UK number two Zoopla has reported positive results since outsourcing its customer support team.
Zoopla's internal customer support team, which offers support for popular everyday real estate agency products including Alto and Jupix, was completely outsourced to Ventrica in May 2023 in a bid to improve customer support response times at 'customer-friendly' hours.
Zoopla says that 100% of outstanding support requests have been resolved in the past three months, call abandonment has dropped by 75%, and queries resolved within 5 hours of submission have gone up by 50% since the change.
And now Zoopla is aiming to introduce more features to show agents other key performance indicators including response times and satisfaction, and reducing Zoopla's backlog of customer support requests to zero.
Riccardo Dawson, vice president of software at Alto, said:
"It’s brilliant to see the improvement in key areas in just three months.
"We always knew that by partnering with Ventrica, our customers would be able to benefit from their world-class systems and technology.
"We always knew that by partnering with Ventrica, our customers would be able to benefit from their world-class systems and technology."
Iain Banks, CEO at Ventrica, said:
"Our experience in bringing transformative solutions to life, through people, process and technology, has allowed us to provide world class customer and employee experience to Zoopla and their partners and we look forward to continuing to work closely with them for a long time yet."
It's been a positive year for Zoopla—including a healthy 6% increase in vendor leads in H1 2023, while the recent addition of a Partner Hub via Alto is sure to incentivise younger PropTechs and other real estate service providers to come to market in collaboration with Zoopla tech.
The UK portals continue to wage a hard-fought battle to keep agents onside.
Research by challenger portal Jangle released in August found that 27.5% of Zoopla agents surveyed rated the portal as "1 out of 5" for satisfaction, with rivals Rightmove (27%) and OnTheMarket (28%) faring no better.