How One Team Puts Their Best of Zillow Report Data to Work

At our Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate franchise in Fayetteville, Arkansas, we’ve worked hard for the past several years to earn and maintain Best of Zillow status. To do that, we built a system for tracking and maintaining our performance. 

Now, with the new Best of Zillow report, our leadership team is excited to have access to more data that both helps support a customer-centric vision and highlights which behaviors provide the foundation and predictability needed to support a successful business. Here’s how we’re taking what we’ve done so far and adapting it to get the most out of the new Best of Zillow metrics.

How we currently maintain Best of Zillow status

We expect and coach our agents to strive for a customer satisfaction score (CSAT) of 90 or above, and we’ve learned that the best way to earn a higher CSAT is to ask each connection to complete a survey before getting off the phone. We do this regardless of whether the person already has an agent, is calling about a for sale by owner property, or isn’t ready to set an appointment. 

This is what we tell those connections: 'Zillow may send you a survey asking whether I have answered all your questions and been of assistance. It would be a great help to my business if you would complete the survey.' We follow this up about 24 hours later in the Zillow Premier Agent app with a text message that includes the agent’s contact information, reviews and profile, as well as a reminder that Zillow may send a survey. 

This action alone had an immediate impact on our score, and the volume of completed surveys increased. Our agents who follow this process have a consistent 90-plus CSAT.

All of this follow up takes place in the Zillow Premier Agent app, primarily through text. We provide templates for the agents to reference in their communications, encouraging them to use their own voice while still staying on message. This helps our leadership team coach on communication and provide actionable feedback to the agent.

Our plans to utilize the new report data

The first metric we’re focusing on is the “work-with rate.” This metric is similar to our own “committed customer” metric, which we use to identify when one of our agents has built a healthy level of trust with the customer. This is also a logical place for us to start, as we have our own historical data to reference as a baseline for the new work-with rate in the Best of Zillow report.

For maintaining CSAT, we’ll continue to use the process described above, while making sure the customer knows they have our full support and the contact information for the agent they spoke to. Not only have we historically seen this practice help CSAT, we’re also seeing it boost our work-with rates in the new report. We’ve found that agents who follow this process are consistently top producers, with double-digit conversion rates, CSATs in the low to mid-90s, and work-with rates in the mid-50s. 

Ways to grow with Best of Zillow

We use a lead distribution matrix with our agents, similar to the Best of Zillow report in that we compile several metrics, stack rank them, and use the results to dictate each agent's lead price-point band. We look at five metrics: CSAT and work-with rate from the report, plus in-house metrics of capacity, appointment set, and conversion. These are weighted and reviewed weekly, and our sales manager adjusts the lead distribution based on the results. 

Today, we have one-on-one coaching with each agent weekly. Moving forward, in these coaching sessions, we will hyper-focus on the critical metrics: work-with rate and CSAT. By elevating these metrics in our weekly team meetings and individual one-on-one coaching sessions, we are confident that overall performance and conversion will improve. Zillow's own data shows a positive correlation between work-with rate and conversion — buyers who answer “Yes” to the question 'Do you plan to continue working with this agent?' in the post-connection follow-up survey are 20 times as likely to transact as buyers who answer “No.”*

The key to it all: consistency

Our office is focused on lead generation, and one of the most important things we’ve learned in working with the Best of Zillow report is that consistency is key. 

Our agents exclusively use the Zillow Premier Agent app for communication with clients. After every connection, they communicate that a survey may be sent and ask for a response to it. They send a follow-up text message with their name, call recap, and agent resume (ie: their Zillow profile, with reviews). Our management team tracks trends, hyper-focusing on the work-with rate and CSAT, and provides weekly coaching to support the team. As long as we are consistent and trust the process, we’ll have a successful business, satisfied clients, and happy agents.

*Source: Zillow internal data