We all know that our businesses are dependent on our customers, yet we don’t always live the dream of providing amazing customer service.
It’s easy when you get tired to say “I’ll get up early and do it tomorrow”. When the phone rings and we don’t answer it we might justify it by saying I need to focus on this CMA I am building. Or worse yet, the phone might ring and we ignore it because we’re talking to one of our friends or having a cup of coffee.
While we’re all human and we have our moments of weakness, customer service is fundamental to what we provide in the real estate industry. After all that is what we’re really selling at the end of the day – Expertise, Local Knowledge, and Service. At the end of a day, if a client doesn’t feel like you care about them, you’re not going to get very far. Certainly, you won’t be able to create a lifetime experience with them.
I would like all of us to ask ourselves a fundamental question through a little exercise I have created. Do you truly have the heart of a servant? Do you LOVE to help your clients achieve their goals? Do you get up in the morning thinking about how you can delight one or more of your customers today?
As a brokerage do you inspire your teams to live the life of a servant to their clients? As an MLS do you encourage and incentivize everyone in the company to do whatever it takes to help your subscribers be successful, addressing their needs quickly and completely? Do you proactively provide them tools, training, and service that will go above and beyond what your members would even ask you for?
Do you celebrate service excellence regularly? Do you review areas of customer dissatisfaction and proactively train on ways to eliminate it for the future? Do you have processes in place to objectively measure Customer Service Satisfaction?
We just spent a week at the Omni Hotel in Rancho Mirage. They were living the dream of amazing customer service. Everyone on their staff was plugged into our needs. It was like they almost knew what we were thinking before we did! We asked one of their staff about it and she showed us a card that every employee carries with them outlining their key goals for delighting customers. Every week they review one of their tenets and then review the customer satisfaction scores for the week. They brainstorm ways to provide even more amazing service. They LIVE it!
I would like to invite you to go through the exercise I have attached to help you reflect on where you are strongest and to help you identify your areas of weakness that you need to focus on.
To download the report click here.
