Hey guys, how's it going? This is Seth from retipster.com
If you are in the real estate business, or really any business for that matter
you know that the phone is something you really can't escape from
at some point in some way,
either you or somebody on behalf of your company is going to have to communicate
with your customers and prospects
and people who do want to do business with you.
And also people who probably aren't going to do business with you,
but they're calling you anyway to figure out
if it's the right fit or maybe just to waste your time, honestly.
This happens to pretty much every business out there.
And that's one of the issues with phone conversations
is that not all phone calls are equally important.
In fact, like the majority of them are not important,
but somebody still has to answer the phone.
You can't just ignore the situation.
And one way to deal with this is to set up
some kind of an automated voicemail greeting
that people can listen to when they call.
Sometimes this can work, but understandably,
a lot of people don't want to listen to a prerecorded message
and you're going to lose some people.
Sometimes those people that you lose,
it's not really going to be much of a loss
because they probably weren't the right fit anyway.
But inevitably, you're also going to lose some valuable prospects.
People who probably would have been great to do business with,
but you lost them because you were forcing them
into an automated voicemail greeting.
And I think that voicemail greeting exclusion is definitely the cheapest easiest way to go.
And you can totally remove the human element, but there's still a cost to that.
And this is one of the primary reasons why secretaries exist is to handle this issue
because the owner of the company doesn't have time to take every single call.
It's just not a good use of their time.
But luckily we live in a time when there are many different services out there
that offer virtual assistants who can literally answer the phone
and ask whatever questions you want them to ask.
They can book appointments, they can register people online.
They can process orders,
they can transfer calls to wherever you want them to be transferred.
There's a lot of basic tasks that these services can handle.
And one of these services is called PATLive
and PATLive is definitely not the only company that can do this.
There's a host of other ones out there and they're all probably fine,
but I want it to take some time and dive into PATLive specifically because for me anyway
PATLive is this company I've heard about for well over a decade now.
I think they're kind of like the Kleenex or the band-aid brand of this type of service.
It's just like the one that everybody knows about.
And since they're that kind of representative of the industry,
I figured why not start with them, give them a try,
see how the service works,
see if I'm satisfied or dissatisfied with it
and just thoroughly record the results and how the process works and what happens
and kind of document what I do and don't like about it.
And first of all, by the way, before we go any further in this video,
I should just mention retipster.com does have an affiliate relationship with PATLive.
If you do sign up for PATLive through our affiliate link,
that's REtipster.com/PatLive.
You can get a discount if you go through that link.
A virtual receptionist service allows a business owner to portray this idea
that there truly is somebody available 24/7,
who can answer the phone and just kind of be available to help out
whether or not the company is actually open for business.
So if that's something that you value, that might be one potential reason to do this.
And I know another reason which probably applies
to any company out there that utilizes direct marketing in any way
is to kind of put distance between the business owner and the customer,
because a lot of the people who are going to be calling in
are not people that the company is going to end up doing business with.
Especially if you're sending out direct mail, like I do as a real estate investor,
you send out mail to like thousands and thousands and thousands of people
and many of them are not the right fit.
Really there's just a small fraction of all those people who are going to say,
yes, let's do business
and you can do what I did for the first year or so,
where I literally spent my time responding to all these people.
And I think that's probably the best result you're ever going to get
because you are the business owner and you know how to negotiate
you know how to make decisions on behalf of the company.
But it's also a massive time-waster.
And if you want to handle that first screening stage by using a service like this
it can just save you a ton of time
and you can get the job done probably not as good as if you were doing it personally,
but it honestly doesn't need to be done perfectly at this stage.
We're just trying to figure out
is this somebody that we want to pursue doing business with or not?
And you can do that pretty easily just by asking
a few key questions of the people that call in
and the way this works is you provide a script or list of questions
that the virtual receptionist can ask when these people call in.
And it's pretty simple to do. I actually have another video
where I'll show you exactly what this process looks like
when you create this script| and send it into PATLive
so that they can then tell their receptionist what they should ask.
And I also have a test call that I did immediately after getting signed up
where I literally called in and pretended to be one of my customers and recorded the call.
So you can listen to it and hear at firsthand like this is about what you can expect
if you hire PATLive and expect them to take your calls.
And they did about as good as I expected them to do.
Keep in mind these people know nothing about your business.
All they know how to do is answer the call
with a friendly tone and simply read off the questions in the script that you provide.
So these virtual receptionists are not there to act as your salesman.
They're not there to negotiate or make any kind of decisions.
Just think of it as a live person who isn't really empowered to do anything else
aside from asking the questions you tell them to ask.
Once they have these calls what they'll do is they'll create a written summary of
what the person's answers were to all these questions.
And then they can send you a plain text email summarizing what happened.
And that's what they'll do by default.
But if you want to get a little bit more sophisticated,
you can provide a link to a web form that you create
that this virtual receptionist can fill out and submit after each call.
So it doesn't show up in your inbox as an email,
but that information can actually go wherever you want it to go.
It could go to a Trello board.
It could go to your Podio account.
It could go to a Google sheet.
I mean, you can really tell it to do whatever you want based on
what kind of a form software you're using and what kind of integrations you set up.
It's kind of up to you and your own creativity on how you want to handle that.
But if you are getting a huge volume of calls, I think it's pretty smart to do it that way,
because you can kind of add some automation and efficiency to this process
where if you're getting a handful of calls a week,
it's probably fine to just use your email.
But once the volume really ramps up,
it's a pretty good idea to think of a more efficient way to handle this.
And luckily you can, if you're just able to create that web form
and figure out where you want that information to flow on the back end.
So let's talk about some best practices
If you decide to use a virtual receptionist service like this.
I think it's important to remember that,
the person who's answering your phone
really doesn't know anything about your business.
They're not you so they're not going to be super-intelligent
about what to say beyond what's written in the script that you provide to them.
So with this in mind, I actually have a separate property research checklist
that I usually go through when I am personally
talking to a prospect who's calling in.
There's like, well, over a dozen questions on that.
But when you're talking about a service like this,
which charges you by the minute,
we don't necessarily need to have all of our questions answered
from this one conversation.
Because even when we do get these answers,
we're still going to verify a lot of the stuff online anyway.
Really the point of a conversation with a virtual receptionist like this
is to get the most critical pieces of information that we need to know
in order to make a decision on,
do we want to pursue this prospect further or not?
Does this person have a property that we actually want to buy?
Or is there some deal-killing information we can pull out this conversation
that allows us to say, nope, it's not going to work.
That's really all I'm concerned about
when I'm having a virtual receptionist handle these kinds of calls.
So I'm not asking the full list of questions in my mind, or on my checklist.
I'm just asking the handful of critical pieces of information.
The first of which is, do you even want to sell your property?
Because if the answer is no to that,
then we can just hang up and be done with the conversation right there.
We don't need to ask a bunch of questions
if they're not even serious about selling their property.
If the answer is maybe,
maybe they have questions or maybe they didn't really like the offer
that we sent them and they want more information,
or maybe they want to negotiate for a higher price, that's fine.
But if that's the case, we just want to figure out,
okay, well, what is the rock bottom price you're willing to accept?
Or what specific questions do you have?
And then we can end the call pretty quickly that way as well.
And then I'm going to get that information
once the receptionist sends it to me after the call.
And then if the answer is, yes, we do want to sell,
then we can dive into some of the more specific questions.
And again, I've got a separate video where I list out the questions that I asked.
So if you're curious w hat those are, you can go ahead and check that out.
But the long and the short of it is the goal here
is to get the most critical information and nothing more,
and then get the person off the phone and hang up
so we can stop getting charged by the minute for these phone calls.
When you sign up for a service like PATLive
something you're going to get right off the bat
is a specific phone number that you can then route your calls to.
One option is to use this actual phone number
and put that on your marketing information on your website and your direct mail pieces.
And have people call that directly.
What I did though, was I just created a call forwarding set up
so that people can call my normal cloud-based business phone number.
And when they call that it's not going to ring on that number or on my phone at all,
it's just going to send them directly to PATLive
And with the cloud-based phone service that I use,
it usually takes a couple seconds for that connection to happen.
So you just want to make sure you're putting enough time in there,
so it can actually make the connection
and get over to PATLive and start ringing on their phones.
That was one mistake I made right off the bat.
So just make sure you give it enough time.
I would give it like probably 30 seconds of ring time
before it gets forwarded anywhere else, or it goes to any kind of voicemail.
But the way PATLive works is, there are people there all the time,
so they should be able to pick it up pretty quick.
Another thing, just to note about how PATLive works.
So they're actually based in Florida
and everybody that they hire generally has an American accent.
And in terms of who's going to be answering your phone calls
in my experience with every test call that I have done to my own number,
it's always been a different person answering the phone.
So it's not like they set up one dedicated person who knows your company
and is always answering the phone. That's not how it works.
But there is some logic in terms of who does end up picking up the phone on PATLives
and usually they have certain teams that are dedicated to like a certain industry,
like real estate, for example.
So they kind of have some basic fundamental understanding,
but it's not like it's going to be the same person all the time.
In fact, I would almost venture to guess it's rarely going to be the same person,
but again, they're all reading the same script.
They don't need to know a whole lot about your business.
All they have to do is read off the questions correctly and respond correctly,
and that's really all you need.
So it kind of works out.
Before I decided to try out PATLive and give it a whirl for myself
I actually asked in the REtipster Facebook community and on the REtipster forum
if anybody else knew of any other companies like PATLive, what they thought of them.
And most importantly, if anybody else had used PATLive directly
and what their experience has been with this company.
And I kind of got some mixed reviews on it, not just about PATLive specifically,
but in general, just the idea of having a virtual receptionist service like this.
Some people love it.
They swear by it. They couldn't praise it any more highly.
So there's that end of the spectrum.
There are also people who tried it for a month and they hated it
and they decided, no, I don't like it.
I don't like how this doesn't talk like me when they answered the phone.
I don't like how they don't really know anything about my business.
They're not trained up the way I want them to be.
So there's that as well,
which also kind of speaks again to the limitations of a service like this.
And I think you just have to go into it with that expectation
if you decide to use it.
Just realize they're not going to do as good of a job as you probably can.
They're not going to know really hardly anything about what's going on
just that script that you're telling them to follow.
And I think as long as you go into this realizing that
it'll kind of help you just to have proper expectations from the outset.
Other people don't really like the cost of it.
And I'll be the first to tell you, there are definitely cheaper ways to handle this,
like the way that I've done it for years and years and years
is just having an automated voicemail message.
I actually have a separate blog post explaining all about how that works.
And I think that can work.
I don't think a service like PATLive is required at all
to succeed in real estate or really in any business.
It's like anything where
it's definitely a helpful tool if you expect the right thing, if you set it up right
If we're asking the right questions.
So, it will definitely enhance your operation
but there's plenty of other ways to handle this that
don't require paying for in using a service like this.
So don't take this as like, you can't succeed with that because that's not the case at all.
So first of all, I've been really impressed with their customer support
and maybe I just got lucky, I don't know,
but every time I've ever called in and talked to somebody they've been like super helpful.
Maybe it's like the friendly tone that they're all trained to have or something,
but they just do a really good job.
I always hang up feeling satisfied like I got the answers I needed.
I understand what's going on, there's no confusion.
So I would give them two thumbs up on customer service.
I hope, if you use them, you also get the same experience that I did.
And for me fundamentally, one of the most mentally taxing aspects
of my real estate investing business
is this whole thing of just chit-chatting with people on the phone.
And I can certainly do it and I can do it well when I have to.
But like, if there was any one or two or three things I could remove from my plate,
this would be right up there at the top of the list.
Maybe it's because I'm an introvert, I don't know.
But, I just really like how I don't have to worry about this with PATLive involved.
And I can know that my prospects are getting a better experience than they would
if they were just listening to my prerecorded voicemail greeting,
which isn't broken, it certainly works.
But obviously, it's just better when a person can talk to a human being,
just kind of gives them more of a feeling of I'm being taken care of.
Somebody is actually listening to me.
And in general, I was really happy with the results.
They've always done a pretty decent job and not like perfect, but definitely good enough.
And that's really like the baseline of
what I would expect from this kind of service and it fits the bill.
And in terms of the things that I have not enjoyed about it so far.
So there's really only one thing that comes to mind.
And this has to do with call volume.
Now, the way PATLive works is that you have to sign up for certain packages
and depending on which you choose is going to come with a finite number of minutes,
kind of like credits that you get for that month.
Obviously the more you pay, the more minutes you're going to get
and they are kind of like "use it or lose it" minutes.
So if people are not calling in, you're just paying money for nothing really.
However, if people call in and start exceeding those minutes,
that's when you start getting charged even more like overage charges.
And I think this is really only a problem for somebody
if their business has inconsistent marketing pushes,
say if they're running some huge promotion for one month
or through sending out just gobs and gobs of direct mail or some other marketing push,
and then the next month, they're like not doing that or not doing as much
that creates this inconsistency
and kind of these big spikes in the call volume that comes in.
And if that's you, that's just something to be aware of
because it will definitely cost you a lot more on those months
if you just get crushed with calls compared to a normal average month.
By the way, you can actually get a discount on the service.
If you sign up through the REtipster affiliate link.
So just be aware of that again, REtipster.com/PatLive
So that's just something to be aware of.
Some people can get understandably sticker shock,
But just so you know if you decide to use this, try to mentally prepare for that.
And if you can just sign it for the right package that's just going to cover you.
Or be as consistent as you can in the direct mail or marketing that you do send out
into the world so that you don't have these huge spikes in call volume
to the extent that you can help it.
I realize, especially when you're getting started, it's hard to do that.
But once you do sort of get into a rhythm
I think you can kind of manage this stuff a little bit better, so there's that.
But that was really it.
And again I've not been using PATLive for years here.
There are probably things I just haven't encountered yet.
That's just been my experience to date with them.
And I think the bottom line is
can I do a better job than PATLive when I talk with my own customers?
Yeah, I probably can. But is that the best use of my time?
No, absolutely not. Especially when we're talking about the initial call that comes in
from a complete stranger, we know nothing about them
then there's a high likelihood they're not going to do business with us.
That's a perfect role for a service like this
because it's somebody who does not cost as much as my time costs
and then kind of handle this in an actual human to human interaction
without getting machines involved and that kind of thing.
So again, not required.
I think the voicemail greeting thing can certainly work
and I've used it for years and I've seen it work.
So I'm not dissing that.
I'm not saying that that doesn't work anymore.
I'm just saying if you want to kind of sweeten the pot a little bit and give your customers
and your prospects a better experience, this is probably pretty effective at doing that.
Again, if you want to give PATLive a shot, go ahead and sign up through
the REtipster affiliate link beneath this video.
You can also give them a call if you want.
We have a dedicated number.
If you call through this number, you can get the REtipster discount
and it will also go through our affiliate link that way as well.
The number is 1-800-861-4543.
If you'd rather just give them a call, you can feel free to do that.
Go ahead and check out the other videos, kind of a companion video to this,
where I'm going to show you what it's like to complete that script and submit it to them.
And then also what the experience was like when I did my first test call to them,
you can hear what PATLive actually sounds like in real life,
and I'll also show you the actual email that I received from PATLive
summarizing what the call looks like
just so you can get a look at what to expect from that end as well.
So thanks again for watching.
I hope you found it helpful whether you use PATLive
or some other service or no service
I hope you found this at least entertaining and enlightening,
and hopefully, I'll talk to you again soon.
See you.