How can Agents survive in an increasingly competitive market?

13 September 2016 7765 Views

The key lies in improving your customer experience through technology

For Agents, the tremendous growth in online estate agents highlights a strong consumer trend that technology is being embraced at an incredibly rapid rate. Online estate agents, like eMoov, Purplebricks and Tepilo have applied greater pressure to the already competitive market. Agents can get ahead of the competition by delivering more value to customers at every stage of the sales process. But how exactly can estate agents do this?

The sales funnel can be broken down into three stages Attract, Convert and Advocate. Here are a few practical tips that can help improve the customer's experience at each stage:

Attract

Implementing a referral system can help you to attract potential customers. Offering a monetary incentive to existing / previous customers to recommend your services to other people can be a great way to attract more customers. For example you could reward one of your existing customers £500 for referring a friend to sell their house with your agency. Social media is a great channel to promote your referral scheme as you can easily find previous customers, post regular updates and even run news feed ads.

Another important factor is to have a modern up to date mobile optimized website. The chances are that your potential customers are viewing your site through a mobile device as over 50% of all internet traffic in the UK is now from mobile devices. For example www.portico.com has a great design which works really well on both mobile and desktop as the content is split up into tiles. There is no question that if your site is not mobile optimized you will be missing out on potential leads.

 

Convert

Once customers have been attracted, the next stage is ensuring that they convert and progress through either the letting or sale transaction. Communication is the key here and a relationship must be built; customers must feel that their agent cares. Treating each customer individually and clarifying complex agreements can go a long way. If a good relationship is built it's much easier to offer ancillary services such as conveyancing, mortgages and of course Homeshift.

Some things you can do to make sure you build and maintain a good relationship are:

1. Always opt to communicate with your customers by phone. You will be able to get a better understanding of their needs this way.

2. Get a real understanding of the reasons why your customer is moving. It could be to start a new family, begin a new job or perhaps something not so positive like a divorce. Being considerate of the circumstances will really make a difference.

3. Constantly keep them updated at each stage of the transaction as moving is a stressful experience

 

Advocacy

Finally generating advocacy amongst your past and current customers will allow you to close the loop as it will attract further business into your agency. If you're focused on delivering the best possible service you want to make sure it's visible to potential customers.

There are great ways to collect, measure and promote a customer's experience. For example, collecting reviews on platforms such as Google Review is an excellent way to gauge the quality of the service you're providing. To collect more in depth feedback you could ask your customers to fill in a quick survey. Typeform is a great free tool which you can use to build online questionnaires.

The bottom line is that consumers expect a better service all round and at every stage of the transaction. Agents must recognise this and utilize technology to their advantage. Gone are the days where dissatisfied customers can’t easily express their feelings to everyone else. Technology provides a great opportunity for the very best agents to grow their business to the next level!

Tom Kelly, Growth & Marketing @ Homeshift

What is Homeshift?

Homeshift helps ease the stress of moving in and out of a property by giving your customers a co-branded dashboard where they can do all their key moving tasks easily online. Once moved in your tenants, buyers, sellers and applicants can manage and control all their household bills and financial services from one place. Currently Homeshift helps move over 1000 people each month and is used by more than 350 Estate and Letting agents across the UK.

How do I sign up or book a demo?

Simply fill in your details here or give us a call on +44 (0) 203 002 7703.