates. To complete the customer journey, the CRM should also generate & send possession letters to your customers directly from the platform with compliant GST and real estate taxation laws.
Real estate is an ever evolving market, and realtors must incorporate technology into their daily business activities. Though collecting leads and nurturing them for conversions in the best interests of the consumer is critical, so is sustaining post-sales connections, a custom-designed platform only for the real estate industry.
It helps to stay up to speed with organised information after the sales process, manage post-sales operations, and existing and future leads through referrals, marketing campaigns and so much more. And on top of that, it helps the real estate builders community to stay in touch with their customers to provide an outstanding customer experience and establish trust.
