Building a solid estate agency business means continuously improving your services.
Customer needs and wants can change rapidly, staff come and go, and the external market can affect how your business is viewed.
Therefore, it’s important that you have benchmarks and measurements in place to make sure that your agency retains a good reputation within the locations in which you are based.
Measuring metrics such as your Net Promoter Score (NPS)
allows you to get an overview of how your business is viewed by those who interact with you.
We explore how you can best benchmark your business over time.
Measure consistently
One of the biggest mistakes that you can make when measuring customer experience is to not do it consistently and throughout the entire customer cycle.
For example, if you carry out only one or two surveys each year, by the time you discover the customers are not as pleased as you would like, it’s too late to change their minds. In turn this will impact on public perception. While you may get to know about a very unhappy customer via an online review or a direct complaint - it’s those who feel ambivalent that you won’t pick up on.
Additionally, as an estate agent, your interaction with a customer will often last months, if not years in the case of a landlord or tenant. Therefore, it’s vital that you measure how a customer is feeling about your business at all touchpoints throughout the process. This allows you to find out where there may be opportunities for you to improve your processes, or where staff training may be needed.
While you can choose to set benchmarks based on annual scores and feedback, by getting that feedback on a regular basis, you can quickly and efficiently make changes to improve customer satisfaction.
Understanding trends
When you measure your performance consistently you can start to identify trends within your business and work on how to manage them.
For example, throughout the stamp duty holiday sales progress was slower than usual, which, in some cases had a detrimental effect on feedback for some estate agents. While the actual problem is outside of an agency’s control – those who put in place better ways to communicate with clients had better outcomes.
By understanding factors or trends which impact on customer experience you can both plan for any potential issues, and also set realistic KPI’s for your teams.
Set goals for your teams
Some estate agents are great at setting sales goals, but often at the detriment of setting customer service ones. Left unchecked, a drop in customer experience can lead to a downturn in business – especially in a market where competing on fees is not a particularly viable long term strategy for most.
By measuring your customer feedback, you can set objectives for your teams that are founded on how a buyer, vendor, landlord or tenant views your services – not just the financial outcomes.
