Keller Williams has been crowned the top real estate agency for customer service in Newsweek’s new survey, America’s Best Customer Service 2019, while realtor.com beat Zillow for the top real estate database spot.
The survey, which looked at how different retail, financial and real estate companies fared in terms of customer service reports, also gave high marks to HomeServices of America and Coldwell Banker.
Courtesy of Newsweek
To conduct the survey, Newsweek worked with data firm Statista to reach over 20,000 U.S. consumers who purchased or used services from these brands about their experiences. The firm collected around 100 different customer evaluations for each brand in the survey, consisting of 132,954 total evaluations. Customers were asked to rate the brands across five different attributes:
- Quality of communication: Measures whether the contact (via e-mail, telephone or face to face) was friendly or polite.
- Technical competence: Measures the quality of information received and whether questions were answered correctly and in sufficient detail.
- Range of services: Measures whether one’s personal expectations and requirements were fulfilled.
- Customer focus: Measures whether a personal concern/requirement was addressed with a tailored/specific solution.
- Accessibility: Measures the availability of customer service in a shop or on a helpline.
These ratings were combined with industry standard Net Promoter Scores (NPS) collected from each customer (“how likely is it that you to recommend [brand] to a colleague or friend,”) to arrive at a total score between 1 and 10 (higher is better). Read more about the survey methodology here.
Based on this survey, realtor.com narrowly beat out both Zillow and Trulia as top real estate database. The latter two came second and third, respectively.
“As we examined the larger, impersonal forces that are transforming retail, it seemed like a good time to recognize a more personal factor in business success: the ways in which many companies nurture their relationships with consumers,” the introduction to the study reads.
Courtesy of Newsweek
The survey also looked at customer satisfaction for various banks and financial companies. Nationwide, TD Bank took the spot as the top commercial bank while JPMorgan beat out Fidelity Investments and Allianz USA for top asset management company.
Over the years, different real estate companies have ranked closely and regularly overtaken each other in different independent surveys — in January, RE/MAX and Keller Williams both scored spots on Entrepreneur Magazine’s Franchise 500 of top 1,000 companies in the country.