Learn From Closed Real Estate Deals With Well-Crafted Client Satisfaction Surveys
July 2013 Issue
Learn From Closed Real Estate Deals With Well-Crafted Client Satisfaction Surveys
A closing isn’t the end of your relationship with the client. While it may lead to a paycheck and the client might not have any more business to conduct with you at this time, there’s still one important piece to the transaction. Your client can give you valuable feedback via client satisfaction surveys as to how well they perceived your service and, even more importantly, what you can do better. In many ways, your feedback collection system is even more important than sending an appropriate closing gift.
The key to successfully collecting feedback is to have a third party send out professionally designed and worded client satisfaction surveys for you. Even if you do your own surveys, they have a fundamental weakness: Your clients are more likely to tell hard truths to someone else than they are to you. This means that self-created and sent surveys are unlikely to accurately identify the areas where you really need to improve. A professional survey can also get better response rate — as much as 25 percent better — than one you do yourself.
Good client satisfaction surveys cover your entire interaction with the client, without being too lengthy. With a well-crafted survey, you can learn such things as:
- What percentage of clients are repeat business
- Which of your marketing pieces drew the client in
- What factors influenced the client to work with your company
- How your client would describe and rate their satisfaction with your services
- Whether your client would do business with you again
- Whether they would recommend your company to their family members and friends
- How often your client needs your services
While using a service provider can give you more professional and detached client satisfaction surveys, the provider should also tabulate the data and provide you with a report that combines detailed charts and graphs with at-a-glance executive summaries. This helps you act on what you learn from your clients so that you can market more effectively, improve your services, increase customer satisfaction, and improve client retention.
Sending out client satisfaction surveys is an effective marketing tool. When you survey your clients, you aren’t just listening to them. Your survey is proof of your commitment to understand your clients’ needs and expectations and proof that you strive to exceed both of them. Furthermore, a survey sends the message with a great degree of subtlety. After all, you aren’t just saying that you care. You’re showing it.
Another couple things to consider include incorporating questions to generate future leads for your real estate services, as well as mortgage or financial leads to pass along to your referral sources. Don’t forget to ask for a referral from your client and also add an area for them to write a short testimonial for you. You can create a brag book of your returned surveys to show potential clients.
To learn more about adding client satisfaction surveys to your sales and marketing plans, contact us. We recommend facilitating them from the corporate level for larger real estate companies as this gives you control and continuity of your client database. Our system breaks down the survey analysis to each region, if applicable, each branch, and each agent.