We hear this a good deal from real estate agents considering using RealSatisfied.
Where we don’t hear that our surveys are too long is from consumers. We also don’t hear it from our customers who’ve consistently experienced our results firsthand. In fact, our client’s experience and the response data support exactly the opposite conclusion. Across the board, 91% of people who start a RealSatisfied Buyer or Seller survey complete the survey. Or put another way, less than 1 in 10 people drop out of a survey once they’ve begun. And since you can’t tell how long one of our surveys is until you begin taking it, the data tells us the survey is not too long.
What’s even more interesting is that the data is even more compelling when you look only at the top performing agents in an office. We recently looked at three different companies and broke out the top 25 agents, in terms of volume of survey events, and found that these agents experienced an even smaller dropout rate. One of the key factors – simply informing their customers that a survey was coming. On average, more than 97% of their clients completed surveys. That is less than 3 out of 100 dropping out of a survey once they had begun.
Our goal at RealSatisfied is to gather the best and most information possible for our clients. To do that, we employ methods that insure we’re asking questions that get at the information from a number of different angles. A few days ago a potential agent client asked if they could reduce the number of questions in our buyer and seller surveys. They argued that their clients wouldn’t fill out the survey, especially since “many of the questions seem to ask for the same information.” They are right. Many of our questions do ask for the same information. There is a reason.
The goal of asking a question a number of different ways is to uncover how the client really felt about the transaction experience. To do that, you can’t simply ask five questions… or one, as proponents of the Net Promoter Score would have us believe. The data that gets returned simply won’t help you in the long run to make course corrections. You are left to guess. We don’t believe that adds real value. You often get just one shot at receiving this kind of client feedback. We believe should make the most of it.
In addition, many of our clients report that the testimonials they receive via our system are more robust. “RealSatisfied has given us a way to simply and easily ask our clients if they think we did a great job,” notes Laurie Davis, Live Love Pinehurst. “The surveys are well thought out and give clients the opportunity to respond without having to figure out what they need to talk about.”
So, we’re happy to say that our surveys are longer than others. They capture a great deal of detail. We’re proud of that. And the numbers speak for themselves.
As I said before, if your client really loves you they may slog through that overlong survey as a thank you or if they hated you, maybe to get that out, too. Perhaps if it were not such an onerous task to get through you’d have a higher response rate and a higher completion rate. I understand about wanting to get results but I think you need to take into consideration the time and patience factor for those responding. I’d have a really hard time going through all of that. I guess it is a trade-off with a smaller response percentage with great detail or a higher response with less. Another point I would make is that those taking the time to respond because they like their agent will tend to give a higher percentage of favorable ratings which could skew the data.
Arlee, I certainly appreciate your perspective. I don’t, however, consider our response rates low. When over 87% of people who start the survey finish the survey, the real issue is not survey length, but how the client has been prepared in advance to anticipate the survey. There is no way to tell how long the survey is before you start, so the survey dropout % is number is the one we pay particular attention to. We monitor that number daily and it rarely dips below 86% on any given day and often climbs well above the 87% average. And I think that in general, regardless of length, happy clients are more likely to fill our any survey or provide any rating or review, thus the overwhelming number of perfect 5 star ratings on Zillow, for example. We are convinced by the numbers that there is no trade off here. We simply collect more data and have a response rate that is better than even simple review systems.