Here is a thought leadership article from KnowYourMarket

In order to promote our KnowYourMarket brand that offers market research in the form of mystery shopping and customer feedback surveys, we wanted to alert readers to the importance of gathering feedback (in any form) in order to better guarantee success. This article focuses on the benefits businesses are likely to realise if they invest in regular feedback from their customers.

Who is KnowYourMarket?

KnowYourMarket utilises mystery shopping and customer feedback insights to optimise estate agents’ sales processes and customer experience in order to improve conversion rates such as valuation to instruction. How quickly does your team respond to leads? How likely are your customers to recommend you? Why did a vendor go elsewhere?

Click here to find out how KnowYourMarket can help your agency

Understanding your target audience and how they perceive your business is paramount to the success of any brand, including within agency. Just look at famous examples such as Blockbuster who failed to adapt to the changing needs of their customers and now no longer exist. Many businesses think they know what their customers think of them, but this can often be far from the truth.

Collecting genuine, unbiased feedback from customers, and on a regular basis, is the key to help steer your agency in the right direction. The data allows businesses to readjust if required and set objectives that will help them achieve higher levels of success and growth in their market. A business’s market includes their customers, competitors, and the landscape in which they operate. Knowing and understanding how the business is currently perceived within your market will provide valuable insight which can be used to make informed decisions regarding the business’s direction and how it operates.

If a brand gets it right, the consumer is not only aware of what the business offers but where it sits in the market too. A mismatch of brand perception, pricing and services can spell disaster for your business. And business owners are often too close to their business to really see how they are perceived externally. It is common to assume that the more experience you have within an industry the more likely you are to make better decisions but even agents with 30 years under their belt are able to learn something from raw feedback from their customer’s mouths. A third party is much more likely to receive honest feedback on your behalf, whether that be Amazon reviews, Google Reviews, TrustPilot, Feefo or Kerfuffle…

Knowing what customers think of you is a key step in making sure that your positioning aligns to where you want your brand to go. Having data and statistics about how the market perceives your business will give you the insight you need to make the right changes to improve the customer experience and convert more leads. If a business is spending money on generating leads, it is important that the right processes are in place to ensure that money is not wasted, and the leads are converted as often as possible. Making your business more efficient at converting leads is often easier and more profitable than acquiring ever more new leads. Even more important in the current property market where instructions are low.

From a staffing perspective, feedback allows business owners to identify which areas of the business may need to improve and what training is required. Staff are more likely to listen to unbiased third-party research, than a colleague’s opinion on what they could be doing better. Good staff are harder than ever to find at the minute, so surely it makes even more sense to develop those you already have? You might even lose fewer if they see the investment you are putting into them.

If a business is standing still and not doing things to improve, it will not be long until it starts to regress and move backwards. Even very good businesses can be made better through measuring and tracking progress. The best businesses have been seeking reviews and researching the market for years and the most forward-thinking agents are starting to do it too now - don’t get left behind.