Over the last several years, the real estate industry has embraced the role of testimonials. It can be a wonderful way for a buyer or seller to validate their selection of an agent. It also can be a wonderful way for you to understand what is important to your clients, and improve your level of service delivery.
The problem is that there are now so many testimonial solutions. We don’t want to burden our clients with so many places to share that feedback, and yet it’s become a critical part of the business. So which sites are important?
Web Chimpy reminds us that it’s important to review the pros and cons of each of the various sites and how their testimonial system works. By understanding those differences, you will be able to develop a winning strategy for you, and for your clients.
In this post you will learn the variations in the different solutions, have a basic introduction into RealSatisfied, and how to effectively manage your account. Simply click on the following 8 links and it will take you to the section that you may be looking for right now.
Click HERE to download the RealSatisfied User Guide. We recommend you read this article below before taking action. Here is an additional PDF Tutorial.
As always, if you need one-on-one help, come see me or Ken.
1. Understanding the pros/cons of the various testimonial opportunities.
2. Accessing your RealSatisfied account.
5. Display Stars or Percentages?
7. Making the most of your testimonials (email signature, posting them on site)
8. Sharing your RealSatisfied on HAR
Step 1
Understanding The Pros/Cons
Zillow Group (Zillow and Trulia)
- Pro – Highly trafficked real estate site.
- Con – People trafficking the site are looking for homes not Realtors.
- Con – You don’t own the content. If they change something about their review display, you have no control.
- Con – Reviews aren’t easy to share socially without sending them to Zillow. Not cool.
- Con – Your client must create an account to leave a review. Also, not cool.
Realtor.com
- Pro – Highly trafficked real estate site, behind Zillow and Trulia
- Pro – RealSatisfied reviews can be fed to realtor.com. Woot!
- Con – People trafficking the site are looking for homes not Realtors.
Yelp!
- Pro – Search engine results strong
- Pro – Highly trafficked site.
- Con – People trafficking the site aren’t often looking for Realtors, but most often bars and restaurants.
- Con – This is the biggie – If your clients leave a review, but aren’t often big ‘yelpers’, their review will get buried in time and ultimately won’t even show!
HAR.com
- Pro – Highly trafficked real estate site.
- Con – People trafficking the site are looking for homes not Realtors.
- Con – You don’t own the content.
- Con – Reviews aren’t easy to share socially without sending them to HAR.
- Con – All in, or all out. All reviews post. And, if you decide to opt out, all those past reviews are pulled from your profile. Whaaat?
RealSatisfied
- Pro – Excellent SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Your 5 star profile has a higher likelihood of coming up higher in the rankings when someone googles you.
- Pro – Easily share reviews socially.
- Pro – Give a ‘thank you’ gift card from the site.
- Pro – RealSatisfied reviews can be fed to Realtor.com
- Pro – Find out what your clients really think of their experience.
- Pro – YOU decide which reviews to make public.
- Pro – The stats on completion of the review is the most informative and they have wonderful stats that those that start, complete the survey.
Zap Site
- Pro – Your site, so you’re the only agent they. Driving people there is safe and keeps them in your real estate ecosystem.
- Pro – Easy to send a request from your contacts to request a review. They don’t need to create an account.
- Pro – Increases the content on your Zap website and makes you look really strong.
- Con – The content is not shared on any of the portals.
- Con – It’s another place to drive a request for a review that may have less bang for it’s buck because you have less traffic here. This may be a good place to ask for the ‘extra’ bit of help from your raving fans.
Step 2
How Do I Get To My RealSatisfied Account
If you are a new agent, you will receive an email soon after you start.
Don’t remember seeing that email? Not to worry. We know you are inundated with email. Simply go to RealSatisfied.com, and click Log In at the top right corner. Use your Gary Greene email as the username. Click forgot password. An email will be sent to your Gary Greene email to reset that password.
Step 3
The RealSatisfied Questionnaire – Increasing The Likelihood of Completion
Consider these statistics that come from RealSatisfied’s results and agent surveys:
- 89% of people that start the survey, complete it.
- For every 10 surveys sent, 5 respond, and 3 leave testimonials.
- 30% of agent customers surveyed by RealSatisfied said they didn’t inform their clients they’d be receiving a survey
- 40% of agent customers surveyed by RealSatisfied said they didn’t thank their clients for the surveys or testimonials
From these numbers we know that if we can get our clients to start the survey, they we likely complete it, and 3 out of every 5 of them will leave a testimonial. The trick is in how we can get them to start the survey in the first place.
The secret is in the 3rd stat … 30% of agents didn’t inform their client that they would be receiving a survey. It’s important to future pace your client during the course of the transaction, and reminding them during the closing.
RealSatisfied has created a marketing piece to aide in this future pacing. I’ve added it to Google Drive so that you can print, and include it in your materials. If you are unfamiliar with how to use Google Drive, you can view this very quick tutorial so that you can edit the piece with your contact information.
This is an example of that marketing piece:
The Questionnaire
No other testimonial site has the level of detail that RealSatisfied includes. On it’s face, one might think that the client wouldn’t want to take the time to complete it, but given the fact that 89% of people that start it, finish it, I think it’s safe to assume the clients are enjoying an opportunity to share detailed feedback about their experience.
The key to the discussion in future pacing your clients, is to share how important it is for you to have real feedback.
Because I’m so dedicated to providing and improving my level of service delivery, it would be wonderful if you would complete the survey that you will be receiving from the third party company, RealSatisfied.
Notice, that dialogue is not just about you earning new business from the testimonial, but your care and commitment to service delivery. That is a key.
Also, make sure your transaction details in BackAgent include the accurate email of the client that is most likely to take the time to respond if you have more than one client in the transaction.
To see the questionnaire your clients will be receiving, take the Test Drive. You can request a copy of the Buyer and Seller questionnaire. You will notice that at the end of each section, there is a place for the client to type a couple sentences detailing their thoughts. At the end of the survey, they may select some, or all, of those blocks of text to create the final testimonial, resulting in a visual testimonial like this:
To take a Test Drive of the client questionnaire, go to RealSatisfied.com and click the button that says, ‘Send A Survey To Yourself’.
You can then select which type of survey you’d like to review. I recommend going through the entire survey as your client might.
Step 4
Managing Your RealSatisfied Account
Once you have logged into your RealSatisfied account you will se the following page.
From this page you can:
1. Push your testimonials to Realtor.com. Simply toggle the switch to ‘On’ and you will need your NRDS number to verify your account. If you don’t know your NRDS number, there is a link to search for it.
2. The section ‘Survey Invitations and Responses’ will allow you to review, approve, or resend surveys.
If you want to share directly from RealSatisfied to social, there is also a place for that.
Step 5
Displaying Stars or Percentages
You will want to keep an eye on your profile display. In some cases, you may decide that you want to display stars instead of percentages. Look at the following examples:
If you have your percentages in the 90’s +, then percentages are fine. But, 88% feels like a ‘B’, and we want to be straight ‘A’ students. In that case, I would move it to a star display, which is easily done.
Simply login to your profile page and click on profile settings. At the top of that page you will see the location to change the display.
Simply click on which type of display you prefer. You may also elect to remove both displays, and only show the testimonials.
In addition to the display of stars, make sure ‘Display Detailed Ratings For Each Survey’ is set so that both Ratings and Review display accurately, and in full, on Realtor.com.
You can elect to keep an individual testimonial private, (For example in the case of, “I really appreciated Linsey’s willingness to discount the commission”) or you can make them publicly displayed.
You will receive an email upon completion of a survey so that you can review it, and decide on whether or not to make it public.
Step 6
Finding Past Surveys
If, at any time, you want to go back to review past surveys, simply go to the bottom of the profile page (when you are logged in), and you will see the list of all past closings and the status of those surveys.
Click on any client with a completed survey and you will see this:
If you click report, you can see the report detail. To view the testimonial, and review public or private settings, click ‘Review’ . The following screen will appear. The green square includes the visual testimony that you can open and save to your computer as a jpeg to post on social media outlets.
Step 7
Making The Most Of Your Testimonial
Here are a few ideas to make the most of your Real Satisfied testimonials:
1. Add them to your listing and buyer presentations. Use those jpeg images of the testimonials.
2. Place them on your website. You can use the RSS feed or the WordPress widget on your profile, or you can upload the green square jpeg images. Lots of possibilities. See me or Ken with questions.
3. Share the RealSatisfied testimonial images on your Facebook personal profile or business page.
4. Place a link to your RealSatisfied profile in your email signature. I would link the text, ‘Find out what people are saying about ‘your name”, with your profile.
5. Knowing that you can push your testimonials to Realtor.com is cool! Woot!
6. Don’t forget! Thank your clients! Every time you review a testimonial, you have the opportunity within RealSatisfied to thank them with a Starbucks gift card. If that’s not your cup of tea, or er, coffee, just send a thank you note. Acknowledgement, appreciation, and gratitude is what matters.
Step 8
Sharing your RealSatisfied on HAR
HAR will allow you to display only one rating system on your profile. You’ll need to decide if you want to display the Client Experience Rating System (CRE), which is provided by HAR, or RealSatisfied. If you elect to show RealSatisfied, your HAR/CRE reviews will no longer be visible.
If you have been heavily invested in collecting HAR reviews, displaying RealSatisfied reviews may not be right for you. But, you will want to consider the following advantages of RealSatisfied before you make your strategic decision.
- If you elect to use RealSatisfied, you only need to encourage them to complete that one survey.
- RealSatisfied pushes their content to Realtor.com to display on your profile. CRE only resides on HAR.
- RealSatisfied surveys are easily shared on social media channels.
- Your RealSatisfied webpage is an easy way to share testimonials. Place a hyperlink in your email signature, “What are people saying about working with Linsey?” for example. Link to your RealSatisfied page. You are the only agent in that space versus driving your prospects and sphere to HAR.
- You have control over which surveys are published to your public RealSatisfied profile.
Setting Up RealSatisfied on HAR
- Log into HAR and go to your Dashboard.
- Scroll down to Quick Access links and click on Client Experience Rating.
- Go to Marketing Tools on the left side. Scroll to the bottom of the Marketing Tools and click on RealSatisfied Rating
- You’ll see a place to put in your RealSatisfied Vanity Key.
- To find your vanity key, go to your RealSatisfied public profile. Not sure where it is? Simply Google your name with RealSatisfied and it should come up. Click on your profile. When it’s displayed you’ll see the URL. The end of the URL is the ‘slug’ or exact name of the page you are on. It will likely be your name. That slug is your vanity key.
- Copy the slug and past it into the Vanity Key space on HAR. Hit ‘Submit’.
- Your RealSatisfied reviews will now display on your HAR profile.
What’s Next?
So, now you have the ‘how to’. Now, you simple have to ‘get to’. The best way to get to this stuff is to schedule a spot in your calendar to get this done. RealSatisfied is incredibly intuitive, but time block, FTW!.
- Login to your account
- Link Realtor.com
- Set up social accounts
- Managing any alerts
- Determine your strategy
- Future pace your clients
- Thank your clients with a note or gift
- Link your RealSatisfied to HAR
Call on me, or Ken anytime.
To your continued success.
