By now Expert Agent should be looking familiar, you have your brochures set up, your data migrated, yours standard letters configured beautifully and your data migrated and cleaned up.
If you are missing any of these key tests, DON’T GO LIVE! Experience says that if you rush things, you’ll mess your business up. Can you imagine the stress involved in your staff not being able to print a brochure or a sales memo for a couple of days?
It's best to speak to your account manager prior to 'going live' just to check that everything is in place as it should be.
Also, remember that to help you get the best out of Expert Agent going forward you may need to revisit various training courses - new starters will also need to be trained.
To register any staff for any of the training courses, go to the Training top menu.
It's best not to instruct the portals until you have all of your properties set up and live. When you are ready, contact the portals themselves and ask them to set up the feed at their end. Expert Agent then sends a confirmation request to you by email.
You have to confirm the request by clicking a link. As soon as you do that, the portal will get your data.
Please bear in mind that this won't be instant - it's best to allow a couple of days for the switchover to be arranged at the portal's end.
For more information on getting in touch with the portals about arranging data feeds, have a look at the Portal Contact Details chapter.
Migration
Data migration (the process of moving data from another software package to Expert Agent) is a big, important job carried out by our data migration team.
They will be in touch (normally via an initial email) to discuss the process and what you will need to do.
The Migrating your data from other products chapter covers migration from specific 3rd party products so that you can know what to expect in terms of migrated data and further setup work. If you have asked us to migrate your data from a product not shown in this section, Tom will contact you with specific instructions.
When possible we try to do data migration in the week in which your staff are being training to minimise disruption and to ensure that they can start using Expert Agent as soon as they complete their training.
The timing of the migration is critical. Do it too early & your staff won’t been trained how to use Expert Agent, won’t use it & the data soon becomes out of date. Do it too late & the staff have forgotten how to use it & we’re back to square one.
You need to be aware that none of the migrations that we do are perfect. Banks and financial institutions spend thousands of hours understanding the intricacies of the old and new product's data structure before running tests, clinics, trials etc. We put Tom or Christopher on the case for 37 hours if we've migrated from the product before and 74 hours if we haven't. We'll do the best migration we can in the time allotted.
With products we've migrated before, we'll send you a spreadsheet showing you what we can and can't expect to migrate. You can then decide whether a migration is worth paying for.
All migrations require you to revisit each migrated On Market property and spend a couple of minutes checking and, in some cases, updating data. We get lots of data from some products, less data from others. Sometimes existing suppliers mess us about by delaying or even changing the format they supply data in. If we have to migrate from something we've not migrated from before, the results can be quite poor. We discuss this in the Migrating your data from other products chapter.
The team will confirm what you will need to do before they start the migration.
Data Entry
Using your knowledge that you have acquired from Introductory Training you will be able to add your existing data into EA. The more data you add, the quicker the process will become.
If we’re doing you a new site, you just sign our form and we’ll put it live.
If others are updating or creating a site, you'll need to tell them to put the site live when you are ready. You need to be aware that this can have a lag time attached to it depending on the way it is done. Often, a new site is visible to some site visitors and not to others – depending on the ISP used to connect to the internet. This is because ISPs keep local copies of the site in a “cache” – this means that if you try to access NASA via BT Internet, you’ll see BT Internet’s cached copies of pages that don’t change very often. How often they update depends on a setting called TTL (‘Time to Live’) on your web hosting account. Don’t panic for 24 hours – this is quite normal. If, after 24 hours, you still can’t see the new site on every connection it is time to start talking to your hosting company.
It's important that all staff are buying into the benefits of Expert Agent. Talking to staff about the business benefits of the move can often help to get them onboard, as well as ensuring everybody has done our relevant training courses and feels confident about using the system on a daily basis.
Make sure everybody has done our Introductory training. This can be done live or as self-study course - we recommend the live training wherever possible. There is also a quiz at the end for you to complete.
There will be other training courses that people need to attend, based on their job role. We run courses covering lettings, lettings financial, sales progression, matching, letters and brochures, Expert Users courses - all training is free, and you and your staff can attend as many courses as you like as often as you like. For more information and to register for additional courses, go to the Training top menu.