Irish Rover
Well-known member
Thanks. Be interesting to see how long it will take them to plough through all their unanswered emails, if they bother.
Red Ensign Broker
- Thread starter Irish Rover
- Start date
Wandering Star
Well-known member
I seem to recall Red Ensign Brokerage have a good reputation and specialise (or did)selling used Rustler yachts including Princess Anne’s Rustler 36?
Irish Rover
Well-known member
I'm sure they're fine fellows, but apparently they don't answer emails.
jdc
Well-known member
Well, I did offer to ask informally! I ran across one of the partners in Waitrose on Wednesday...
Irish Rover
Well-known member
Yes, I know, and it was much appreciated. At the time, I genuinely expected they would answer my polite email enquiry, and didn't want to make a fuss. Surprising as it was not to get a reply to that, I'm amazed they haven't answered an enquiry I made about a specific boat for sale on their website. Strange way to run a business.
Greg2
Well-known member
Perhaps because they rarely get serious enquires via e-mail and anyone really interested would pick up the phone? Not defending anything but just speculating I guess.
We are on our sixth boat so have looked at many boats and years ago I realised that e-mail enquires to brokerages rarely elicited a response but phone calls usually did the trick.
Irish Rover
Well-known member
Reasonable point, but why publish an email address on your website if you weren't intending to read your emails and reply.
dunedin
Well-known member
Thats a very olde worlde way of thinking.
Many of us would only attempt a phone call nowadays as a last resort .
Tend to do leisure things in evenings, on weekends or whilst travelling. Much easier to send an email or online request at time that suits me, and expect quick response from that.
Don't think had ANY phone discussions with broker buying last boat. Email only up to viewing, and email only thereafter for negotiation and contracts.
Irish Rover
Well-known member
Added to which my last 2 boats were bought through a broker in a country other than where I live so I definitely wouldn't have been wasting international call costs on a preliminary enquiry.
Greg2
Well-known member
Love the description of phone and talking as olde worlde!
I do use e-mail during transactions because it is precise and there is an audit trail (I had a Dutch broker claim that we had definitely agreed to buy a boat having negotiated a significantly reduced price whereas what we had actually done was negotiate a price that would work and induce us to travel to view but it was all subject to viewing, trial and survey, which was all confirmed via e-mail so I was able to refute his claims).
My point was that in todays online world where the approach you describe can mean high volumes of enquires it is perhaps difficult to keep on top of it and given that all details are usually online any first contact via e-mail other than those asking for an appointment to view might not get a lot of attention. Perhaps their thinking is that a serious buyer will pick up the phone if there is no reply to an e-mail whereas a ‘fender kicker’ is less likely to?
To illustrate the point our eye was caught by a yacht in Scotland last year, which I saw online and I had some questions so I sent an e-mail. As anticipated I didn’t get a response so after a week or so so I put a call in and was put through to the relevant Broker. He had my e-mail and he was apologetic about not replying but it was clear that he was busy and answering questions in an e-mail obviously hadn’t been a priory and was way down his list. He was most helpful on the phone though and had to go away and get answers to some of my queries, which he did and he got back to me the same day.
I guess this reflects my general approach inasmuch as I see e-mails as a useful tool that can do the entire job in some contexts but perhaps not in others and if I want something to happen I don’t fire off and e-mail and sit on my hands thereafter.
As I said in my comment at #126 I am not defending anything here
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Irish Rover
Well-known member
"Apologetic about not replying", "answering questions in an email hadn't been a priority". Definitely sums up my experience of Yacht Brokers. Maybe it's the title "Yacht Brokers" which makes so many of them pompous. They're secondhand boat sellers, for the love of Pete. My most recent, unanswered, email to red-ensign.com was asking when and where I could view a particular boat.
benjenbav
Well-known member
I wonder if the email mentioned in #15 (asking where they had obtained the OP’s address) was referred to their data controller who might then have put a hold on replying to any subsequent emails from the same address pending completion of enquiries into the original question?
Irish Rover
Well-known member
If that was the case why not reply to the original email and say we're making enquiries. In any event the boat enquiry email was sent from a different email address so, unless they're at the level of checking the ISP details of every incoming email, there would have been no connection.
benjenbav
Well-known member
Just a thought. They do have some nice-looking boats on their website. I almost wish I hadn’t looked …
Irish Rover
Well-known member
Yes, and plenty of detail about each one. Just a pity about the poor communication.Just a thought. They do have some nice-looking boats on their website. I almost wish I hadn’t looked …
dunedin
Well-known member
But that does seem like very bad practice. In almost every industry nowadays it is important to have an efficient process for handling incoming electronic communication.
Any broker bigger than a one man band should be able to have an assistant (perhaps part time, work from home) who can screen incoming emails - and do an initial holding (and qualifying) reply. Generally the first email received is simply “is the boat still available” and “please provide more details”. Easy to reply quickly to, either by the assistant or the one man band personally.
An initial reply would typically also have a question or two in return (existing boat, location, when like to visit etc) to qualify the contact and prioritise for further action.
Much more efficient / less disruptive to the brokers time than responding to phone calls, as email response can be scheduled to suit the broker.
So sloppy practice from the Scottish broker (as well as apparently Red Ensign).
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ashtead
Well-known member
As someone who is still working we now very much operate by emails and internal unplanned calls are indeed a distraction but many seem to use the Microsoft teams as the new phone call and expect a quicker response but I can see from a small broker how the phone call might be the way they have always done business but if your customers preferred comms are by email you should adapt accordingly to meet their needs. Many cannot easily use the phone and find emails easier. I guess customer centric behaviour and vulnerable customer training don’t really feature in the CPD programmes of yacht brokers though and they just carry on as they always have. That said when dealing with larger brokers I have always found them easy to contact .
Fr J Hackett
N/A
It all begs the question that if a company, any company uses the internet and has a website with an e mail address as part of it then one should expect them to monitor it and respond to any enquiries that use it unless of course they decide to filter the the incoming enquiries and not to respond to ones they judge to be not worth following up which if is the case it says a lot about the company.
Irish Rover
Well-known member
I received an email today from Red Ensign. I had enquired last year about a powercat advertised on YachtWorld but had not made the association because that boat was in Gibraltar. Anyway, that's that cleared up, thank you Red Ensign. Strangely, I did a search on outlook but it failed to find the previous correspondence, but when I'm reminded of the date I have no difficulty finding it now. So mystery solved and all good.
