May 15 2015 18:00:00
Traditional agents are doing better than online agents – online. An independent report by digital customer service and sales firm The Chat Shop looked at five online agents and five traditional agents.
It found that Knight Frank leads the way in social media, with the highest number of followers and interaction on both Twitter and Facebook.
Foxtons’ website has the most online traffic with 970,000 visitors per month – 300% more than all of the online agents combined.
Your Move was second with 440,000 visitors per month and online agent House Network had the least number of visitors at 30,000.
The report – which was not commissioned by any third party – looked at Foxtons, haart, Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward, Knight Frank and Your Move.
The five online agents it looked at were eMoov, House Network, House Simple, Purplebricks and Tepilo. The research was done between last September and December.
It did, however, find that online agents do better in terms of making information and services accessible to customers.
House Network came top in accessibility, with all contact channels and essential information available either on its home page or just one click away.
By contrast, the Kinleigh Folkard & Hayward (KFH), Knight Frank and Your Move sites still require up to two clicks to find a company phone number, branch listing, or to book a valuation. Your Move came bottom, with all but one channel being two clicks away.
Visits per month (source: Similarweb):
The research also looked at Facebook “likes”.
The highest, with 5,427, was Knight Frank, followed by KFH with 3,542 and eMoov with 3,410. Two of the five online agents, House Simple and Purplebricks, scored fewer than 1,000 likes per page.
Bottom was Foxtons with no Facebook activity. When it comes to Twitter, the online agents were as a group more prolific at tweeting than the traditional agents: however, this could partly be explained by Foxtons having no official Twitter presence.
Traditional agents have more followers than their online counterparts, but online agents are much more enthusiastic followers of other Twitter users.
Knight Frank has the most popular Twitter presence, followed by eMoov, Your Move, House Network, haart and House Simple. KFH, Purplebricks and Tepilo scored least in the popularity stakes.
In terms of volume of tweets, Tepilo has the most active Twitter account, followed by eMoov, haart and Knight Frank.The research also looked at office hours per week and, not surprisingly, found that Purplebricks – with its use of a 24/7 call centre – offers by far the most hours.
However, next come traditional agents haart and Foxtons with 98 and 84 hours respectively. Knight Frank offers the least opening hours at 49.
The research’s accessibility scoring is also interesting, looking at how easy it was to book a valuation by phone, live chat, email and/or contact form, and branch information.
Of the traditional agents, only Foxtons has a live chat facility, pushing it into second place on the ‘accessibility’ index.
Top is House Network, with a near perfect score. Surprisingly, two online agents which were otherwise very accessible had no live chat function – eMoov and House Simple. Jonny Everett, director of customer development at the Chat Shop, said: “We were interested to find that traditional agents had a powerful digital presence, with a number embracing social media adeptly.
“Online agents performed better in terms of their accessibility and variance in channels.“What’s clear is that online agents have a way to go in terms of brand awareness, but traditional agents must assess their current mix and accessibility of channels to remain competitive in the long run.”
The report makes for interesting reading, although it does place what some agents may see as unquestioning reliance on all Agents when it comes to looking at customer satisfaction ratings.