Connect Now is focused on making a quick connection between consumers and sales people. Enabling quick response has benefits for all parties. The consumer gets an immediate response to their query and the salesperson is more likely to connect with the lead and eventually close business with that person. In addition, the Connect Now platform gives brokers and business owners transparency into inbound leads. This includes their sources, claim times, and salesperson performance.
In response to customer needs, Connect Now has developed a number of innovative routing methods for brokerages and teams. As an extension of our earlier post on the basics of Lead Routing for Brokerages, the following is a list of ways routing techniques available through Connect Now:
Availability-based Lead Routing for Brokerages
Given our focus on making quick connections between consumers and salespeople, availability-based routing permeates the entire Connect Now system. With few exceptions, only agents who are available when a lead comes in are notified, though unclaimed leads are always accessible in the “unclaimed leads” tab, with or without notifications.
Real-world example: A business puts the Connect Now CNipIT on the main page of their website, and agents who are available show up there as available to “Connect Now”. The first agent to claim/respond to that lead gets it. More engaging than a traditional “contact us” form, our CNipIT pop-up is similar to chat, but promises instant connection, via phone, to a sales professional knowledgeable about the property of interest. Connect Now’s own sales teams fields inquiries from prospects generated from our website…where you are reading this post!
Connect Now’s “CNipIT” lead capture pop-up
Team-Based Routing
Often, business owners want certain leads to go to a particular group or “team” as a subset their organization. This is easily done with team-based routing. Admin users whose business has “organization” privileges in Connect Now can create an unlimited number of teams and sub-teams for routing. In addition, reporting can show the data for the entire organization as well as for individual teams. Team routing gives organizations maximum flexibility.
Real-world example: A brokerage has a number of offices in a given geographical area. It creates teams for each office so that leads coming in for properties that correspond to those offices go directly to those agents.
Team Waterfalls
An addition to team routing that some of our customers are beginning to use is Team Waterfalls. Under team routing, you can designate a “waterfall” for leads. If a lead remains unclaimed, an additional group/user or groups will get notified about the lead within a specified time period. The broker or other designated user can also be set to handle the lead, if unclaimed. This ensures that each new inbound lead receives a timely response to their inquiry.
Connect Now’s setup of Team Waterfalls using our admin dashboard setting
“My Listing My Lead”-Based Routing
The large majority of real estate firms agree that the listing agent should have “first dibs” on leads that come in on his/her listings. At the same time, listing agents are often too busy to respond to leads, and owners want to make sure that all leads are handled promptly. Enter “my listing my lead” routing with waterfalls. Admins (or listing agents themselves) can set up waterfalls, giving the listing agent a certain amount of time to respond to a lead, followed by two additional groups.
Real world example: A listing agent (if available in the app) has 3 minutes to respond to a lead. After that, Connect Now notifies trusted team members about the lead (for 3 minutes) followed by a “whole office” team. If the lead is claimed at any point, additional recipients will not be notified about the lead.
“My Listing My Lead” lead routing setup screen
Zip and Price-Based Routing
Leads that are not attached to an office listing agent can be routed based on zip code and price range. These settings are set up by the broker/admin. With this type of routing, you can assign zip codes and price ranges to individual agents, and also set a “default” agent (or groups) for leads that do not match any of your designated routing criteria.
Easy setup for lead routing by Zip Code or Price
One Agent, One Lead
As an optional setting within lead routing, business owners and brokers can indicate that they would like future leads already claimed by a given agent to go to that agent. In this case, new inquiries by an already-claimed lead are automatically assigned to the original claiming agent, and that agent is notified. This way, the consumer grow a relationship with the agents as they research multiple properties of interest to them.
A simple toggle allows admins to activate this feature
Dynamic Allocation
While we at Connect Now are thrilled when a team of agents fully adopt our tools, sometimes some agents have quicker fingers than others. With our dashboard, brokers can easily see if a disproportionate amount of leads are being claimed by one or two agents. While this is not to say those agents aren’t superstars communicating with each lead effectively, many of our customers have asked for a way to more evenly allocate leads across all agents. This has proven especially true in metropolitan areas, heavy with rentals where fast, but meaningful, conversations are a must to close a transaction.
Dynamic allocation is a way of “spreading the opportunity” of leads coming in without compromising too much on consumer response times. In dynamic allocation, the system looks at lead claim activity in the last 24 hours. Agents who have already claimed one lead (in the last 24 hours) are in one “bucket”, agents who have claimed two leads are in another “bucket” and so on. Admins can set the “interval” between buckets, which defaults to 5 seconds.
Real-world example: Dynamic Allocation is set to “on” for a team, with a 5 second interval. When a lead comes in, agents who have not claimed any leads in the last 24 hours will get notified first, followed by (5 seconds later) agents who have claimed one lead, followed by (5 seconds later) agents who have claimed 2 leads, and so on. If the lead is claimed at any time, additional agents will not be notified.
Dynamic lead allocation that creates more opportunity for agents
Address-Based Routing
This type of routing allows leads coming in to a particular email address or team to be parsed (based on property address) to agents in a specialized sub-team. While helpful for any part of the country, this feature is particularly useful in metropolitan areas, such as New York City, where agents frequently focus on rentals in a tight area…or even just a single building.
Example: A rental office has agents who specialize in different buildings. Leads coming in to a single source can be routed (using address names) to agents in sub-teams named after those buildings.
Child teams setup to handle individual apartments or rental communities
Integrations API
Using the Connect Now Integrations API, integration partners can access additional routing parameters, including extensible waterfalls and lead routing to agents by email address or user id.
Conclusion
Lead routing has matured for many organizations, and none more so than for real estate professionals. The product team at Connect Now greatly values customer feedback to constantly improve its tool. This makes agents and brokers more efficient, and their revenue generation more effective. Many of the lead routing techniques reviewed here reflect the needs identified by our customers who use our mobile app and analytics dashboard everyday. We realize each brokerage, in each geography has its own needs and we will always strive to evolve the product to satisfy those needs.
Curious how Connect Now’s tool works? Check out our video.