After taking note of changing consumer behavior and having to adapt to the added pressure of selling new homes safely during a pandemic, your company might be one of many that have invested in self-guided home tours this past year. Congratulations! But now, like many, you might find yourself responsible for incorporating this self-service option into your sales funnel. Stress not — UTour is here to help.
It Starts with the OSC
When you take the plunge into self-guided home tours, it’s essential to get both sales and marketing teams up to speed. In some cases, it’s possible that builders may need to adjust their existing workflow, and redefine the roles of key players — including the most critical digital sales personnel, your Online Sales Counselors (OSC.)
With so many home shoppers preferring self-service options before initiating contact, your OSC should be well versed in managing the leads who come in through the UTour self-guided home tour experience. By integrating three key best practices within your OSC’s responsibilities — which are comprehensively detailed in our new OSC Guide to Self-Guided Tours — the UTour platform will help you deliver timely follow-up and appropriately nurture leads utilizing self-guided tours.
Best Practice #1 — Understand the Preference for a Self-Service Experience
What data tells us about touring is that the old model wasn’t cutting it for home shoppers. To more fully understand why UTour conducted a survey in late 2019 (pre-COVID) that was sent to home shoppers who were on interest lists but hadn’t visited the community in person.
As a result, we learned a wealth of information about the preferences of modern homeshoppers, all of which are included in the OSC Guide to Self-Guided Tours. Homebuilder teams can use this information to refresh and refocus their understanding of their shoppers' preferences and adjust their approaches to meet shoppers right where they want to be.
Best Practice #2 — Identify Your Role in Self-Guided Tours
In the UTour platform, there are a few roles that need to be filled, such as the Community Support Contact, to ensure a seamless user experience. While no one person should be filling every role, an OSC is often capable of covering a few main responsibilities throughout the process.
Download the OSC Guide to Self-Guided Tours to get details on each role that needs to be identified and assigned for a successful self-guided tour program. While some might fall to the OSC, others can be assigned to the sales team, community managers or other team members.
Ultimately, you’ll likely want your OSC to continue to be the primary point of contact for home shoppers until they complete a self-guided tour. At that point, the lead could be handed off to a community salesperson who will follow up and continue the nurturing process.
Best Practice #3 — Personalize UTour’s Default Content for Your Business
To save our homebuilder partners time and effort, we include default messaging for all UTour notifications that get sent to your shoppers. This covers texts, email reminders and follow-up sent before, during and after the self-tour takes place. Yet, we realize each homebuilder has unique and specific processes, hence, our default content is available via the UTour Client Portal to allow homebuilders to customize the content to their specific needs.
Many of our builder partners have identified their OSC as the point person for customizing these notifications for your business, and we have found they are often the best team member suited for that role. At the very least, your OSC should be well acquainted with the notifications timeline. Learn how you can get started customizing your UTour notifications by downloading the OSC Guide to Self-Guided Tours.
Do you have other questions about getting started with UTour? We’d love to help. Schedule a demo today.
