We have a lot of long standing customers. Retaining customers is something we are proud of. Even though our customers buy into a relationship with us, software still requires work on the part of the agent. Paying a monthly subscription and receiving all your software updates is half the job. Implementing the changes the software offers and improving your business is an altogether different challenge. Unfortunately it’s the tough part.
Example:-
Dezrez have worked with Chase Buchanan (www.chasebuchanan.co.uk) for many years. They are a great team of guys who we get on very well with. We encourage them to utilise the software and in fairness they really do (regularly in the top 5% of users). They also push us with software development and give us suggestions to improve our product.
When we rolled out Mydezrez we paid the guys at Chase Buchanan a visit. We showed them lots of changes we made and discussed how these changes could fit their business; we showed them how to modify the system so that the interface matched the job role of the user. We demonstrated how to access new powerful reports and created dashboards for the managers, valuers, negotiators and Saturday staff.
What I loved the most was the way that Chase Buchanan created a dashboard for managers and directors to analyse staff performance in specific areas of the business.
The guys have some 30+ users and wanted a way to create some competition and make sure people were doing what they should be doing. That’s what we worked on with them. Chase Buchanan now have a monthly get together where they praise and reward those who are achieving the most from their day. This monitoring and analysis via Mydezrez also enables them to highlight training or personnel issues and nip them in the bud before they become a bigger problem.
Well done to Chase Buchanan – that’s progress. If you would like us to come and visit your agency and help you fit the software to the goals you want to achieve talk to us. We love improvement!
I am pleased to announce www.prestonbaker.co.uk as our website of the month for January.
The site has been designed and developed by The Property Jungle using our XML based feed. The site provides customers with a wide range of information on each property and its surrounding area, with features such as maps showing local schools, public transport and other amenities.
Despite the site carrying a lot of information, the layout has been tailored to ensure that you are never lost, with company colours used to draw you attention to the most important features, such as price and number of rooms.
The property searching functionality is well thought out, with a range of searching criteria. The site also offers you the ability to map out you own search area, a feature made popular recently by Rightmove.
Congratulations to both Preston Baker and The Property Jungle!
All of these estate agents have achieved this status by consistently using 90% or more of the entire dezrez system. We can monitor your usage of dezrez from our specially designed software, making it possible for us to tailor training specifically for your estate agency. We can also offer you advice on how to improve efficiency in your estate agency.
It has been just over 6 months since we launched our Uservoice Customer Ideas Forum. For those of you that haven’t seen it yet, it’s a way for dezrez customers to put ideas forward for development and then have other estate agents vote on it. The idea being that you help build our development pipeline and develop our Estate agency software.
Well, we think it’s been a great success with the suggestions coming in steadily over the months and many people have been submitting, commenting and voting on all sorts of ideas.
Every time you Submit, make a comment, vote, someone votes for your idea or your idea is marked as completed i.e. developed – you get some points! This way we can create a league of Uservoice Users!
So, without further ado, out of 367 active users and all the dezrez customers, I give you the TOP TEN contributors to the Dezrez Uservoice Forum!
Well done to Ross Phillips of Moginie James. The majority of Ross’ points have come from commenting on Ideas and helping out other agents.
Closely followed by William Hill of Country Property in 2nd place, a forward thinking agent who always likes to keep us on our toes!
And bringing up the rear in the last of the medal positions is Jeremy Godfrey of Mather Marshall, a long term dezrez agent and a great advocate for the software.
The current stats for uservoice make for some interesting reading, here are the figures (click to enlarge):
An insight into our Conveyancing Department. Here is the A-Z of The Dezrez Legal Team.
A. is for Angharad. She’s not called Ann Harad but many of her clients make that mistake
B. is for buffets. We always put on a good office spread for special occasions.
C. is for communication. We like talking to you!
D. is for drinking, we’re no strangers to the odd tipple.
E. is for email. Unlike some law firms we’re not afraid of modern technology!
F. is for fancy dress. We quite like an opportunity to look silly.
G. is for Gina! One of our longstanding conveyancing referral account managers. She once spelt her name to a customer using the phrase ‘G is for Gina’. The joke follows that she then went on to explain ‘I’ for the ‘I’ in Gina … but we may have exagerated here.
H. is for healthy… well we try but often fail (see B & D).
I. is for Integration with your dezrez software.
J. is for Jolly. We’re a pretty upbeat bunch and to have a few team giggles every day.
K. is for kettle. We’re ever so slightly dependant on Tea & Coffee.
L. is for Lauras. Together they keep us all in check.
M. is for monitors, we get 2 each in this office so we can work twice as hard!
N. is for no sale no legal fee.
O. is for oestrogen in our all-female office. Colin our Business Development Manager calls in every 4 – 6 weeks but we get the feeling he’s ready to leave again by the end of the day
P. is for Paper! We’re trying to wean ourselves off it but the legal profession are addicted. We printed a massive 429,690 pages in 2011.
Q. is for quids in with your minimum £100 referral fee
R. is for recruitment. We’re growing and have welcomed several new team members in the last year – we now have 15 full time staff members and are rapidly running out of space!
S. is for Saras/Sarahs. It’s all getting rather confusing!
T. is for treats. Colin likes to take a sweet treat in exchange for a brew when he calls into see you.
U. is for umbrella. Our home (Swansea) is the wettest city in Britain… But it’s also one of the most beautiful.
V. is for vendor satisfaction. We pass all our feedback forms on to you so you can see how we’re doing.
W. is for Weddings. We had 1 in 2011 and a whopping 3 of our team will be getting hitched in 2012.
X. is for Xtreme sports, we have snowboarders, surfers, scuba divers and sky divers among our team.
Y. is for Y Tim. That means ‘ The Team’ in Welsh. Can you tell we were struggling here? It gave us an excuse to get the team pic in (minus some camera shy people)
Z. is for zzzzzzzzz!!! All the team try their very best day in day out to bring you the best conveyancing service we can. By 5.30pm we’re about ready for a nap before that tipple we were talking about earlier.
Check out the latest widget available within Mydezrez! The new Twitter Feed widget allows you link your Twitter account to dezrez allowing you to tweet your properties, send out a general tweet and follow twitter users conversations, all from within dezrez estate agent software.
Jump on the social media band wagon and get tweeting from within the dezrez software! Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @dezrezsoftware
With the release of Rightmove’s TV App yesterday for Samsung’s D8000 Smart TV, if you haven’t seen the app yet Click Here, this got me thinking what tools Estate Agents will use or want next to reach out & drive information to their clients.
Will any Estate Agent be making a Smart TV app to advertise their Property Stock?
Or how about a Smart TV app for Lettings Agents, that will allow them to communicate with their Tenants through the app on the TV? Rent reminders? Remind them of their tenancy end date?
Last year it seems that QR codes became very popular in the Estate Agency world, we have seen huge demand from agents looking to incorporate QR codes into their Property Particulars.
So what will overtake QR Codes?
I believe Estate Agents will be able to utilise Blippar technology in the future. So what is Blippar?
Imagine being able to turn any real world product, advert, logo or physical landmark into an interactive experience simply by pointing a phone at it. No scanning or photo taking.
Imagine a member of the Public is walking down the street and sees a for sale board outside a property, they point their phone at the For Sale board and a brochure of the property or a 3D floor plan or a virtual tour appears on the screen of their phone they can interact with.
Check out the following link showing how Blippar works HERE
Or give it a go, download the Blippar app to your iPhone, iPad or Andriod device and once you have the app try it on some examples HERE
Name: Matthew Dendle Age: 30 Job Title: Head of Software Development
If you were an animal what kind of animal would you be? And Why?
A snow leopard, get to hang around in the snow all day, and I wouldnt get cold, plus, i’d be really dynamic. Reminds me of my younger self, plus, in a rage, I could pull some massive gibs. A bit like this – http://go.dezrez.com/hq. And i’d be under protection from hunting.
Who is your favourite person in dezrez?
Matt Davies because he helps me with my golfing problems
How would you describe your boss in three words?
Absent, Incomunicado, Climbing Everest
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Dynamic, Energetic and Bald (ing)
What would I find in your refrigerator right now?
Cold Air
If you won £20 million in the lottery, what would you do with the money?
Buy a nice house, then knock it down and build an even NICER house just because I could
What makes you angry?
The emotion “Anger”
What is a perfect weekend for you?
A big night out with no hangover, followed by a lottery win, followed by accidentally discovering a cure for cancer, followed by acheiving world peace
My colleague, Matt Davies, wrote a very interesting blog on using Twitter and Facebook last year (link to the blog HERE), which got me thinking on how specific a company could get with just how reactive they are to Social Media, in particularly, Twitter.
It got me wondering about how our customers are using Twitter. At dezrez we are already getting used to a few customers tweeting us if they need support or help but we also try and listen. By “listen” I mean attempt to pick up on any dezrez or industry related subjects we think we should be aware of.
So You may be tweeting but are you listening!?
I use a piece of software called Tweetdeck to listen out for people using the term “estate agents” – Hundreds of tweets come through daily for this term, but very often they contain information that can be used to an Estate Agents advantage.
My first example is of every agents nightmare, an unhappy Vendor. In this case a vendor named Mark has been let down by his agents not turning up to do a viewing.
So here Mark’s estate agents has failed to turn up and he has had to carry out the viewing himself. “Estates agents Suck” is not a particularly glowing reference for his agent.
Now, any proactive estate agent listening in “Twitter land” could jump on this in order to take advantage. Any agent in Manchester could drop him a tweet. And he certainly isn’t going to recommend his agent to any of his 1538 followers!
My second example is of a buyer named Lisa, frustrated that estate agents are not only sending her inappropriate properties but are also calling her “Mr. Lisa”! – check out her tweet below:
Two things can happen here. Firstly, whoever her estate agent is should jump on this customer, she’s not likely to recommend them to anyone at the moment and secondly any rival agents should be getting in touch with her. But why bother if you’re not in her area? Well a little bit of investigation means you can find out where this potential purchaser lives – Incidentally, YELL.com gives 150 Estate agents covering Guildford!
My third scenario is another gentleman not particularly impressed with an estate agent. Here, Mr. Sam Grimley is frustrated with an agent and lets his followers know about it!
Mr Grimley is clearly frustrated with the estate agents he’s been in touch with. Again, this opens the door for him to be contacted by any agents listening out there. It takes a little bit more investigation to find out where he is based but not impossible.
Sam has an “About me” page on his twitter feed. From here you can view his Google plus account which conveniently has his location as central London.
Stalking maybe, but working smart in social media is the key to impressing and potentially winning more business. I would tweet “@SA5G I see you are having a few problems with an estate agent maybe I can help?”
And finally, a couple more to think about. One tells us a particular chain of estate agents don’t tell each other what’s going on in their branch and on a more positive note a tweeter tells her 1795 followers just how good her estate agents are!
I would love to hear your thoughts on this, and how any estate agents out there use social media to not only win but retain customers.
All of these estate agents have achieved this status by consistently using 90% or more of the entire dezrez system. We can monitor your usage of dezrez from our specially designed software, making it possible for us to tailor training specifically for your estate agency. We can also offer you advice on how to improve efficiency in your estate agency.
We have a lot of long standing customers. Retaining customers is something we are proud of. Even though our customers buy into a relationship with us, software still requires work on the part of the agent. Paying a monthly subscription and receiving all your software updates is half the job. Implementing the changes the software offers and improving your business is an altogether different challenge. Unfortunately it’s the tough part.
