Thomas Morris and Fine & Country

What made you trial Moneypenny initially?

Simon Bradbury, Partner, Thomas Morris and Fine & Country: We first trialled Moneypenny about 3 years ago and we trialled them because, at the time, we were using answering machines to take care of customer calls and we didn’t think that was good enough, so we thought we’d have a bash to see if they’d be able to handle calls better.

What were your first impressions?

It worked so much better than we’d anticipated. What we were thinking was that it would just be a simple replacement for telephone answering devices, but in actual fact what we found it was like having an extra member of the team, because now, when anybody rings up, they get a human being answering the telephone that they perceive to be part of our team at Thomas Morris or Fine and Country.

Can you outline some of the business benefits?

I think that Moneypenny have brought a significant amount of benefits to our business, specifically we have situations like where people, for example, are running late to attend an open house; they’ll ring through to our office, Moneypenny will pick up that call, ring it through to the person who’s attending the open house and let them know that that person, that they’re going to be late. We had one example, just a few months ago, where somebody couldn’t even find our open house. We had nobody in the office unfortunately, Moneypenny picked up that call, and we give them directions for that open house, and they took that customer directly to the open house event, and that worked really well for us.

How does the relationship work?

The way I would see our situation with Moneypenny; it’s much more to do with the business relationship and a personal relationship than it is to do with just telephone answering. All of my team know all of the people at Moneypenny intimately and, likewise, they know us really well and what we’re about. I’ll often have conversations with them to let them know what’s happened with our business, and they with us, and it’s that understanding of the way that an estate agency works and the challenges we face every single day, that really makes our relationship work well with Moneypenny.

How important is it to ensure you are capturing all calls?

The amount of calls that are picked up at our Fine & Country department is relatively small, in all honesty, it’s probably between 80 and 100. But at Fine & Country, because our average fees are so high, every single communication that we get from a member of the public is worth a lot of money to us and so I would always recommend that estate agents use Moneypenny. I would recommend that they use their 14 day free trial, see how it works with them and I think they’ll find that it works with them very well indeed.