Wherever the customer is on their home-buying or rental journey, it’s essential for estate agents to gather data to provide them with the best possible service. What are their housing preferences? What’s their budget? How did their viewing go?
Wherever the customer is on their home-buying or rental journey, it’s essential for estate agents to gather data to provide them with the best possible service. What are their housing preferences? What’s their budget? How did their viewing go?
There are multiple ways to gather this information: telephone calls are effective but expensive; email, while very cheap, suffers from over-use and can be ignored; SMS Surveys strike a balance, being less expensive than making a call, and delivering a far more favourable response rate than email. Our customers report improvements from 3% to as much as 47% from using SMS to deliver surveys.
SMS Surveys support straightforward yes/no questions, and 1-10 satisfaction rating scales; this quantitative data is ideal for providing insight into the general sentiments of customers and potential buyers.
Allowing audiences to provide qualitative information in addition to this gives estate agents the opportunity to correct a negative impression on an individual level. Both tactics help estate agencies make better decisions and ultimately have happier customers.
What sort of data can you collect?
There are two main types of survey that retailers can choose from. Linear surveys allow a set of questions to be sent chronologically, which is great for collecting data like personal information where the questions will always be the same.
Branched surveys allow a hierarchy of questions to be set up, meaning that the question currently being asked is a consequence of the response to the previous one. This makes them perfect for gathering more specific information. E.g. if a potential buyer has a specific requirement for a property, the follow-on question could delve into more detail about that.
How can surveys be used in property sales?
Property viewing feedback
Estate agencies can reduce the amount of follow-up calls made by agents by automating the process with an SMS Survey. Ask how the viewing went, would they like to arrange a follow-on viewing or maybe even make an offer.
Post-sale feedback
Estate agencies can find out how customers found the purchasing/selling process using your agency, and then make improvements to the service based on this data.
Rent arrears
If a particular tenant has fallen behind with their rent payments, then a non-intrusive SMS Survey can be sent to find out when they are planning to make their next payment, if they’d like to set up a repayment plan, or seek more affordable accommodation.
Rental contract renewals
Rental contract renewals can be partially automated by sending an SMS Survey which, asks them if they’d like to renew, and if they agree to any changes which may have been made to the contract.
Database refreshing
Periodically it may become necessary to ask a potential customer if they are still on the market for a property, and what their requirements are. This process can be completely automated by using an SMS Survey – and the data can even be fed back into existing in-house CRM systems.
Like to know more?
Surveys can be triggered from your CRM software, or you can upload data to our online portal; both options allow you to include merge fields to personalise your bulk messages.
Try an SMS Survey for yourself, or call our team on 0345 356 5758 / [email protected] for more information on how an automated survey can be easily and affordably implemented.
