FOR BROKERS: Relationship management
BY ROBERT FREEDMAN
Improving service
Measuring customer service: What’s it cost?
What to do when . . .
Customer satisfaction falls through the cracks.
A curious thing happened when Debbie D’Valentine, CRS®, started putting listing information on her company’s Web site a few years ago. The online information was great at generating customer traffic, but few of the sales associates at her company, Tomie Raines Inc. in Lansing, Mich., could take time to answer customer inquiries quickly; instead, they continued to direct their attention to their established clients.
The result: a less than exemplary service experience for online customers. Her solution: customer-relationship management.
She required all of her sales associates to complete a day-long training session to become certified as customer-service specialists through a program offered by Quality Service Certification Inc.
(www.qualitycertified.org) in San Juan Capistrano, Calif. QSC also offers online training.
Now all 145 of her sales associates follow a system for determining up front what their clients expect of them and measuring how well their service met those expectations.
D’Valentine’s receptionist, a licensed associate, also took the training, allowing D’Valentine to expand her role. As Internet customer-service coordinator, the former receptionist is now responsible for developing a relationship with customers coming to the company over the Internet, answering their questions quickly, and then referring them to an associate when they’re ready to transition from casual shopper to committed client.
“Usually customers in the information-gathering stage don’t want to be pressured,” says D’Valentine. “But they do want their inquiries answered quickly and professionally.”
Improving service
Ramping up the quality of your customer service can be as simple as making sure that a live person always answers the phone and that your associates obtain feedback from clients shortly after a transaction is complete, says real estate brokerage management consultant Joe Klock Sr. of Key Largo, Fla.
D’Valentine opted for a structured system, which gives her a way to start all of her associates out on the same foot and learn the same lessons. As she affiliates new associates, she sends them through the online version of the training, too.
The structured approach also enables her to obtain a consistent measurement of how well her associates are doing. If an associate consistently scores low, she and the associate can discuss the circumstances and map out an improvement plan.
“When an associate isn’t providing good customer service, you tend to hear about it anyway,” she adds. “But now we can quantify the issue and see where the person is weak.” The consumer surveys address such performance areas as communication and marketing plans.
An aggressive customer-relationship management program can generate push back from associates, especially top performers who feel they wouldn’t generate as much business as they do if their customer-service skills were weak, says Larry D. Romito, CRB, president and CEO of Quality Service Certification.
Many do provide good service, he says. But some top performers build their business by being good prospectors and good closers—qualities that don’t necessarily translate into good customer service.
“Only one in three buyers and sellers, when asked after closing, indicate that they’re very likely to use that salesperson again,” says Romito, citing a statistic his company generated through its client feedback surveys. “The service that real estate professionals provide shouldn’t be so hit-or-miss.”
What are critical components of customer-relationship management? According to Romito and Klock, your associates should:
- Determine up front what clients expect, then match the level of service to that expectation. Some clients expect their salesperson to talk with them daily and walk them through every aspect of the transaction; others want certain services taken care of, but otherwise prefer to be left alone.
- Obtain feedback on how well service matched client expectations. Salespeople can get feedback more reliably if it’s solicited as soon after the transaction as possible, when the experience is fresh in the client’s mind.
And you should:
- Institute a companywide customer-service program to see how your company is performing as a whole.
- Consider working with a third-party vendor that would provide customer-service training and obtain feedback so performance measurement is consistent and objective.
- Offer coaching for associates whose customer-service performance is weak or declining.
- Encourage associates to tout completion of customer-service training and strong customer-service ratings in their marketing.
Brokerages can and do get by just by measuring their sales performance year after year. But by measuring customer-satisfaction levels, too, you can up your sales numbers by retaining customers who in the past may have slipped away.
Measuring customer service: What’s it cost?
Making sure someone in your office is always available to answer the phone or reminding your associates to obtain customer-service feedback from clients might not cost you anything. But if you take a systematic approach to customer satisfaction, expect to budget for it.
Debbie D’Valentine, of Tomie Raines Inc. in Lansing, Mich., paid Quality Service Certification Inc. of San Juan Capistrano, Calif., $9,500 for training 140 associates, plus $5,428 for certifying them. Going forward, D’Valentine will pay an annual $50 certification renewal fee for each of her current associates and $149 for each new associate who’s trained and certified online.
The certification program also involves surveying costs. QSC uses a third-party company to survey client satisfaction shortly after transaction completion and includes the results in a database. The cost: $3.50 per survey, which is billed to the brokerage monthly.
