estate agents and outsourced compliance

Let's say, for the sake of the illustration, that the most unpleasant part of the visit to the dentist is the drilling into one's teeth.  Imagine, then, if, just before the drilling was about to start, your dentist put on some clown music, and went out for a cigarette break.  In comes a complete stranger, wielding a drill, wearing a tee-shirt saying "outsourced-drillingz-R-US", with the rest of their outfit being a clown costume.  They then set about clumsily trying to drill into your face, while your dentist, with whom you thought you had the relationship, is nowhere to be seen.

Some time in the current compliance era, during which no real economic growth has taken place in the West, estate agents in various jurisdictions (including Guernsey and the UK apparently) had to start compliancing buyers of real estate objects.  Although there are several very unpleasant parts of the buying procedure, getting complianced is arguably the most unpleasant part.  How does it feel, then, when the estate agent hands this off to some third party, who comes in, with no introduction, and starts making demands and hassling the buyer, failing to use any pre-existing information, and generally acting the clown?

At first glance, this is understandable, because why should estate agents, who are basically sales-people, suddenly be able to do financial compliance?  It is not a core competence (and the dentistry-drilling analogy falls short, here).  I hesitate to use the word "retarded", but any regulators who thought this was a good idea have got to be retarded.

Inevitably, the compliancer outsourcees are on contract and have tried to "automate" and make their processes "efficient".  This means entirely depersonalising them, which is contrary to the compliance principle of knowing one's customer (or, in this case, the outsourcer's customer).  It also means that the customer's time is valued at zero, because wasting it doesn't cost anything according to the psycho MBA bean-counters.  Lost sales due to customers throwing up their hands in dismay probably don't come onto the bean-counters' radar.  Simultaneously, the compliance outsourcee's time is valued at some value, because this is measured.

The outsourcee will tend to do infuriating things, like sending PDF forms that have to be printed, on to which the customer is supposed to spend their time, which is the one thing they do not get back, writing lots of information the compliancer already has.  Or insisting that some humiliating procedure is completed via an "app", which is to be downloaded with some link from some SMS, with daily SMS spam until the assigned tasks are completed.

So while it must be tempting to management to outsource this aspect of the service, from a customer relationship perspective it is a disaster.

I've encountered this so far with Savills in Guernsey outsourcing to Newgate compliance, and Knight Frank in Oxford outsourcing to Thirdfort.

I should emphasise that the agents are not using these as suppliers in a back-end way.  Rather, the customer is subjected to direct and extremely bossy communications from the outsourcee themselves, an entity the customer does not know, does not trust, and has no relationship with.  The compliance legitimacy of this approach thus seems dubious.