While setting up the service and consulting with various Agencies, we were faced with quite a few opinions on how we do the rating of our endorsed Agents. Most had experienced a follow up call after having their car serviced, or a SMS after reporting a Telkom line asking to rate the service they had received. Some agencies, have an in-house service follow up process to stay on their toes and ensure service levels to their clients. So the concept is not totally foreign.

The challenge with these ratings is that they can become very complicated and open to interpretation. So what is important to one homer seller may not be the same for another. Also, very few of these surveys are published on the Internet, and as you can imagine, this raised a whole lot of questions when we put this to Estate Agents.

Our approach, at least for now, is to keep it simple. Just one question. Would you refer this Agent, or because of the general lack of response from satisfied customers, is there any reason you would not refer this Agent?

Where is the value in that, you may well ask? Well, rest assured, just the mere fact that the Agent is prepared to have us follow up with their clients, speaks volumes.

For the mathematically minded, the Rating on the Website is determined as follows: Rating (%) = number of referrals /number of deals. So, if 1 out of a hundred sellers has an unresolved issue with an Agent and so would not refer them, their rating would be 99%.

The important thing to note is that Hook Point endorsed Agencies have undertaken to have every one of their Agents’ clients followed up on by us. Not just the good ones or a random sample. This is what makes the service dependable, because just one bad reference could mess with the Agent’s rating. Given that this is a new service, a long term track record cannot be numerically established, so we have worked with the Agencies to check with past clients in order to establish the rating.

So, while the rating is of interest, we believe the critical thing is for potential home sellers to insist that the Agent is prepared to register with us as to ensure they cannot let them down.