One of the things that is difficult to manage in any modern business is data quality, but it is particularly important in estate agency businesses.

At Veco by Eurolink, we’ve never really been big fans of mandatory fields, but we do offer mandatory fields as an option within our software.  In some cases mandatory fields can promote bad data, it effectively requires the user to type anything in order to move to the next stage and therefore a lot of mandatory fields lead to a poor quality of data being collected.

What we can do in order to manage data quality more effectively is to audit the fields to assess the quality of information being collected, or whether the fields are achieving the desired outcome. This drives reporting that can be extremely useful to highlight where additional training may be needed.

For instance, if you were to find that your junior negotiator was consistently failing to register the source of an enquiry to your estate agency business, you would very quickly be able to identify that perhaps further training is needed around the reasons that collection of this ‘source of enquiry’ data is so important. If we explained for instance that this data is necessary for the allocation of marketing resources in terms of return on investment, then perhaps these are vital learning opportunities that we should all be incorporating into our training. By explaining that this will benefit the company, that it would benefit the negotiator due to more commission in fresh sales opportunities and ultimately benefit countless clients by improving service.

In this way we can drive data quality though good habits, good reporting and auditing.

Veco is also able to help clients with data cleansing, trawling existing data and making sure that it is fit for purpose. These housekeeping routines can be so important to larger businesses, as data  often accumulates over the years, and this can keep it fresh to suit the current objectives of the business. The Veco approach is that one system should be all that your business needs in order to cover sales, lettings and property management. The quality of that data is therefore important as it drives the global search function within our software that helps you as agents to deliver seamless customer service without delays.