I’ve been teaching real estate agents how to leverage technology in their businesses since the early days of DOS and when mobile phones were called Car Phones because they had to be bolted to your automobile because there were no batteries small enough to carry around or antennas that didn’t require a windshield to be suction cupped to. One of my crowning achievements was to work for the company that literally introduced the laptop computer to the real estate industry. Back then it weighed about ten pounds, had a monochrome screen and a hard-drive smaller than what an iPod Nano can hold today. A lot of things have changed since then.
However, it’s the tech support that seems to have withstood the tests of time and the individuals there aren’t any better. Did you know that everytime you have a problem with your Real Estate CRM program the technical support people usually have no idea how to resolve your issues? I have two slides in my PowerPoint presentation that talks about all the irritating things technical support people say and ask. The titles are: “Do you have a brick or a sledgehammer handy?” and “Please hold for Mr. Gate’s attorney.” I have several others, but we’ll save those for the live seminars in your area.
The truth about tech support, especially as it pertains to real estate software, is the fact that almost none of the people you call have actually used the software you are calling about. In fact, it would be safe to say that NONE of them have ever sold real estate. In other words, the people you are calling don’t know how the software “works,” they just know how to handle error messages. It’s this little subtlety that is at the core of so much dissatisfaction with technical support for programs like Top Producer and AgentOffice. Here’s an example: you are trying to do a mail merge in the word processor for a group of contacts and every time you click the print button you get one letter and then the printer stops. After three or four tries you finally call tech support to find out what is wrong with the software. After a few minutes (or hours) on hold you finally get to speak with a technical support person who takes you through a series of questions like: “Does this happen when you use other programs to perform a mail merge?” to which you answer, “I don’t know, I don’t have another program that performs mail merges.” They then take you down a rabbit hole of different diagnostics with your printer only to discover that there’s really nothing wrong with your printer. After another hour of running checks on the software you are informed that there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with the software either. I even remember one particular customer who was told by a tech support person that, “Maybe you shouldn’t try to use it to do mail merges!”
What it comes down to is you have an educational issue as opposed to a technical one. A great example of this is when you try to print out your Real Estate Contact Management list and it was prepared in a form letter as opposed to something else. Usually it’s the smallest issues that end up creating the big problems. Taking for instance when you tell the Real Estate CRM software to print “to the contact” not “to the group.” Unfortunately most of the tech support people don’t even know this is a problem when you prepare a mail merge. They will however make you feel like an idiot and that everything is your fault.
Can you believe you have to pay for all this nonsense? Top Producer claims your tech support is free, but they charge you $39 a month to use the software. AgentOffice on the other hand will give you 30 days free, but once this is over and a problem comes about, you have to pay $295. This is the cost of the entire program!
My point here is, if you just take the time to get trained on the program you purchase, life with Real Estate Contact Management software will be much easier. Just think of it as a good health strategy. After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. If you take this route you won’t have a tech support person say; “We can fix this, but you’re going to need a knife, a roll of duct tape and a car battery.
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