The HERO News this month is about listing communications.
We’ll cover new enhancements being rolled out to accounts this week. If you do not have the features yet, please contact us and we’ll prioritize your upgrade.
Because it’s new, we don’t have a mailbag of user questions yet, but we’ve included a helpful FAQ.
Enjoy!
– The HERO PM Team
Did you know?
Listing communications in Harmony provides a centralized, full-featured system for managing prospect conversations and actions to maximize your marketing performance. It’s far more than responding to emails — it helps you identify intent, prioritize responses, and streamline your leasing workflow.
FAQ
What are the new features being added?
Three major new features work together to make your job easier:
- Automated responding with AI decisions
- Complexity scores on inbound inquiries
- Custom procedure guides for inquiry responses
Together, these features help your team respond faster, prioritize effectively, and maintain consistent communication quality.
I already use an auto-responder on my leasing email account so every inquiry gets a reply. How is this different?
There are a few reasons we implemented this for property managers, who may already have auto-responders:
- In automatic mode, the simple inquiries will get an auto-response, while the complex ones are routed to show up in your alerts for manual responses
- Inquiries can be combined with the check phrase matching feature to give high-awareness, high-intent prospects a way to get directly to a human for response
- The responses use your CRM template emails, which can be customized to your liking
- Your database tracks all inquiries, responses, and times
- Not all your inquires will come into the same email account, but they can all be centralized in your inquiry database
How can I be sure my prospects are getting my inquiry response for regular inquiries and my showing response for showing requests?
This is automatic, based on the communication type that’s either integrated, selected in manual entries, or sent to the communications API (typically by partner sites where a request is entered).
Remember that you can always convert an inquiry to a showing request when you deem it’s necessary, or when the initial request was submitted as an inquiry but should have been a showing request.
How does this impact my text inquiry system, where prospects text the rental code on my yard sign, Instagram post, or flyer?
Text inquiries through the text marketing system are already fully automated, so these new features have no impact.
What is the new complexity score on my listing inquiries?
Complexity score uses AI to analyze the content of the inquiry to determine how complex the prospect’s needs are.
- A low complexity score (1-5) indicates this appears to be a run-of-the-mill inquiry without special/complicated needs or requests
- A medium complexity score (6-10) indicates this person appears to have special/complicated needs or requests, but they can likely be handled according to your standard responses and/or by a junior person
- A high complexity score (above 10) indicates this person may have complicated needs or requests best handled by a human, and possibly by a senior person
In analyzing the inquiry, the AI is asking questions like:
- Is this person indicating something unusual, like a request for exception, modification, special requirement, or special arrangement?
- Does this inquiry contain content in the following categories: Fair Housing, policies, legal, financial, government programs, and pets?
- Does the structure and content indicate the person is looking for something beyond normally published listing information?
I already have a custom procedure guide for handling communications, what is the new response guide for?
Custom procedure guides are a big part of Harmony, giving you a way to integrate your P&P directly into the software with instructions for your team.
The existing custom procedure guide for communications (view/change) outlines your policies for leasing agents responding to inquiries.
The new custom procedure guide for communications (response) outlines your actual responses, that guide your message composition and give you easy copy/paste snippets for your messages.
Each listing type has its own guide, so you can have a different set of responses for your commercial or storage rentals than you do for your long-term or short-term residential rentals.
Featured Harmony U Article: Crossing the Channel
It’s a great day when someone finds you or your listings online and begins an interaction. So often, though, a person is not on your website when they discover you. They’re driving past one of your properties, or seeing a print ad somewhere, or doing something other than browsing the internet.
Featured Harmony U Video: Where can I learn about handling inquiries, showings, and NotifyMe with Listing Communications?
