Some Agents Do Not Want to Hear What Customers Say
This week, thanks to all the media attention we’ve received, we at What-Customers-Say.com have been dealing with some… very interesting questions from agents. And by “questions” I mean angry or crying or passive-aggressive ranting. Here’s a sample (make sense of these verbatims if/as you will):
I personally believe it\’s the agents on this site who have an ego that needs to be fed..
…you\’re bordering on slander which I find very distasteful…
…I don’t know how it’s possible to ensure the postings are legitimate. You’ll end up having realtors post their own comments, and worse, comments about fellow realtors.
…should a posting occur for any of us at [brokerage name removed], positive, negative or otherwise, I would expect you won’t need another e-mail from us harassing you to remove it.
I would highly recommend you guys have some sort of agent focus group to get some feedback on what you’re doing.
There was an absolutely crazy email thread with an agent we’ve already discussed here, and I’d love to include some snippets from that conversation, but it happened with another person at What-Customers-Say.com, and I’m not able to access the email. In the event that I can access that convo, I’ll add the interesting stuff in here.
Lots of agents aren’t complaining at all
I’d say, on average, we have a complaint-to-happy ratio of 1:10 —- that is, for every angry agent who writes to us, there are 10 others who tell us that this is a great idea. That’s reassuring.
And what’s most assuring is the consumers are telling us that this is exactly what they’ve wanted.
We take heat for every single negative review
We’re here to allow consumers/customers/clients to express their honest opinions about agents they’ve actually completed a transaction with. And that means that, when a person leaves a negative review and an agent finds out, we take some serious heat — the customer doesn’t. And the customer shouldn’t!
So, agents, if you think we’re here trying to bash you, we’re not. We don’t get ANYTHING out of getting people to bash you. We get a bit of a headache every time it happens actually.
But remember this: We happily leave those negative reviews up (when they’re legitimate) — and we continue to take the heat. Why? Are we masochists? Ha! Hardly. We’re average Joes who work hard at our jobs, love the Web, appreciate great service in restaurants, drive the speed limit, drink Tim Horton’s coffee. We’re not into dangerous shiza. We’re not masochists. We just really believe in the voice of the customer.
We really, really, really believe in the voice of the customer.
And we do not believe in working unnecessarily hard to protect agents from legitimate public scrutiny. We’re not promoting it (again, not masochists), but we’re not going to work to make bad agents look good.
~jw
