The large majority of agents are failing to give  the correct contact information about themselves online – including on website directories.

Digital marketing organisation Yell looked at the online presence of 2,500 agents on the likes of Facebook, Bing and My Local Services UK.

It found that 92% of agents were giving wrong or inconsistent information, including basic details such as a phone number or email.

Yet, according to Yell, 89% of customers will try another company if the details listed online for a particular business are incorrect or missing.

Mark Clisby, Yell’s marketing director, said: “If a company’s information online is wrong, it’s arguably worse than not being online at all.

“Not only is the company effectively invisible to customers, it can also seem careless or even untrustworthy.

“This often happens because companies don’t always know all the listings sites where they appear, or they forget to update their information.

“It’s easily done, but can be incredibly damaging for business.”

The Yell research also found that a number of agents have very similar names.

There are 152 estate agency businesses whose name starts with “Home”, while 17 business names start with or include the words “home experts”.

Yell has launched technology that automatically lists and updates business details online, and also monitors online reviews.

It is offering agents the chance to try out its Connect technology for free, so that agents can see how visible they are online and how accurate the information is. We suspect it’s worth doing.

* EYE wonders if it is only third party websites where agents frustratingly fail to give the right information. It is part of our job to contact agents on a daily basis, but sometimes the obstacles are almost insurmountable from the information on their own websites. There are agents that do not give any phone numbers or email addresses on their site – instead, you have to submit a request. Such requests may get an automated acknowledgement but otherwise disappear down a black hole.

And please do not get us started on the huge number of agents whose phone systems give you any number of automated options to press or you can wait: that’s a couple of minutes we’re never going to get back.

On the other hand, all credit to those agencies that dispense with all of that nonsense, whose staff (or, for all we know,  Moneypenny?) pick up phones promptly, pass the messages on and the person you need to speak to really does get back to you. And pretty often, these are the agents that offer a live chat facility when you visit their websites AND make their phone numbers and email addresses abundantly obvious.

We’re journalists, but isn’t that what all customers want?