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LeadSimple Inbox: What Story is Your Customer Service Telling?

What story is your customer service telling? Are you committed to providing an incredible experience for your clients? How do they know that? What makes the difference?

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What Story is Your Customer Service Telling?

Your company’s customer service tells a story about your company. 

It might tell the story that you care about your clients and are committed to providing an excellent customer experience. 

Or it might tell the story that you don’t care about your clients and aren’t committed to creating an excellent customer experience (even if you want to be).

This is especially true in property management.

Think about it. You could buy a $100 pair of shoes from a company and have a poor experience with them (such as receiving the wrong size and not hearing back from the company for 2 months). But that experience won’t deeply affect your life. You just likely won’t be buying from that company again and you may warn others not to either.

But in property management, we’re talking about something far more important than shoes: we’re talking about people’s homes and their long-term investments.

These things are critical to their lives and they need to know that they can trust your company to care for them.

They won’t gauge this based on your marketing or what you say during the sales process. Instead, their impression will be influenced by how they feel through every interaction with your company, but most especially in how quickly you get back to them. They want to know that they will be heard and that issues will be resolved quickly.

(Interestingly, this could mean that your churn rate may be closely tied to your response times. If so, prioritizing your inbound communication will increase your profitability by both increasing your new lead conversion rate and reducing churn.)

However, it may seem that you’re already doing everything you can to get back to clients and prospects quickly. 

If that is the case, you may not realize that you have bottlenecks that you could eliminate to improve your response time:

  • Forgotten Emails: Messages are sitting in inboxes for days on end, either forgotten or de-prioritized because the team member they were sent to is out for the day or has too much else on their plate. 
  • Fragmented Systems: Team members don’t have all the context on a property because the emails and information is scattered across multiple inboxes and systems. This causes their responses to be inaccurate, or forces them to hunt down the information every time.
  • Reactive Approach: Team members are buried in their inboxes every day, putting out fires rather than proactively delighting customers.
  • No Collaboration: Clients only reach out to the team member they know, even though others on the team could easily answer their question and may be more available to reply.
  • Unprofessionalism: Team members respond to the same client with contradictory information.

This approach is not scalable as your team grows. It is also very difficult to track KPIs and keep your team accountable to the company’s desired best practices.

So, what can you do?

How to Improve Your Inbound Communication Management

Of course, the best place to start is to anticipate questions and reach out to clients before they reach out to you. This will help to lower the amount of inbound communication. 

This is done through building proactive communication at key points into your processes and systems in LeadSimple, such as building in weekly updates to owners about recent showings or automatically sending move-in instructions to new tenants.

But even after you’ve done that, you still need a well organized system to handle inbound communication in a timely manner.

Fast Response Times: You need a way for anyone on your team to be able to respond to your clients at any given time, removing the bottlenecks that slow down your response times.

Collaboration: The team can collaborate on replies and step in for each other, with the ultimate goal always being to provide the best experience to the customer.

✅ Professionalism: Your responses will be consistent and accurate, without duplicate or contradictory replies.

Consolidated Systems: Imagine a single software where all of this is consolidated so that your team doesn’t have to search for context in multiple systems:

  • Inbound communications from clients
  • Past inbound and outbound communications with those clients
  • Current processes in progress and all their context
  • Internal collaboration/discussion on conversations

So, what’s the solution? 

You need LeadSimple’s Shared Inbox!

LeadSimple’s Shared Inbox ties your inbound communications and your operational processes together into one consolidated platform.

With Inbox, teams and departments can have a single system with all their communication channels (including texts and phone calls made to LeadSimple numbers). 

Team members can then claim unassigned inbound communications, reply to them, snooze and close them, and trigger any necessary processes directly from those conversations, while having access to past conversations for context.

What else does Shared Inbox do?

✅ It allows for internal collaboration on conversations (private notes and @mentions)

✅ It enables consistency, accountability, and fast response times as the whole team is working in the same place

✅ It helps your team avoid overwhelm and burnout because they can spread tickets out based on capacity

✅ It integrates directly with your processes and data

✅ It provides reporting, insights and analytics on inbound volume and key KPI’s

Once you have adopted LeadSimple’s Shared Inbox, LeadSimple will become your company’s hub for managing growth, operations, and customer communications, all in one simple platform.

Want to learn more about Inbox? Inbox is launching to the public on June 15th. Join us for the launch to see it in action and get access to Inbox! Register for the launch event here.

Get started on streamlining your company in the meantime by starting with LeadSimple’s CRM or Operational Processes.

Author

Aimee Berkompas

Aimee is the Content and Customer Education Manager at LeadSimple. She creates training, educational, and other content to help clients achieve success in sales, operations, and the health of their business. When she isn't working, she enjoys the outdoors, crafting, family time, and learning new skills.

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