Simple Ways To Use Data To Continuously Improve Your Business

Improving your business is an aspiration of all conveyancing firms. With increasing competition and client expectations firms are looking to gain advantages and efficiencies.

One avenue available is through the analysis of the day to day information or “data” that flows through your business. By turning this data into insights, conveyancers can make better decisions, uncover truths and prioritise work activities to add value.

In this article we share some tips on data analysis you may apply to your day to day operations. We illustrate how this approach has enabled ZipID’s continuous improvement towards one of our core objectives: delivering a safe, convenient and simple experience for conveyancers and clients.

Capturing the data that aligns with your strategy

Conveyancing firms have access to a variety of useful data. This includes information on workload (e.g. number of files per month), productivity (e.g. hours worked by staff to settle files), client-base profile (e.g. by postcode type or age), source of that client (e.g. online or referral).

Ultimately, these various data points are only useful if the information can allow conveyancers to confidently measure, assess and adjust their current business strategy. It’s important to identify trends early in your business if you want to stay ahead of the competition.

To illustrate, at ZipID we assess whether the above objective is being achieved by assessing our progress via various information streams.  These include:

1. The booking experience

ZipID VOI bookings are primarily made via desktop or laptop (66.96%), followed by phone (19.19%) and table (13.85%).

What these figures doesn’t explain is the % growth in both tablet and phone based bookings since our launch in 2014. By observing this development we have been able to fastrack improvements to the tablet experience in our technology roadmap and the call centre experience we offer clients so we could lead with best practice in these channels.

Through regular monitoring we have recognised the importance of supporting multi-channel client service options including online self-service and phone based customer support.

How do your clients prefer to interact with your firm – via email?  Over the phone?  Are you contemplating investing in areas (e.g. new staff, website upgrade) that doesn’t reflect your internal data?  

2. Adapting our service windows to clients' needs

To truly deliver a “convenient” service means allowing the client to be verified where and when they wish.

Saturday continues to be the most popular day for VOI appointments in the 4 States we operate in. Knowing this is a key preference for our clients influences our staffing on the peak periods of Friday, Saturday and Monday to support client changes to bookings, support of clients on the day of their appointment and prompt review and return to conveyancers of our VOI reports. 

Similarly, 52% of appointments are made after hours.

We deduce from this pattern that busy, task focused clients prefer an appointment outside of their normal working hours so they can tick one task of their to-do list without interruption to their working day.

Could offering conveyancing services on Saturday or outside of traditional business hours provide a key point of differentiation for your firm? 

3. Customer satisfaction

Ultimately its client’s feedback we want to measure our performance against. To determine this we offer every client the opportunity to share with us their feedback after their VOI is completed via a brief online survey. The survey seeks feedback on key aspects of our service including the usability of our online booking portal, the level of service our customer service team provide and of course, the ID check appointment itself.  Analysing these survey results is a piece of real-time data that continuously improves our operations.

Should any AICSA Member be interested in designing a customer feedback survey we recommend using a web based tool such as Survey Monkey to get started.

The information contained in this article is general in nature and does not take into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs. Therefore, you should consider whether the information is appropriate to your circumstance before acting on it, and where appropriate, seek professional advice from a finance professional such as an adviser.