Genesys Cloud CX for property and real estate contact centres

Property businesses often grow branch by branch, and through acquisitions, so callers meet a different phone system, greeting and routing in each office. Callers do not care which brand a branch used to be; they want the right person, quickly. Branch staff want calls that follow them, and managers want to see the whole network at once.

Genesys Cloud CX can be both the contact centre and the phone system for every branch. Calls can be routed on the number dialled and on what your CRM knows about the caller, so they reach the person already handling the enquiry, or the local branch, and overspill to colleagues when that person is out on a viewing. For a large UK estate agency chain, grown organically and through acquisitions, we took that from discovery to go-live as the contact centre and phone system for every branch, about 180 users in all, working under sub-contract to a UK Genesys reseller partner.

Property businesses keep growing: a new office opens, a rival agency is acquired, a lettings book is bought. If every addition needs its own design, the network slowly drifts back into a patchwork. A better approach is to design one framework for numbers, dial plans, routing, schedules and reporting, and bring each new branch on board by following it.

That is how we designed the estate agency chain's platform. Discovery mapped every branch, number, team and call path across the estate, and the design turned it into a single pattern common to every site, user and location, so the next branch or the next acquisition follows the pattern instead of inventing a new one. Back-office colleagues who need calling, presence and the directory, but not routed customer interactions, can use a lighter Genesys Cloud licence alongside the contact centre.

Many valuation and viewing requests start on a phone in the evening or at the weekend, when no one is free to answer. WhatsApp and web messaging let people start at any time and come back when it suits them, and a bot can capture the details the team needs: the postcode, whether the person owns the property, what they intend to do and when.

For a UK estate agency, working on behalf of a Genesys reseller partner, we moved valuation requests into WhatsApp and web messaging, with a bot that captures each request. In office hours, priority requests reach the valuations team with the details on screen; every other request is posted securely into the agency's own lead system, which creates a callback. An option in the main IVR sends callers a link to continue on WhatsApp instead of waiting.

Web enquiries go cold quickly. An outbound dialler fed from your CRM can call people back within minutes of an enquiry, but only if the integration keeps up. As volumes grow, slow lookups and batch updates can leave the dialler working from yesterday's list.

For a global flexible workspace provider, whose Genesys Cloud CX outbound dialler was fed in real time from Microsoft Dynamics, we were brought in when the dialler fell behind as the integration grew. Through workshops and technical deep dives, we traced the path from a website enquiry to a dialled call, found the bottlenecks, and gave the client's engineers and its partner a prioritised plan to bring the dialler back to real time, which they then delivered themselves.

Estate agency in the UK is regulated. National Trading Standards' Estate Agency Team enforces the Estate Agents Act 1979 and approves and oversees the sector's redress schemes. Its material information guidance, published in full in November 2023, sets out what should be established for property listings: price, council tax and tenure for every property, details such as construction, utilities and parking, and information such as flood risk or building safety where a property is affected. Calls and messages are part of how that information reaches buyers and tenants, so scripts and knowledge for agents should match it.

Marketing calls carry rules too. The ICO explains that whether you may make live marketing calls depends on the lawful basis you rely on, whether a number is registered with the Telephone Preference Service, and whether the person has objected; anyone who objects should be added to a suppression list. Outbound campaigns in Genesys Cloud can apply do-not-call lists, so those decisions are enforced by the dialler, not left to memory.