I’ve operated as an estate agent for over fifty years and seen a lot of change, not all of it for the better. In this series of articles, I shall explore why technology has largely failed to improve the home selling and buying process which sees sales transactions now take over twice as long to complete as they did twenty years ago.
I’m going to start with the humble telephone and question why people seem to have become scared of using it.
There is now a huge over-reliance by estate agents on communicating by email, WhatsApp, text message and social media. This, it can be argued, is because this is the way the consumer wants it but, in my opinion, it often comes at the expense of agents failing to get to know their customers and clients as they rarely, if ever, actually speak to them!
The downside is immense. It devalues an agent’s service offering, makes it harder to differentiate as all agents seem the same and “dialogue” is just a series of “one way” messages not “two way” interactions that would improve understanding and outcomes.
Estate agency is becoming a “self-service” model and has seen a “race to the bottom” on fee levels. For the consumer it results in having to deal with poorly trained individuals with little knowledge, experience or understanding of what they, the customer or client, actually require. This is no wonder when agents spend all day producing Tik Tok videos of themselves or hiding behind their desks avoiding direct communication with the very people they should be helping.
In short, we used to use a telephone to converse and build relationships with people! When did the novelty of this approach wear off?
Back in the day we had a key and lamp phone “system” on our desks. One handset and a box with several switches and a light above each switch. You could see an incoming call as the light flashed and the bell rang. To answer you simply flicked the switch and you were connected to the caller. You could put someone on hold by moving the switch to the middle position whilst you shouted across the office to a colleague that so and so was on the line. Simple and effective!
You could manage several calls at once, both incoming and outgoing.
Yes the equipment was bulkier than today’s highly sophisticated systems and aspects such as “hunt” groups, programming, phone number storage and VOIP were yet to even be a stirring in the loins of a programmer in a darkened room somewhere. Let’s be honest though, many of these new elements are actually more trouble than they are worth, unless you are a fan of digitised on hold “muzak” and have a ten year old child in your team to explain how it works!
Because of its simplicity, the key and lamp system worked. It certainly took no time at all to train someone how to use and it was reliable.
Because I had to, I could recall the names of over 300 customers and clients at a time and memorise nearly as many phone numbers. Today estate agents have become reliant on digital databases and consumers are often no more than a number with their names and personal data lost somewhere in the Cloud.
Even when a rare call comes into an office I hear agents, in an effort to avoid conversing with the customer, say things like:
“Would you like me to register you in our system?” Basically “Our computer will then look after you and I won’t have to.”
The consumer probably says yes but, if they thought about it, what they really mean is “No, I’d like you to understand my plans and help me achieve them!”
Of course, mobile phones are now integral to everyone’s lives and, in theory offer great opportunities to improve communication yet they seem to have further reduced our ability to talk with each other.
How often, for example, do you see entire families at dinner in a pub or restaurant, all tapping away on their phones, hardly raising their heads or opening their mouths, other than to force the next mouthful of burger down their gullets?
How long before we “evolve” to the point where spoken communication disappears from our lives altogether?
I still believe we do business with the people we know best, people we have built relationships with and who trust us.
Perhaps the future will all be AI chatbots and robots. They don’t sleep, get ill or go on holiday, they learn, they can listen and speak properly. If the future perception of good service does not involve human spoken communication then AI will undoubtedly take over rather than just support human activity.
