Inside Conveyancing: Sub-standard customer experience is not an option

Being a great conveyancer today means more than just being a legal expert. With the pressures of meeting client expectations, adhering to rigid timescales, whilst simultaneously, ensuring a good level of communication to a broad spectrum of interested stakeholders, over time, has meant that issues pertaining to customer service have been laid bare, leading to an increased perception from some consumers of a substandard approach within the conveyancing sector.

As we know, property sale and purchase are not just legal transactions but highly emotive, financially burdensome, and stressful activities. Fuelled by miscommunications of case progress and lack thereof, many customers are afflicted with grief.

For an industry that has seen little change in the way transactions are executed, arguably from several centuries ago, one would expect the process to be a well-oiled machine but with external factors affecting the everyday, the reality is that in fact, the average time to completion is increasing, as are the dropout rates, leading to high financial and emotional cost for buyers and sellers alike.

Varying levels of maturity
There are some fundamental issues pertaining to the makeup of the sector that make frictionless industry-wide execution of transactions difficult. The industry is led by a number of groups and bodies – such as the UK Finance, the Mortgage Bankers Association, National Association of Estate Agents, as examples – each providing their own set of best practice for the sector to follow.

Then there are the refers, the introducers, the search providers, the software providers, and the conveyancers themselves. These players have long seen technology as a panacea for removing and ironing out difficulties in the conveyancing process, but mostly from their business’ operational standpoint.

Less focus has been applied to the consumer experience (although there are some notable exceptions) and even less to the experience in the broader eco-system where provider meets provider. Furthermore, these participants are at varying levels of maturity in their technology adoption. The result is that there isn’t a platform or approach that glues all the different technologies, digital processes and procedures together to enable a consistent and transparent way of completing transactions. 

This is why blockchain technology is exciting. It offers the capability to securely and seamlessly connect all the different and disassociated, but commonly interested, players across the conveyancing process, end-to-end.

It seems obvious that adopting a common industry-wide blockchain platform within the conveyancing sector is the right thing to do. Nevertheless, with nearly 2,600 service providers, realistically, a wholesale move to a standard platform will take time.

In the interim though, maintaining the status quo on sub-standard customer service simply cannot be an option. Conveyancing service providers, across the chain, need to work together and proactively endeavour to improve customer experience.