In every business, customers are believed to be treated as kings and queens. This has always been premised on the fact that without them business does not exist. In our previous analysis, our analyst stressed the place of conversation analytics in building and sustaining superior customer engagement in the market. His analysis, coupled with the views expressed by an expert in the market, shows that the real estate companies are missing a lot when they failed to extract value from the big conversation data inherent on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.
For instance, a study from the Harvard Business Review discovered that when businesses responded to customer reviews — good or bad — ratings subsequently increased. The researchers of the study note that “responding to online customer reviews, especially when they’re bad, can help you learn from your mistakes as a business owner — and this learning curve will improve your customers’ overall experience and your business’ reputation.” In another study, it emerged that user-generated online reviews help customers for making decisions about ‘continuance’ or ‘withdrawal’ or ‘staying away’ from projects of developers.
As submitted by another set of researchers, when a real estate developer utilized online customer reviews in the areas of new product development and refinement of the existing ones, there is a likelihood of having superior ability and capability over others. As the Harvard Business Review’s study indicates, our analysis of the number of reviews of the 50 real estate companies’ customer reviews and ratings given to the companies reveals that the higher the reviews the higher the ratings.
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However, our analysis only establishes 6.2% increase in ratings when a customer reviewed the companies’ products or performance. Our relational analysis further indicates that replying to the customers’ questions enhances ratings by 16.7%, while it was 21.7% when the companies replied to reviews. Our expectation of 50% or more than 50%, which indicates a good relationship, was not met. Therefore, the real estate developers need to work on the customer engagement on Google Business Review and other platforms that allow conversational engagement with the prospective and established customers.
In line with the emerging insights, our Real Estate Marketing Analyst, Mariam Akanni notes that “not replying to customers on the Review Platforms is an indication that companies do not care if their products satisfy customers and are comfortable with becoming obsolete in no time.” She stresses that the Nigerian real estate companies should engage their customers through online conversation for better understanding of their needs.