Adele Berenstein, a retired Customer Satisfaction Executive with over 41 years experience at IBM wrote the following post on her blog. http://www.satisfactionsecrets.com She is a valuable resource and consultant in big business and was very kind to allow us to repost her article here. She has no affiliation with RealSatisfied.
Buying or selling a home is a major financial transaction for all concerned. Picking an agent to list with or an agent to help find a home is a decision that often involves word of mouth recommendations. As a result, it is very important for a broker to monitor it’s customer satisfaction ratings for its agents and for the broker as a whole.
In an earlier blog post about how to easily create a customer satisfaction survey, I covered many tools available to do your own survey or poll for your business. But there is more to a customer satisfaction system, than just the questions in a survey. In that post I talk about elements you need to consider when evaluating a survey tool? It still takes work to set up a customer satisfaction system. But what if there were services you could buy that were geared to your industry that provided a whole system, and would eliminate the hassle of setting up your own and running and managing it.
I recently came across a Real Estate example of a system called RealSatisfied, currently in place in Australia, the US and Canada with plans to rollout in the UK and New Zealand. It provides a system for customer satisfaction for broker who many have multiple real estate agents working for them. The system is provided as a service and does not require hardware and software installations within the broker’s IT shop.
Elements of a Customer Satisfaction System:
“Management can use the results to train both new and existing agents and share best practices.”
1. A survey questionnaire geared to the type of transaction just completed and customizable to show the broker’s logo and the agent’s name and picture. Real Satisfied has three types of surveys for brokers:
a. Seller Satisfaction
b. Buyer Satisfaction
c. Lost Listing (why a seller did NOT list with the broker after a proposal by an agent)
2. A method to send out surveys to the target audience.
3. Reporting that provides results back to management and optionally to the agent who is being rated.
a. Individual Surveys
b. Aggregated surveys for each agent over time
c. Comparisons of agents within the broker’s firm
d. Comparison of agents and brokers with industry norms.
e. Reports on different topics, such as overall satisfaction, performance across multiple elements of the service provided, recommendation rating (would you recommend this agent) and testimonial return rate (clients are asked if they would be willing to provide a testimonial).
f. Number of surveys sent out and the return rate.
g. Customer requests for management escalation about the service they received.
A customer satisfaction system, such as the one provided by Real Satisfied, allows a Realtor to evaluate itself against others in the industry, and to manage each of their agents. The agents also benefit. They can view where they are doing well and where they need to improve. Management can use the results to train both new and existing agents and share best practices.
There are other organizations the provide agent ratings such a RatedAgent.com, Zillow, Redfin and others that can provide a consumer with ratings for individual agents or sites like NeighborCity that help someone find an agent but Real Satisfied takes the hassle out of setting up and managing a customer satisfacton system within RealEstate.
If you know of other customer satisfaction systems like this for the Real Estate industry or any other industry, share it in the comments section below.
Note: Real Satisfied also provides a customer satisfaction system for Property Managers to measure customer satisfaction of Landlords and Tenants.
