At your service

You assume you give your clients good customer service, but how do you know?

by Ward Lowe   All REALTORS® claim they provide great customer service to their clients and customers. Were that true, there would be little difference from one REALTOR® to another. You may use the same contracts and follow many of the same practices as other Texas real estate professionals, but, more than any other aspect of your business, service differentiates you from your competition.

You’re probably not stunned to learn that customer service is a vital component of your business. However, are you paying enough attention to it? An informal poll of almost 400 Texas REALTORS® revealed that two-thirds of respondents think REALTORS® don’t focus enough on providing good customer service.

Today’s consumers don’t compare your service only to that of the broker up the street; they look at what other industries provide. The care and service your customers and clients receive from other businesses influence what they expect from you.

You compete with every 24-hour phone center, money-back guarantee, and quality-control standard set by other industries. While you may not need to match the extreme service levels provided by some businesses, you should realize the type of attention your customers and clients are accustomed to.

Your customer service may measure up to today’s consumers’ needs, but how do you know? Have you asked clients what they think of the level of service you are providing? If you claim to give consumers great customer service but have never examined your practices, then you may be lying to yourself—and losing clients or referrals.

Ask a simple question

Danny Steed decided about 18 years ago that he wanted to know what clients thought of his agents’ customer service, so he devised a simple way to find out. Steed, the owner and principal broker of Hirschi, REALTORS®, in Wichita Falls, included a one-page survey with a stamped, self-addressed return envelope along with the thank-you note he sends at the conclusion of every transaction.

"The survey just made sense," he remembers. "We always focused on client services and improving quality, and this just seemed to go hand in hand with what we were trying to accomplish."

The survey, which differs for buyers and sellers, asks clients to rate various aspects of agent performance during the transaction and gathers information about why clients chose Hirschi. Steed enjoys a survey return rate of more than 50%, and many of those include comments, almost all of which are positive, written in by the clients.

When clients return the surveys, Steed reviews them, gives copies to the agents involved, and reads aloud the best comments at his weekly sales meeting. This practice, he says, fosters a little healthy competition among his 20 agents that improves their customer service. "They know that in each week’s sales meeting, I’m going to have four or five surveys that I’m going to read out loud to the group," Steed says. "They all hang on these every week. … They want their clients to say good things about them."

And from the comments, agents get ready-made testimonials to use in their personal marketing and promotional literature. Every survey comment is entered into the brokerage’s computer system, where each agent has his own file. They can copy and paste the testimonials, create ads around them, or include them in listing presentations.

While the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, any negative comments are handled in private between Steed and the agent. "I’ll sit down with the agent and ask them what happened. If it’s serious enough, I’ll pick up the phone and call that client and try to figure out the problem."

Steed acknowledges that this feedback has its shortcomings. "Statistics say that the people who have a bad experience are probably the ones who won’t say anything. If a waitress asks you at a restaurant how your meal was, you’ll say it’s fine even if it’s not. You just won’t go back again."

Regardless of its limitations, he likes the way his system works. "For what we get, how it makes the agents feel, and for the impact it has on them, the surveys definitely are serving their purpose. Good, bad, or otherwise, it’s getting us the type of results that we need."

Steed knows other agents and brokerages conduct similar surveys, but worries that not enough is done with the results. "I think every REALTOR® should do some form of customer-service tracking and feedback. But don’t just pay lip service to it; you need to use the data once you get it."

By the numbers

Randy Jeffers agrees with Steed’s notion that survey data is valuable only if analyzed. Jeffers, president and managing broker of Coldwell Banker First Equity in Amarillo, felt so strongly about analyzing client feedback that in 2000 he hired a marketing firm to improve the results from his company’s 15-year-old client survey.

"I wanted them to take our survey and ask the questions in a way that was more quantifiable, so we could have benchmarks for service and measure our performance over time," explains Jeffers.

Like Steed, Jeffers sends his survey at the close of a transaction and receives about 50% of them back. Management reviews the completed surveys with the agents and forwards them to the marketing firm for tabulation. At the brokerage’s annual meeting, the firm presents and interprets the results of all the surveys from the past 12 months.

The biggest change made to the surveys by the marketing firm was the addition of detailed demographic questions. These questions, says Jeffers, really showed the places where service expectations differ depending on a client’s experience with real estate transactions. And the firm’s analysis of the survey results surpasses anything the brokerage was able to achieve on its own.

"If we want to find out how female, first-time homesellers feel about our service, we can do that. Or if we want to check how we’re servicing male, first-time homebuyers making $30,000-$40,000, we can look at that. That’s something we couldn’t do on our own."

Despite the overwhelming number of positive responses about his agents’ service, he feels his results are accurate. "I’ve been in this business since 1972. It’s been my experience that if someone’s dissatisfied, you usually hear about it."

Jeffers believes that the survey heightens his agents’ awareness of service and says the new way of tracking the results is invaluable. "We sell real estate. These marketing people are professionals in their own field, and we need to employ them to set up our survey and analyze our data just like we expect people to employ us when they want to buy a house."

"Human nature changes when you keep score."

Many REALTORS® like Randy Jeffers and Danny Steed measure their customer service by sending out their own client surveys, but Larry Romito, CEO of Quality Service Certification in San Juan Capistrano, California, says that method lacks objectivity. "It’s like scoring your own test at school."

Respondents to surveys from the brokerages tend to write what the agents or brokers want to hear, Romito says, because negative feedback is combative and prolongs the process. "If I have a relationship with you, and I ask if you’re satisfied with my level of service, you will tend to say yes, whether you were or not. There’s very little in it for you to tell me the truth, and it’s a good way to make me go away."

Romito’s program attempts to eliminate subjectivity and provide useful, quantifiable feedback from clients in order to raise the level of REALTORS®’ customer service. "Service has become far more important than information. The average consumer thinks that any one of the 800,000 REALTORS® out there can help him buy or sell a house."

Romito asserts that real estate professionals need to establish standards for service just like the performance standards already in place for other business activities, such as production and profitability. "In a world where service is serious business, we need to approach service more seriously with standards and metrics and systems."

The Quality Service Certification system was designed to establish those standards, quantify them, and measure how well a real estate professional compares to them. Quality Service Certified REALTORS® present each new client with a set of consumer-driven, quantifiable standards that the REALTORS® promise to achieve. QSC developed these standards by determining what factors are most important to the customer. For example, a seller may be guaranteed a final price, maximum length of time the house will be on the market, and quality and frequent communication from the REALTOR®.

The REALTOR® explains these standards of service and provides them in writing to the client at the beginning of the transaction. Along with these comes a guarantee that the REALTOR® will live up to the standards. "The agent says that if I’m going to make these promises, I intend to keep them or you can terminate our relationship," Romito explains.

After closing, an independent research company, Leading Research Corporation, sends the client a substantial survey, which asks critical questions about the details and overall satisfaction of the service provided by the sales agent and broker. These questions are tied to the standards of performance outlined at the beginning of the transaction.

Clients send the completed surveys to the research company, where they are immediately entered into a data bank, analyzed, and posted on the password-protected member section of the QSC Web site. Each participating practitioner can see only his survey data; however, once four surveys on an agent are returned, that practitioner gets a rating, which is posted on the QSC consumer site for the public to see.

Romito stresses that his Web site provides a place for consumers to find REALTORS® who have shown their commitment to a high level of customer service by submitting to an independent rating. "The whole point of the system is to influence behavior and improve service delivery."

Satisfaction guaranteed

John Stapleton doesn’t use surveys and mounds of data to determine if he’s providing good customer service. As the broker associate of Focus Realty in Austin, for the past five years he has offered clients a few simple guarantees to ensure he is living up to his clients’ expectations. Since Stapleton accepts only referrals, his future business depends on how he serves his current clients.

"I try to give my clients as much leverage as possible, so they feel comfortable and in control," he says. "The guarantees are one way of telling people this before they have a chance to experience working with me." Stapleton currently offers three guarantees: quick call-back, easy exit, and total satisfaction.

"The call-back guarantee began in my first real estate class," he recalls. "The instructor said 72% of clients said they would not use the same REALTOR® again, and the overwhelming reason was how bad the REALTOR® was about returning phone calls." Stapleton tells clients on his message that he’ll either return their call within 15 minutes or a specific time later in the day; he builds "return calls" appointments into his schedule and sticks to them. If Stapleton fails to return the call, the client receives $219 per call.

The easy-exit guarantee puts his clients in control. "It gives them the ongoing option to fire me," he says. A client may cancel his listing or buyer-agency agreement with 48 hours’ notice at any time for any reason.

If it’s too late in a transaction to fire him but a client is less than totally satisfied with his service, a client can ask Stapleton to donate his entire fee to charity at closing. He judges his clients’ satisfaction by their level of referral. "If they are not referring me by the time we reach settlement, I ask them why," Stapleton explains. "Sometimes they won’t know anyone right then. I just want to be sure they would refer me if the chance arises." He has never been asked to donate his fee.

At the beginning of a relationship with customers, Stapleton provides them with a guide to his services that also includes the guarantees. He briefly reviews each guarantee, but he keeps his discussions of customer service informal. "I’m not looking to excuse myself with fine print or technicalities. If the client’s not thrilled, the broker doesn’t get paid."

Actions speak louder than words

REALTORS® may argue about how to ensure the best customer service for clients, but most agree that you should do something to promote good customer service and monitor your performance. However, talking about service is one thing and implementing a system or program is another.

Steed sees the need for more action. "I don’t think there’s enough evaluation of the service that REALTORS® provide." QSC’s Romito agrees, "The problem we have in the real estate business is we talk a lot about customer service, but, in reality, we don’t do much about it."

Rather than making self-satisfied claims about your service, find out what clients really think. Whether you employ simple surveys, sophisticated ratings, or meaningful guarantees, make sure you’re not simply voicing your own opinion when you tell customers about your great customer service.

Photo © PictureQuest.

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