How to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Level

We recently read and unpacked the Reputation Benchmark Report 2024 by ReviewTrackers, which states that the Australia and New Zealand real estate industry sees an average rating of 3.58 stars, reflecting a moderate satisfaction level among customers.

But with property generally being the biggest purchase someone will make in their lifetime, shouldn’t this satisfaction rating be higher?

With this in mind, here are some best practices to ensure your customer journey is a market-leading experience.

1.      Lead Acquisition Best Practices

When acquiring a new lead, it’s important to learn as much as possible about them, so you know what information to provide them. Capturing the following details is essential to ensure you can effectively respond to their expectations and needs throughout their journey:

• Their name and contact details

• Type of buyer

  • First Home Buyer

  • Upsizer

  • Downsizer

  • Investor

• Type of products they’re interested in

  • Townhomes

  • H&L packages

  • Land

  • Established home

• What stage of the buying journey they’re in

  • Are they at the top of the funnel, and just looking to gather more information?

  • Are they lower down the funnel and close to making a purchase decision?

• What locations are they interested in?

In order to gain information from potential customers, you need to offer them something of value. A great way to acquire leads is to have a gated download (such as a First Home Buyer Guide) where people must enter their details in order to access it. You can include some (or all) of the above questions in your form.

Whatever details you don’t gain in the lead acquisition process must be captured by a sales agent during their follow-up process.

2.      Follow-up Best Practices

In our extensive mystery shopping experience, we’ve come across a range of sales agents who have perfected the follow-up process, as well as those who need to refine and improve their approach.

Best practice for following up leads involved multiple attempts to contact the customer within 24 hours of their enquiry, across a few different channels. Too often we see sales agents only calling once and leaving a rushed voice message. We recommend implemented the following method:

• Call the lead.

• If there’s no answer, leave a clear voice message stating your name, the project/company you are calling from and the best number to contact you on.

• Send a text, with your name, the project/company/listing you are calling from and the best number to contact you on.

• Send an email, explaining you have attempted to call them and will try again over the next few days.

• Repeat the above process over a series of weeks.

Tip: Don’t send an email with lots of attachments as your first point of contact. This can easily overwhelm the recipient. Instead, choose 1 or 2 crucial attachments (masterplan or listing flyer) and use your email to try and learn more about the lead by asking up to 3 questions, such as the products they are interested in and their timeframe to purchase.

3.      Initial Lead Nurture Best Practices

It’s important to have an initial email nurture sequence set up for when a lead leaves their details. This series of emails is not only your opportunity to highlight your USPs and products, but more importantly, it’s your opportunity to answer questions, respond to common concerns and help customers overcome any obstacles they may have on their journey to purchase.

We recommend sending at least one weekly email for four weeks, before placing the contact into your long-term nurture sequence. These nurture emails should be automatically triggered and sent.

Database segmentation is important here, as you need to be sending the right messages and products to the right customers. Sending townhome product to an upsizer interested in a knockdown rebuild won’t be effective.