New survey reveals millions of pounds’ worth of business opportunities missed from residential conveyancing telephone quotes
The long awaited survey report on ‘Converting Telephone Enquiries: Residential Conveyancing’, has been published today. The three-year study has been led by Professor Ian Cooper, author of the Financial Times Guide To Business Development.
The survey report claims to be one of the most specialist and comprehensive reviews of the way residential conveyancing firms and departments deal with the daily request of…“Can I have a conveyancing quote please?”.
It is based on reviewing the results of mystery calls for quotes to 387 firms nationwide; interviews with senior management from residential conveyancing departments in over 100 firms and feedback from over 1,000 call handlers.
Professor Cooper stated: “The truth is that the majority of firms condemn themselves to the inevitability of quotes conversion failure. What firms do with this report after they have read it is obviously up to them, but if a firm gives telephone quotes for residential conveyancing, then this report has to be seen.
“It reveals the main reasons for failing to convert. We have looked in detail at a huge number of key areas. These include, amongst other things, telephone techniques; how disbursements are dealt with; email follow up quoting; pricing; opening hours; competition from online website conveyancing operations; tracking results; who handles the calls and challenges the popular notion that price is the main issue”.
Firms can get the full survey report free from:
http://convertingenquiries.com/residentialconveyancing/report-launched/
Amongst the many findings, the study shows that:
- Over 85% of firms seem to treat ‘residential conveyancing quotes’ as a purely ‘low level’ administrative task.
- 91% of firms make no attempt to differentiate themselves from competitors, either during the telephone enquiry or in any follow up email.
- 69% of firms use email as a way of actually avoiding a proper conversation at all and lose business as a result of it.
- 56% of call handlers who spoke to a potential client failed to introduce themselves.
- In over a third of all calls, neither party knew who they were talking to, as the caller’s name was not taken and the call handler had not introduced themselves!
- In 97% the call handler failed to either ask if the caller wanted to go ahead, even when the caller responded positively to the quote.
