Word of mouth referrals are important to any business but probably none more so than those in the real estate industry.
Anne Crarey, Executive General Manager, Property Services at Little Real Estate explains why her business relies on positive experiences from clients to generate new sales listings, add new properties to the rental portfolios and to hold onto the existing customer base.
We introduced the NPS (Net Promoter Score) metric into our business in 2016 to ensure real-time feedback that was coming from our tenants and landlords reached not only the property managers but also our leadership team.
The scores measure customer loyalty – specifically how likely a client is to refer our services to others.
Those who score 9 or 10 on the scale are likely to become repeat customers and speak glowingly about your brand or service whilst those who score between 0 and 6 are more likely to have had a negative experience and could detract others from engaging with you.
As a business, utilising the NPS has allowed us to find out when clients are unhappy and get in front of those concerns before the business is lost.
We’ve been able to work through the communications styles preferred by each client and tailor our services for a more personal experience for them.
Our leadership team has also been able to find coaching opportunities for staff that may have been overlooked if we’d not been provided this valuable feedback.
It shone a light on areas that need to be improved both in terms of processes and software and also communications channels that could be strengthened.
We treat every piece of feedback as a gift as it allows us the ability to improve.
We’ve made sure we follow up feedback from both landlords and tenants with a phone call to acknowledge their insights and advise them on a plan to rectify any issues in the relationship.
Using NPS we can also compare ourselves to other businesses not only in the real estate industry but across other sectors.
We can see which businesses are scoring highly and look at their models to see how we can replicate that in our own environment.
We’ve made sure we establish NPS goals on a national and state level for each financial year so we can bring our teams together to achieve a common purpose.
All of our departments have contact with our clients so the NPS score applies to everybody.
Word of mouth is vital for our business success.
Even the best marketing campaigns fall flat if customers aren’t saying good things about you.
