Why they matter: reviews of online agents from customers who pay upfront but have yet to experience the service

Editor’s note: This article was written by Ben Marley, head of market development at Feefo, in response to a question from EYE. We asked about reviews from people who have paid online agents up-front but have yet to receive the actual service. 

The future of the estate agency in the UK will be about customer experience.

Get it right and customers will sing your praises and say nice things about your business or staff online.

Let down your customers at any point in their dealings with you and off they go to a competitor, probably leaving a trail of negative comments on web forums.

There is little point in repeating the clichés that are trotted out about poor performance by agents, precisely because they are so common.

The UK government’s 2017 report into the industry Research on Buying and Selling Homes examines the many points where buyers and sellers feel short-changed and stresses the need for increased transparency.

The truth is that in an age of enhanced choice, customer experience is now the key battleground for all consumer-facing businesses. A survey published by PwC last year found that for 65% of Britons, customer experience is an important factor when they consider what to buy.

Among the survey’s 15,000 global respondents almost a third (32%) stop using a brand after a single bad experience.

The stakes are high, which is why it is so vital to obtain as much insight as you can about the journey your customers take with you.

Many agencies use review systems, for example, but primarily seek and publish feedback when buyers and sellers have exchanged or completed a property purchase. That’s fine, but it only provides a viewpoint from those businesses who get to the end point.

What about those sellers whose properties fall through, or they decide to take their property off the market?

Indeed, why shouldn’t the public and agents know more about the experience at each of the many touch-points, in what can be a notoriously lengthy and emotional process for those involved.

Collecting reviews purely from those who have exchanged and completed doesn’t give an account of what happened to those that dropped out or dispensed with the agency’s services before that point.

A company with multiple branches that only collects reviews on completion therefore lacks the understanding of what’s going right or wrong throughout the journey, and nor do potential customers considering which agent to use. This is where things will soon start to change.

Estate agents and customers value transparency

At Feefo, we’re encouraging agents to use reviews to map the customer journey right from the point sellers first sign on with them or buyers express an interest. By adopting these smart review platforms, agents can advertise their transparency but also extract hugely valuable customer insights.

Another issue surrounding reviews in this industry is that of fake reviews, which we are committed to helping combat, working closely with the British Standards Institute (BSI) in launching the recent ISO 20488 – a new benchmark that will help increase transparency and trustworthiness in UK reviews.

This is a big step in the right direction helping to provide transparency and building trust with customers, but also to establish long-term loyalty. The reviews industry needs more regulation, and we firmly believe and back that motion.

AI transforms what reviews can do

Artificial intelligence capabilities will help transform the insights agencies can garner from all their reviews. Smart platforms use machine learning and natural language processing to analyse thousands of reviews, almost instantly uncovering where in the buying or selling process customers are unhappy, satisfied or pleasantly surprised.

When a property is listed, viewed, and sold subject to contract, why shouldn’t an estate agent know if their clients are satisfied with how the process has been handled to date?

Artificial intelligence capabilities will reveal how clients feel and what it is that has pleased or irked them. The insights extracted from this often-neglected goldmine of data give unique visibility to the trends and factors that would otherwise remain hidden.

One estate agent in the Wirral has been using its smart platform to contact sellers, buyers, landlords and tenants at key touch-points in their respective customer journeys, with agency staff politely requesting they take up the offer to post a review.

This agent has benefited from greater transparency in the eyes of prospective clients, and as a business is also provided with rapid intelligence on the performance of branches and individual members of staff. Any difficulties or misunderstandings with clients can be quickly remedied, while senior managers learn what they need to address to improve the overall customer experience.

Journey mapping is essential to competitiveness in all consumer-facing sectors

To conclude, in all consumer-facing sectors, mapping the customer journey is necessary to understand what happens to potential clients and purchasers at different twists and turns in their engagement.

This is as true in the travel and insurance industries as it is in the property market – in fact any business where there is a series of steps towards the final outcome desired by the business.

What estate agents are quickly learning is that smart review platforms give them critical insights into the key points in the journey where they are exceeding, falling short or meeting expectations. They are also a vital tool in boosting and advertising an organisation’s commitment to transparency.

When the quality of customer experience is so crucial to success, it is only sensible for estate agents to employ smart reviews. There are few better ways to map the customer journey and remain competitive in a rapidly changing environment.

* Ben Marley is head of market development at Feefo, the reviews platform used by several agents including Purplebricks

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41 Comments

  1. MarkRowe

    Sorry, I must have missed the answer to the question…?

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    1. Bless You

      Purplebricks Google in Solihull is 1.8 stars ( off 85 reviews)

      Trustpilot is fake

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      1. M Arlington

        This is the point the article is making.   By only accepting reviews from people who completed or exchanged they are not taking into account all the unhappy customers were no sale was achieved.

        For an online model the service you are paying for, often in advance is to market the property, not to sell.   If the marketing does not work you should be able to leave a review.   Not have it removed, as would appear to be  the case with a certain online agent and review site.

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        1. Bless You

          I know what the article is saying, i was saying it 2 years ago with a comparison to rating a restaurant 5 stars for just taking your order and you not tasting the food ( very clever) .

          Its NAEA , Rightmove , Zoopla , which?   etc who should hang their heads in shame for profiteering off the back of fake business models.

          bless you all.

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          1. Malcolm Egerton

            Agreed, Bless You: I cannot believe so many ‘industry bodies’ have endorsed these reviews businesses – none of which even comply with the CMA regulations.

            These are crystal clear: if you invite any customers at all to write a review you must allow all of your customers to do so, and at a time of their own choosing.

            On top of that I wouldn’t touch an agent with a plastic barge pole that needed a ‘feedback system’ to work out why they’d lost a deal!

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            1. CountryLass

              I think the feedback system could help by finding out the buyer/seller perception of why it went wrong. When you are dealing with something day-in-day-out we can sometimes miss what seems obvious to others.

              This industry is about perception management as much as sales and customer service. A feedback system could help highlight where the perceptions could have been managed better. It doesn’t mean that the deal could have been saved necessarily just that the way the client perceives the Agent and the scenario might be useful to compare.

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  2. Hillofwad71

    Ben
    Fake and Negative Reviews. Does Feefo work differentally fromTrustpilot ? where your mutual client Purplebricks effectively polices the site for negative reviews ,gets them removed and then places the onus on the reviewer  to show some sort of proof to get them reinstated.
    Guilty until proved innocent? Fox in the henhouse!
    In fact policing Trustpilot and removing negative reviews seems to be the main function of  regional directors at Bricks . Potential buyers who have had a bad experience have their negative reviews  removed because they can’t  show any documentary evidence of a transaction or an invoice .
    How can that be justified? How can the public have any faith in the accuracy?  
    It does seems to me its all about maintaning the 5*rating at all costs and removing negative posts . How is your site different?  
     
    Just looking at your site Bricks  have  38 1*reviews How many have been removed?

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    1. Malcolm Egerton

      Ben – surely you would want to answer a question like this (8 hours in)? Hollofwad has put his finger on both sites’ flaws – they favour the business. Trustpilot by allowing the business to ‘appeal’ the review and Feefo by allowing the business to control who gets invited to review and when. To try and punch home what is fatally wrong here – would you pick a cancer surgeon on the basis of reviews from either of these sites? Then why should someone trust their property sale to a business that uses them?

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      1. Chris Wood

        Can you send a link to the CMA regulations page please?

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  3. AgencyInsider

    It does seems to me its all about maintaning the 5*rating at all costs and removing negative posts . How is your site different?’ asks Hillofwasd71

    I think we would all like the answer to that question, please Mr Marley.

     

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  4. JonnyBanana43

    ANSWER the question. Don’t feed us drivel – have your bed fellows Purblebricks written this article for you…? “There is little point in repeating the clichés that are trotted out about poor performance by agents, precisely because they are so common.” F off.    
    As a marketing development manager, what exactly do you know about estate agency?

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  5. Chris Wood

    A good article and reviews of the entire process are vital for agents to learn and improve. What this article misses, possibly purposely, is that what consumers really want to know is what the whole service is likely to be. I.e. in the case of selling agents, ‘did they do a good job of selling the property up to the point of key handover on completion?’.

    If consumers believe they are reading a review of a consumer who has reviewed after a completed transaction when, in fact, they are basing a substantial transactional decision on a review of someone who has only just accepted an offer, subject to contract, that is highly misleading unless, it is made very clear that the review is only of a certain stage in the process. Something Feefo reviews do not do.

    The CMA and Trading Standards have been vocal over the past few years that reviews form part of transactional decisions and, thus, are a subject of close scrutiny under COR legislation.

    To use a clearer analogy, if you are asked write a review of a restaurant at the point the food arrives on your table, it may be a fair review of the service to date but, the food may subsequently taste awful and be cold. Nonetheless, if that restaurant uses your review “food arrived quickly and with very friendly service” another consumer may feel they have been mislead when having spent their hard-earned money at that eatery the following week.

    Feefo currently commands a relatively high degree of respect in the review world; if it wants to maintain and build on that position, it should insist its customers draw attention to where, when and what any given review is actually reviewing.

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    1. coleface

      Firstly, as already highlighted that’s a very long piece to manage to not answer the one question posed?

      Secondly, questioning the service of agents when the standards of review companies is shameful is totally hypocritical.

      Thirdly, the point about reviews throughout the service may have merit, but the reality of smaller agents having capacity for creating systems to  keep on top of that less so.

      Consumers could easily be persuaded to put a review after a well set up accompanied viewing lets say, but that’s hardly a reflection of the agents overall ability. It’s like reviewing the peas when you’ve had a 3 course meal.

      Abortive sale reviews do happen, normally negative with a client in an emotional angry state and blaming the agent. Often unfairly and always difficult to counter without a spat.

      Finally the the Trustpilot 5* rating that PB, Yopa and Emoov all still show on their home pages.

      And considering the whole arguement of this guy is the consumer will make choices based on ratings….  well these rating are not genuine, but the public thinks they are and the businesses are still failing. So let’s not over state the value of a review site.

       

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    2. Dom_P

      I completely agree Chris. As you point out, if one had an agency which didn’t always deliver the result, but had the capability to put on a good show at the front end, when are you going to ask your customers for reviews?
       
      I would suggest that the fairest and most transparent way to allow Feefo and others to display reviews in a constructive way would be to allow selection of the ‘interaction’ the customer has had with the agent, for example Accompanied viewing/Property Valuation/Purchase/Sale etc. with the facility to rate them on each service experienced.
       
      That would allow a useful metric for reporting where a person could see that an Agent may have strengths in valuations but maybe not in completed sales for example.
       
      Anything else is effectively, to a lesser or greater extent, misleading, whether deliberate on the part of the agent or not, as it is not always clear what the customer is actually reviewing at first glance.

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      1. Malcolm Egerton

        Why then – for heaven’s sake – not use Google? It allows the reviewer to post whenever they like, and alter their review at will if their experience changes? Never mind that it shows in every conceivable search.

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  6. DB999

    One large corporate agent took to doing this on google some time ago. Getting potential vendors to leave positive reviews about how nice the valuer was when they visited and told them what they wanted to hear! No actual sale, never listed the property or carried out a single viewing. Totally pointless reviews that tell you nothing about the competence of the company but as you say, gets the rating up.
    80 reviews, a third of which are from people who have never actually completed or even started a transaction with them. If a review is left at the point of an offer being accepted can the client go back and change it when they don’t hear another word from the “agent”?
    It is important to take feedback from the transactions that fail and it would be good to see comments on Feefo from the 48% of vendors who have paid upfront and not completed, although strangely they don’t appear in abundance and get removed from trust pilot sharpish! It’s almost as if the owners of trust pilot have a personal interest in Bricks.

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    1. cyberduck46

      DB999,

       

      >it would be good to see comments on Feefo from the 48% of vendors who have paid upfront and not completed

       

      I’ve just had a quick look at a few of feefo’s 3* reviews and clearly some of them haven’t sold.

       

      This one hasn’t sold after 2 years!

       

      “I have been trying to sell my house for two years and have many buyers pull out. The last one just at Exchange. This has been no fault to purple bricks but having a post sales team is not quite the same as a high street estate agent, even though I have been given a contact person who has been very helpful”

       

      Why do you think they aren’t asking people who haven’t sold?

       

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  7. smile please

    Peebee we are waiting……

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    1. wardy

      pop corn at the ready……

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  8. flower10136

    Mr Marley – I’m not sure you know what a Review is and who they are for. Insights are not reviews and should not be used as such.

    I would suggest it is impossible to leave a ‘truly honest review’ until the sales transaction is complete and anyone reading a review would expect it to be of a completed transaction – because why write one before then ?

    In reality, very few clients are going to leave any kind of negative review if they still require/need the help from an EA- how could they ?

    You are misleading consumers.

     

     

     

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  9. Hillofwad71

    I received this email from Trustpilot last week on the 25th January !!!! months later .
    It illustrates quite clearly howTrustpilot operates You couldn’t make it up bearing in mind what happened on  Emoov Its clear that the new owners are looking to sweep clean historic poor reviews  A complete farce How can you take the review sites seriously ? 
     
      “Gemma (Trustpilot) Jan 25, 13:02 CET
    Dear  XXXXXXXXXXXXX,
    Thanks very much for your review of emoov.co.uk.We’re writing to you because we’ve noticed that your review only includes limited information about your experience with the company. We really want Trustpilot reviewers to provide an overall picture of their buying experience, and this includes the level of customer service. In this case, your review has been flagged as incomplete by emoov.co.uk, so we’ve TEMPORARILY MOVED it offline. But we’ll be happy to reinstate it online if you can add a few more details.!
     
    LOL!!!!!! I bet!!!!!            

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    1. AgencyInsider

      I don’t think I am alone in suffering from ‘Review Request Fatigue’. Constant emails, pop up, text messages from companies wanting me to rate my ‘experience’. Unless the experience has been really exceptionally good or bad I simply bin the requests as nothing more than an annoyance.

      I would bet that ‘Gemma’ above, like many many others, won’t be ar*ed to add to her review and in consequence it will never reappear – which is exactly what the likes of emoov will be hoping.

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      1. Hillofwad71

        Agency
        No Gemma was the name of The Compliance Officer at Trustpilot emailng me The review was posted months ago  She has been responded to but not holding my breath !

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    2. cyberduck46

      Hilofwad71,

       

      Have you ever had a problem where you have provided the information requested and the review has not been re-instated?

       

      I think if I was a business I’d want to i) have reviews ii) know that reviews were genuine and iii) wouldn’t want the expense of having to verify all reviews. I can recall before the system of verifying reviews was introduced, companies predominantly had negative reviews because competitors or people holding a grudge used to post under multiple names.

       

      TrustPilot issued a statement in regard to PurpleBricks a while back and they said that PB sought verification of as many positive reviews as they did negative ones. Now perhaps this doesn’t go far enough because perhaps there are more positive ones? You also have to remember when considering this that there are two methods that people use to review (I’m talking about PB here because this is the only system that I am slightly familiar with). 1) via an invite 2) directly at the TrustPilot website.

       

      If a customer reviews via an invite then that doesn’t need verification really in terms of it being from somebody who’s had a valid experience. However other rules will still apply, like bad language and anything else TrustPilot have in their user T&Cs

       

      So I think if PB queried an equal percentage of positive and negative reviews that are entered directly at Trustpilot (i.e. not via an invite) then that would be fair. What do you think?

       

      I see you regularly comment on TrustPilot reviews and was wondering what your estimate is in regard to the number that are queried by PB? Do you ever see positive reviews queried?

       

      Is there any way of identifying whether a review comes via an invite?

       

       

       

       

       

       

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      1. Malcolm Egerton

        “Have you ever had a problem where you have provided the information requested and the review has not been re-instated?”  Two answers to this one – the first is that a high proportion of (negative) reviewers won’t be bothered to challenge a suspension (TP asks them to jump through so many hoops), so it never reappears. The second is that their system means the negative review reappears on the date it was submitted, not the day it’s put live – often pages from the front – clever eh?

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  10. Property Poke In The Eye

    With most of these sites when you review between 1 and 3 it goes directs to the internal  company review site.  If you review between 4 and 5 only then does it get directed to the actually review site.

    I believe all agents should display how long an agent has been in the industry with what type of experience so the public can see at a glance which agent they want to instruct based on personal reviews opposed to company reviews.

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  11. WiltsAgent

    The only reviews that matter are Google reviews, the rest of these review sites are nothing but ‘paid for’ advertising. Ask anyone under 25 and they’ll tell you they completely ignore this sites. Try reading some off the reviews for the onliners, straight from the keyboard of some PR bod and usually includes the phrase ‘so much better than my local high street agent’.

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    1. Malcolm Egerton

      Google every time.

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  12. Ostrich17

    Thank you Mr Marley  
     
    Perhaps you can kindly explain when feefo changed their policy as I seem to recall being told, by one of your sales people, that you were NOT like Trustpilot and only collected reviews from completed transactions?    

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    1. cyberduck46

      Ostrich17, would you not be complaining if the reviews were only from completed sales?
       
      If you consider the status of PB’s listings they fall into a number of categories:
       
      1) listed for sale
      2) listed SSTC
      3) sold by PB
      4) listed, SSTC or sold with another agent
      5) not listed by any agent – but can presumably be re-marketed by PB at any time.
       
      Which of these categories would you include when trying to offer a fair reflection of the service provided?
       
       
       

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    2. Chris Wood

      I was given exactly the same line in 2017 by Feefo (call recordings held on file). Clearly, that policy has changed.

      When I was investigating online reviews for a blog article a couple of years ago and, more recently, for another I am currently working on; I spoke to a number of review companies including Trustpilot and Feefo. When and if asked, I gave my full name, address and company. There was no deception.

      I also located and contacted UK based companies that offered to ‘manage’ customer reviews for companies. (To be very clear, these management companies were in no way related to, associated with or part of the companies mentioned above).

      One of the review management companies (RMC) I spoke to proudly claimed (but I had and have no way of substantiating the claim) that they worked for a number of big client firms well-known in estate agency. I contacted these RMC using my own name and company stating I was looking to see how I could improve my company rating.

      During these conversations, but in particular with this particular ‘review management’ company, I was gleefully told how the negative reviews are easily disposed of or “buried”.

      I was advised by this senior sales executive at the time (2017), to avoid Feefo as their method of vetting reviews at the time made disposing of negative ones highly problematic. The reason given was that they have a strict cross-referencing system in place and only allowed reviews on completion of a sale. Sadly, it now appears that Feefo has undermined its own USP.

      The techniques used for other review sites that the RMC described mirror what has been outlined by others in the comments section above:  Any negative reviews are immediately contacted and removed whilst “investigated” and, on the rare occasions when “incentives” to alter reviews have not been successful and they have to be marked as verified or genuine, this firm claimed that they would be able to add dozens of new positive reviews to push the negative reviews down the pile and, to keep the average score of the client firm at an agreed level. “Are they genuine?” I asked. “Do you really want to know the answer to that?” Was the response I received.

       

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      1. PeeBee

        Here’s an interesting statement – also from 2017:

        “I’ve stopped reading TrustPilot reviews. Online reviews are notoriously unreliable.”

        Feel free to guess the source…

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  13. Hillofwad71

    “Have you ever had a problem where you have provided the information requested and the review has not been re-instated?”
     

    Yes  I have with , Crowdcube,Bricks ,99 Home and Emoov having supplied screenshots and copies of emails  all nuked !!

     

    “However, unfortunately we cannot put your review back online as it still contains personal information that could be used to track, identify, contact or impersonate someone.Please remove sensitive information within the next 7 days. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll have to keep your review offline. It won’t be deleted, but it will stay offline until we hear from you again.”

     

    HAVING REMOVED ALL THE SENSITIVE INFO AS REQUESTED STILL NUKED

    It’s like the Tests of Hercules trying to get a neg one to stick .They wear you down  hoping you  get bored

     

    It’s hard work being Disgusted from Tunbridge Wells!

    ;

     

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    1. Chris Wood

      And yet, personal information such as the agents full* name and ‘branch’ are often quoted. Go figure….
       
       
      *When you write a review for anywhere, do you use the persons’ full name or just their first or last? E.g.
      “Rosalind at your Slough branch provided excellent advice and was very helpful” or,
      “Mrs Renshaw at your Slough branch provided excellent advice and was very helpful” or,
      “Mrs Rosalind Renshaw at your Slough branch provided excellent advice and was very helpful”
      Perhaps it’s just me but the latter smacks more of copy and paste rather than a genuine review.

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    2. cyberduck46

      >Yes  I have with , Crowdcube,Bricks ,99 Home and Emoov having supplied screenshots and copies of emails  all nuked !!

       

      Thanks. Seems to be a problem then with a common denominator being online agents.

       

       

       

       

       

       

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    3. GibsAgent

      Had you personally used the companies you were reviewing?

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  14. smile please

    Any business owner / Competent employee knows review on any sites should be taken with a very large pinch of salt.

    The problem is when companies can remove unflattering reviews it makes the entire review site questionable in my opinion.

    As much as i dislike AllAgents, They may have a number of flattering reviews that may not strictly be true, but they do not remove the poor ones which does give some balance.

    The best ones are google reviews, but anybody can go on ebay and buy them!

     

     

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    1. Malcolm Egerton

      Re: ‘buying Google reviews’: agreed – plenty of ads on eBay. But have you ever come across a UK estate agent doing that? – I must admit I haven’t. Estate agents usually stick to cherry-picking – selcetively choosing happy clients to post reviews to Google (aginst the CMA regs, and, according to Propertymark, the CMA are on to it). The really naughty boys get reviews to places like Allagents and then only ask only those who write 5* reviews to copy them to Google – that way they are guaranteed to look great wheer it matters most – just waiting or the first prosecution.

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  15. Anthonyw

    I was told a short while ago regarding a buyers bad experience with an online agency in that the communication was dreadful etc. etc. So much so, the buyer ended up communicating direct with the seller on whatsapp and email. I asked if they gave feedback to help others when deciding who to go with but they said the ordeal was so stressful they just wanted to put it behind them. They then went on to say they wouldn’t know where to go to do that. Most people either can’t be bothered to leave a review as it inconveniences them, or they just don’t know where to go to do one.

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    1. Malcolm Egerton

      Google?

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  16. Malcolm Egerton

    Occur to anyone that the person best qualified to understand why the sale fell through is the negotiator?

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