Call Scoring in Multifamily — Your WHAT, WHY, & HOW Guide

What is Call Scoring?

As it relates to the multifamily industry, call scoring is a performance aids that consists of a live, third party agent who scores 100% of incoming and outgoing calls between potential renters and your leasing team. The quality of the call score is determined based on key qualifying questions asked by the leasing team such as: the prospect’s name, potential move-in date, floor plan preference, lease term and most importantly — asking for the appointment. Using an example such as the one below, will give us straightforward insight into how leasing performance can be easily assessed.

As you can see, you can clearly identify which leasing consultant is delivering consistency (Agent 3), and which consultants (Agents 1 & 2) have opportunities for improvement. While this example is only part of the streamlined view, the scoring process expands by covering every step of the prospect interaction, making the process consistent and reliable for your team. It’s no secrey why it’s quickly become the tool that multifamily executives are searching for when considering lead management platforms.

Monitoring call quality through key qualifying questions allows you to have true visibility into how your teams are interacting with potential renters and where they are excelling/underachieving. Better yet, it’s done without the need to listen to every phone call or recording. We can draw clear conclusions as to why we are or are not hitting desired appointment and traffic numbers.

Key Points

• Call monitoring and scoring is done for 100% of prospect interactions
• Call quality is done by an unbiased third party agent
• Call score is determined by key questions being asked by leasing consultant
• Unprecedented clarity for property and portfolio managers
• Discovers strengths and weakness of their leasing team’s sales process
• Identifies and allows leasing deficiencies to be addressed immediately
• Evolves assessments into teaching moments for your team

Why is Call Scoring Essential for Multifamily Lead Management?

The future of multifamily lead management platforms lies in the ability to have true leasing performance visibility. Regional and portfolio managers have longed for the ability to have a transparent insight into how their leasing teams are performing on a daily basis without picking through unreliable and outdated metrics.

Call monitoring provides a benchmark for your leasing teams, creating a consistent and accountable sales process. Additionally, it improves leasing performance, sales process inconsistencies, and ensures proper communication with every potential renter that contacts your community.

Key Team Performance Opportunities

• Provides benchmarking, goal setting and accountability
• Allows for individual/team coaching and feedback
• Expedites leasing skill-building, training and development
• Promotes a learning and progression-focused environment
• Improves quality of customer service and satisfaction

How does Call Scoring Improve Organizational Performance?

A multifamily lead management platform that includes call performance capabilities addresses a multitude of challenges. With enhanced visibility into performance, leasing effectiveness should no longer be judged using unreliable and conventional metrics such as:

• Closing ratios — which don’t filter out a prospect’s true intentions or objections out of the leasing team’s control (i.e. price, floor plan, move-in date)
• Exposure — which doesn’t tell you the real story behind occupancy deficiencies (i.e. does your true concern lie in your price, your product, your process or your people)
• Randomized shoppers reports — which isolate a select call/visit and don’t include a large enough sample size to make an infallible conclusion

These metrics all provide room for assumptions rather than conclusions, increasing the likelihood of inaccurate judgments. Instead you should be considering the following:

• How consistent your team is with asking key qualifying questions
• How often appointments are asked for
• How much the cost per lead/appointment/lease is for each ad source
• How frequently your team is answering calls from advertising sources
• How to use new metrics to identify issues immediately and turn them into coaching opportunities

More than ever we need to dig deeper into leasing analytics but that doesn’t have to be at the expense of convenience. A multifamily lead management platform that has call scoring capabilities actually makes the leasing process easier and smarter.

This type of forward-thinking platform is not only beneficial for on-site teams. Implementing a lead management platform such as this one positively affects multiple organization levels.

Key Job Roles are Enhanced

• Leasing Consultants — sets goals and benchmarks for leasing teams
• Property Managers — gives visibility into individual leasing performance
• Regional/Portfolio Managers — provides eagle-eye view of leasing process across entire portfolio of communities that doesn’t require in-person visits to accurately assess performance or effectiveness
• Training Directors — allows for an autonomous training program on-site so that leasing teams aren’t just relying on one-off training sessions from corporate
• Vice Presidents — receive more accurate reporting in relation to your portfolio performance so there’s less of a “putting out the fires” approach to occupancy and exposure concerns

Conventional metrics are unreliable and disguise the real leasing concerns. Better leasing performance data exists — why not use it? Too many multifamily organizations are settling on traditional and conventional metrics because “it’s the way it’s always been done”. If you truly want to make a forward-thinking mark, coaches up your leasing teams, and make better leasing decisions through new industry metrics. Using a multifamily lead management platform with these capabilities positively affects your entire organizational chart.