New research has found that the majority of conveyancing practice heads believe that client reviews are the best determinant of client choice.
Published by Pitsford Consulting, the survey asked firms about the recent recommendations from the Competitions and Markets Authority, questioning respondents as to the views on the effectiveness of the proposals.
Whilst the results suggested that firms saw minimal benefit to publishing prices on their website, around three quarters felt that publication of independently sourced client reviews would be a key contributor toward client decision making.
Though some stated that they’d made some effort to providing reviews, the manner in which they did so was often inconsistent.
Commenting on the results of the survey was Richard Hinton. The Managing Director of Pitsford Consulting stated: “There are real reservations around the negative impact of publishing prices and any solution that is going to work for conveyancers is going to have to put a lot of effort into contextualising the pricing message using performance data – both operational and client driven.”
Where reviews were concerned, he also highlighted the need for standardisation; by making the data comparable, consumers will be more easily able to make an informed choice.
One Response
Fifty years ago I was working on the first Which? report on conveyancing and was probably the first person in the country to see figures as to the elements of a conveyancing service which most influenced a consumer’s overall impression of it.
The particular aspect which most clearly tracked general views was the question “How well did you feel that you were kept aware of progress”
This is of course a subjective opinion and what a client feels (rather than should feel) is important. But I am reminded of George Burns wonderful sign-off. “And remember folks sincerity is everything. [Pause] If you can fake it you’ve got it made”
The CMA needs to balance subjective views with objective evidence. Regulatory incidents are one aspect of the latter but I would suggest that the most important is conveyancer performance extracted from open data held by the Land Registry. If CMA picks what conveyancers want as the overriding indicator it will be open to criticism for being too close to the professions.