A month-long study of visitors to agents’ own websites has revealed that very few go on to other agents’ sites.
It has also shown that agents could do far more in terms of chat availability and are seeing potential business ‘walk away’ because there is no one on chat duty at certain times.
Just 4.6% of the 2.8m visitors monitored during May went on to browse other agents’ websites.
Giosg, a firm which advises businesses on how to engage with customers online, monitored a total of 2,710,592 individuals looking for properties on eight websites.
These belonged to companies of very different sizes, and included one online agent: Connells, Knight Frank, Hamptons, Savills, Countrywide, Hatched (the Connells-owned online service), Barons and Winkworth.
Knight Frank, Connells and Savills were the three busiest sites. One of them – Giosg has refused to say which – drew over 40% of all the visitors. The next busiest drew 38.4% of the visitors, and the third busiest 22.4%.
The least busy sites drew just 0.08% and 1.32% of the visitors.
On average, visitors viewed 8.8 pages during a browsing session, although results vary between the best performing site which generated 14.9 page views per visit and the worst with only 2.8.
All eight of the agency websites have chat functions, and during the month there were over 1,000 chats between them.
The study showed that most visitors go to agents’ websites during the working week between 6am and 7pm.
These times had significant implications for the chat functions on the sites, since chat operators tend to be available between 9am and 6pm.
Ville Rissanen, CEO at Giosg, said: “This means there are three hours a day which accounts for 720,000 unique visitors and indicates that a significant amount of potential additional business is currently just walking away.”
Weekend online visits accounted for approximately 850,000 visitors in the month.
Whilst weekend visits fall by 30% on Saturdays and 34% on Sundays, the number of chat operators ‘on call’ drops by 51% and 69% respectively.
Five out of the eight companies have no one on chat duty on Sundays.
During the month, the 1,000 chat conversations broke down as follows:
- Booking a valuation 30%
- Property enquiry 28%
- General enquiry 20%
- Technical issues and site content 5%
- Branch contact 2%
- Recruitment 1%
- Other 14%
Rissanen said: “Property companies have been one of the early adopters of online chat but there is more that can be done, watching potential customers’ ever-changing habits and actions.
“We know that today’s consumers expect to get a response from property companies around the clock, not just between the hours that most customer service representatives are in the office.
“To ensure there are no ‘black holes’ in the communication flow when teams are enjoying a rest, our clients such as Connells Group, whom we work with to deliver new revenue sources from its websites and to improve online customer service experience, have implemented semi-automated instant messaging services.
“This targets their website visitors at the optimum point in their online journey, regardless of whether that happens to be at 10am or 10pm.
“This has resulted in a more than 20% increase in the number of property valuations booked through Connells websites.”
Sounds like someones trying to sell me something…
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yep, we could open sundays and spend our day talking to hot buyers with ice creams and maps in their hand..but i prefer to go to church and repent for purplebricks sins….Bless You All x
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Bless You……..you need to write a book on your ‘Journey In Estate Agency’. I reckon it might be a best seller. As writing is one of my main hobbies, I could always help you if you needed it. We could work on it together while running the boat business in Greece!
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haha. Agent V i find that jokes often turn into truths. We dont need a boat just a jetty and a beach.. i get sea sick and have no money from purplebricks stealing my bread and wine.
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If just 4.6% of people went to another agent’s website, I would hardly describe it as “business walking away”.
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so back to seven days a week trading?
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Please can we start having a little warning on these stories as in the newspapers and magazines telling us that it is in fact an advertorial.
NOT NEWS !!!
ADVERT ALERT !!!!
Something like this.
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There are some interesting points in this post. In my experience, it is true that live chat services can demonstrate a significant ROI if deployed in an intelligent way, however I would normally expect a much higher engagement rate than what is being shown here.
Based on 2.7M individual site visits in which 1000 chats were carried out, this is showing an engagement rate of 0.036% which is far lower than the the normal 3-5% I typically see. This of course will have a large impact on sales leads generated and drastically reduces the potential ROI.
Another point, I’d be interested to hear how Giosg knows that these visitors are not visiting other agents’ sites? Or is this only referring to people who visit one or more of the agents listed in the article?
Finally, to revisit my first point, live chat needs to be designed and run in the most optimum way and this is not necessarily achieved unless you engage with industry leading experts to deliver this as an end to end service by engaging with as much of your website traffic as possible. This will deliver maximum results that in turn will increase your sales revenues which is the aim, right? And as a final thought, people are visiting agent websites 24/7, and to maximise results having 24/7 live chat support through using an expert partner can deliver significant benefits.
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I asked a solicitor contact the other day why are they all so stressed these days, didn’t used to be like that and the quality was way way higher, proper can do problem solvers back in the day handling the same number of sales ( at least from the offices that I have run ) now probably heading up departments or running their own show if they stayed in the business,
Answer?
Email, deluged by email which if not answered straight away results in a phone call, I would say that more technology in this sector has possibly made service worse
I am not available 24/7 but I am available during our published working hours, at the time of writing I am watching who do you think you are on tv, I do not want an email, mobile call, instant message or social media alert asking me whether I think 10 acacia avenue might leave their fridge, I don’t care, but I will care 9am tomorrow morning, or at least I’ll care enough to ask them for you
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