The Client Who Never Gets Back to You

As an agent, your clients expect you to return their phone calls and emails in a timely manner – in fact failing to do this can cause them to choose to work with someone else!

But often enough, you’ll find yourself dealing with a client who never gets back to you in a timely manner for anything. You know the type – this is someone who is one day away from their home inspection deadline or counter offer and suddenly it seems as if they have vanished into thin air!

Or there are the customers who are not clients yet – maybe someone who you met through an open house or an opportunity time call and after several messages and emails they’re missing in action too.

Sometimes you might even get this from fellow agents – they just don’t take their job quite as seriously as you do, or maybe they went on vacation without telling anyone!

What do you do with clients like these?

Most importantly, do not get mad or lose your temper. This will make you seem unprofessional at best, but could have even longer lasting effects such as no more referrals from that person or the loss of a client who decides to work with someone else.

After that, there are a few techniques you can try. One I follow regularly for urgent issues is to attempt to contact this person through every means possible – phone, email, snail mail, fax, etc. I will leave one voice mail, and a follow up voice mail saying I wasn’t sure if the last voice mail worked since I know they would call me back as soon as they could. Then I would fax and email saying “Just in Case Your Voice Mail isn’t working” – after that is snail mail with a quick note saying “I hope you already contacted me about xyz issue and everything is okay, otherwise please call asap, I’m having problems reaching you.”

Leaving a paper trail of your actions and trying every viable form of communication is especially necessary when you are dealing with an absent agent or client on a deal – you want to have EVERYTHING documented as much as possible that you tried to contact them so they can’t blame you for not meeting a contract date and if it defaults.

If it is something less urgent, such as just trying to get in touch with a follow up prospect, you want to make sure you are not being too aggressive, since this can turn people off as well. Add them to your email list, send them snail mail, and then make a follow up phone call to question if there is anything else you can help them with or if they no longer wish to receive updates from you. Some people will let you know they don’t want to hear from you ever again if you give them a friendly way to tell you so! This will free you up to spend time and your resources on a prospect who does!

How do you handle the client (or agent) who never gets back to you? Comments are always welcome and encouraged!