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