Beyond the Mystery Shop: How Are Your Leasing Professionals REALLY Performing?
By Douglas Chasick, RAM

The 2005 CallSource Industry Report Card revealed that overall telephone performance is far from satisfactory. The report card is based on listening to 21,557 actual customer phone calls from 1,159 apartment communities across the country, between January and December of 2005.

Only 72% of these calls were deemed qualified by the Leasing Professionals, raising the question of how effectively advertising and marketing programs are reaching their intended targets.

Frequent tracking and review of advertising and marketing effectiveness is essential for generating qualified traffic and maximizing your budgeted dollars. When more than 10% to 15% of total traffic is unqualified, the reason must be found and corrected.

Fifty-five percent of callers were asked for their name, up from 51% from the previous year. Adding the 11% of the callers who volunteered their names to the 55% asked for their names leaves 34% of callers not hearing the Leasing Professional use their name.

We know that it’s necessary to establish rapport with our callers, and that the more personal we make the call, the more likely we are to set an appointment — how can we do that if we don’t know the caller’s name?

Need determination results fall far short as well in the report.  Only 6% of callers were asked why they were moving, and only 21% were asked for their specific needs and preferences. This is slightly higher than the year before which was 17%, and a total of 60% of the callers’ needs and wants were known when we factor in the information volunteered by the callers. 

After building rapport with the caller, we must determine what they are looking for so we can present the information that will cause our caller to make an appointment and to see our community.  How can we do that when we don’t know what 40% of our callers want?

Our Leasing Professionals spoke about the features of the apartment homes on 39% of the calls, but talked about the benefits of living in the apartment homes only 1% of the calls. Likewise, the Leasing Professionals mentioned the features of the apartment community on 24% of the calls while talking about the benefits of living at the apartment community on only 2% of the calls.

Only 27% of the callers were asked to set an appointment by the Leasing Professional, and 41% of the callers asked for an appointment. With the performance issues listed above, and an average call duration of 2.5 minutes, it’s no surprise that only 3,151 callers set an appointment on a specific day at a specific time, out of 15,509 qualified callers.

This is a conversion rate of 20%, lower than the 23% conversion rate we found in 2004, and well under the standard industry conversion rate of setting appointments with 40% of our qualified callers.

Using the 40% conversion rate of qualified callers to appointments, the 15,509 qualified callers should have yielded 6,204 appointments — 3,053 more than were actually set.

Applying the industry standard closing ratio of 35% of qualified visitors to leases, these 3,053 additional appointments would have produced 1,068 additional leases. A recent Reis (www.reis.com) study reported average monthly rents of $859. So, at an average rent of $10,308 annually, the 1,068 missed leases are worth over $11,333,000 — income that could have been generated simply by improving their Leasing Professionals ability to convert their qualified callers to appointments.

In a perfect world, people would be shopped every day — measurement must occur frequently for it to be useful in identifying problems — quarterly or even monthly is not frequent enough to ensure quality control. After all, people answer the phone many times each day, so how long can we afford to wait to find out if each phone call is answered effectively?

Douglass Chasick, CPM®, CAPS, CAS, Adv. RAM, CLP is the Senior Vice President, Professional Services, CallSource. He can be reached at 888-222-1214 or via e-mail at DChasick@CallSource.com.

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