Modernising CX in the Real Estate Industry
Modernising CX in the Real Estate Industry
The pandemic has disrupted every industry, including real estate. The peak of the pandemic led to many working professionals shifting out of their rented properties to save money in times of uncertainty. With professionals returning to the new normal, interest in purchasing properties has risen since early 20211.
Pre-pandemic people were looking for rental properties as the cost of acquisition was lower as compared to buying a property. However, post-pandemic shows a different trend with sales of residential properties being 114% year on year. This figure is 70% up when compared to pre-pandemic figures.
While this increase in demand is heartening, the customer is spoilt for choice. It is more critical than ever before to ensure they have a great experience with the digital assets and offline touchpoints of your real-estate business.
Importance of CX in real estate
Even before the customer steps onto your physical property, there are preliminary steps that they have already taken. They have researched properties online and gone through photographs, reviews, and social media chatter before shortlisting properties they would like to visit. Based on this research, they would also have questions.
Whether they do this preliminary homework on their own or through a call centre you as a brand has set up, the deliberation journey of the customer has already begun. This means that you need to be capturing data like how was the interaction of the customer with the call centre/website and if they got all the information that they needed.
Irrespective of how large or small the sum of money your customer is going to invest, you are no longer selling them four walls or amenities. You are selling them a personalized experience that can lead to interactions and collaborations. Delivering such an experience would require capabilities that can work seamlessly across offline and online realms.
That’s where CX and measuring interactions between customers and brands play a role.
Wide coverage via SMS & email allowed a leading Indian real-estate brand to measure individual journey stages, with response rates as high as 24%
CX in real estate – why NPS®
Delivering superior CX across the journey of a home buyer is key to building a profitable and sustainable business. The success of your CX program can be measured through Net Promoter Score® (NPS). NPS® of your business can help you understand the answer to a key metric: on a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you will recommend the company to your friends/family/colleagues.
NPS® gives you a figure that is easy to interpret. Anyone who scores 9 or 10 is a promoter. Those who score 7 or 8 are passives, which means they’re not invested enough to either say good things or bad things about their experience with you. And those who score between 0 and 6 are detractors.
An NPS® score can not only help you to achieve operational efficiency, but it can also assist you in removing pain points and barriers to purchase, leading to an improved customer conversion rate and increased average transaction size.
A leading Indian real-estate brand improved their NPS® by 37 points over 6 months by measuring CX across key improvement sites
Mapping key touchpoints
From research to site visits, to the point where you hand over the keys to the homeowner, every interaction that your customer has with your brand has the potential of turning them into promoters. A purchase cycle for a house is typically a long process, taking months, so it is essential that pain points are addressed timely and the right expectations are set at the beginning of the journey.
A few examples of touchpoints that could come into play while mapping the journey of your customer are:
- Call between the customer and call centre/agent – to understand the quality of the interaction.
- Is the customer a qualified lead – this will help you gain insight into the reason behind interest or lack of interest.
- The quality of the visit interaction.
- Documentation and support provided for speedy closure.
- Registration completion – to understand the ease of the process and to capture any issues early on.
- Timely interaction with the relationship manager.
- How easy or difficult it is to lodge a complaint.
- How quickly is a complaint resolved.
- Quality of handover.
- The customer moves in, how easy it is and if they can/would refer anyone.
- Timely interactions with the estate manager.
Once your touchpoints are mapped, you can get into the M.A.I. framework of Measure, Act and Improve.
- You can measure data through contextual conversations, monitoring real-time feeds and using analytics to gain insight into program performance.
- Take actionable steps for grievance redressal.
- Improve your processes based on the data you have collected.
How can CX help your real-estate business?
CX will not only help you to give your customer a memorable, tailored and unique experience, but it will also help you to engage with leads to understand the movement through the touchpoints and its key drivers. It can also help you to reach out to qualified leads with structured information so that the discussion is more fruitful – both for you and your customer.
Apart from this, it will help you to understand the reasons behind booking/drop-off and you can prepare your sales agents in advance to minimize the gap and improve your conversion rate.
Understanding the overall experience of your customer is a key factor when it comes to a successful deal of a real estate transaction. Through CX, you can not only understand this experience but also improve your ROI.
Got questions? Contact us to get a detailed understanding and a demo from one of our CX experts.
