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Know a Good Estate Agent?
Author: James Duez  | Posted: 04-09-2007 | Comments: 0 | Views: 45 | Rating: (57)  (?) 
 Successful Estate Agents know the importance of word-of-mouth referrals. Repeat business and recommendations massively accelerate the success of a business. Of course, we all know that word of negative experiences spreads further and quicker and if you don’t learn from them, they have the potential to damage or even kill a business.
While the public-at-large are quick to absorb the-word-on-the-street, estate agents often miss this critical background chatter until it has had a negative impact on both revenue and reputation.
What clients are willing to say face-to-face is not necessarily the whole truth. While a slowly increasing minority will pipe-up and offer their honest insight, the well established British tradition remains strong among the masses. Most will just not comment on their experience, whether good or bad. There remains concealed a multitude of valuable insight that, if heard, might just be the difference between boom or bust.
I talk to sales reps all the time and see many grappling with a natural fear of discovering what clients really think. Business owners know its commercial suicide to ignore what the customer, yet so many find it hard to confront the problem.
So, we are left with a curious situation. Clients find it hard to say what they think and staff find it hard to get feedback, and act on it.
The bottom line is this: Increasing customer retention rates by 5% is shown to increase profits by between 25% and 95%.
This statistic is startling, and has seen many business executives running to create customer retention strategies, many of which continue to pay huge dividends. Estate Agents can unlock this huge growth opportunity, simply by uncovering makes their clients loyal, and acting on that information.
Many take on third-party mystery shoppers to fill this intelligence gap. For many, it feels the right thing to do. After all, if real clients won’t talk, why not pay fake ones to find out what’s going wrong? Unfortunately, this tends to generate a sporadic, often distorted view of the client experience. What you really need to know is what your clients will tell their friends, and whether they will appoint you again. In either case, why? Mystery shopping measures a set of criteria at a particular instance in time. It goes some way to measuring service, but does not measure loyalty.
Failing to measure and respond to changes in client loyalty levels can have a serious impact on revenue, costs and even staff turnover rates. With the prospect of difficult market conditions ahead, understanding loyalty becomes even more critical. If you can’t measure it, you
can’t hope to improve it and many are left struggling to find the reasons why things are not going to plan.
The best Estate Agents may take on the occasional piece of ‘client satisfaction’ research, but this is poor at yielding insight into real client experiences and loyalty. They usually contain too many of the wrong questions, often yield inaccurate results and at best give a snapshot view.
So just what is customer loyalty?
The answer is surprisingly simple to both understand and to measure. Backed up by thorough research by Frederich Reichheld at Harvard Business School, customer loyalty is simply the strength of the bond between the customer, and a business - in this case, the office of an individual Estate Agent. It’s what makes customers come back again and again and recommend to others.
To measure this, you need to understand how enthusiastically a customer is likely to recommend the agent on a scale of 0-10, based on their experience as a vendor, or potential purchaser. Ask them why they give this score, and you can uncover what is being done well to engender this loyalty, or what might be happening to reduce it. Count the difference between the two and you have a very reliable loyalty score which Reichheld calls the ‘Net Promoter Score’ or NPS.
Ideally, this customer insight should be gathered all the time, feeding each office with a continuous stream of insight that reinforces what is going well (for example, moral boosting praise relating to specific staff) and problems that need to be fixed. Regional and head-office teams can also see what is going on – often enough to drive local improvements. By doing this, agents can constantly monitor loyalty levels, and gain the client insight necessary to drive improvements.
Finally…
Asking staff to encourage customers to talk is important – but not enough, and won’t change the great British mindset. Face-to-face feedback is ideal, but it is still too confrontational for most. Mystery shopping and satisfaction surveys may yield some interesting data, but can rarely drive meaningful improvements.
Property Agents need to provide an easy, non-confrontational way for clients to give feedback when they want to give it – close to the moment of their experience.
Any business that is willing to listen to what clients want to say (and rest assured, will go on to say to friends and family anyway) will certainly be more successful. Without an open feedback channel that respects how customers behave, the barriers stand tall between customer and business. If not well understood, these barriers will certainly continue to be felt in the pockets of business owners.
James Duez is a Director of The Customer Feedback Company who help organisations track and improve customer loyalty levels.
Email: james.duez@thefeedbackcompany.com
Web: www.thefeedbackcompany.com"
Tel: 07912 064461
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