Customer service is simple; it’s nothing more than one person doing something for one other person. The customer might be a home buyer, an associate, or another employee. The service provider might be the receptionist, a warranty technician, a superintendent, or the company owner. The service might be answering the phone or a question, filling out a form, building a home, or providing a repair.
Customer reactions to hundreds of such interactions comprise your company’s reputation for quality and service. Your goal, of course, is to have a good reputation and reap the benefits.
Referrals are a powerful indication of and reward for customer satisfaction. Besides generating sales, high referral rates help keep marketing costs under control. Your reputation affects the ease with which you conduct business. From purchasing land to arranging financing, reputation influences the cooperation you receive from the business community. Talented people naturally want to work for companies they can be proud of and where their efforts are respected. Your company’s reputation affects employee recruitment as well as negotiations with vendors and trades. Ultimately, a builder’s good reputation can benefit his buyers by increasing the value of their homes. Do your homeowners mention your company name in newspaper ads when they sell their homes?
You do not stumble accidentally into such a service reputation. You need clear service goals and a plan to achieve them. Company decision makers need a framework for setting those service goals and organizing the activities necessary to bring them about.
Think in terms of establishing a service infrastructure. Begin with the fundamental challenges to which every service-oriented builder must respond: staffing, quality management, documentation, internal communication, and service policies and procedures. Next think about how you work with clients. Examine each phase of your relationship with home buyers, from aligning expectations through warranty.
Understandably, builders would like to find a simple position to take regarding customer service and get on with the business of building homes. But the complexity of the new home experience makes working with a one-size-fits-all approach difficult at best. Sometimes builders perform well; sometimes they create their own problems. Sometimes customers have reasonable expectations; sometimes they do not.
Most traditional builder service programs are designed to keep the customer under control, enforce boundaries, and fend off attacks. By focusing on reactive policies and procedures, many builders have developed excellent response systems yet still fail to do as well as they’d like in satisfying their customers. This is because such companies invest most of their service resources in responding to problems and initiate little in the way of proactive attention.
In today’s world, impressing home buyers requires service initiatives which some may view as a radical departure from traditional, reactive systems. But recognizing that the methods that worked 20 years ago produce uninspiring results with today’s buyers, we see that a new strategy is required to succeed.
That strategy includes an emphasis on making the entire experience a positive one. Fortunately, throughout the home buying-building-owning process, hundreds of opportunities to delight and amaze clients exist. Tapping those opportunities requires that your procedures and personnel training programs evolve to a level of sophistication equal to that of the home buyers’ expectations.
Begin with a commitment to act as if you like your customers and these opportunities will become visible. This attitude includes appreciation, respect, compassion, tolerance, enthusiasm, and resilience.
Initiating service means including proactive (think intentional, deliberate) elements in your service program. By planning an extra attention here or there, you create a context for exceeding customer expectations. These actions are characterized by verbs such as listen, volunteer, provide, anticipate, assist, assure, involve, update, counsel, remind, offer, follow-through, follow-up, invite, confirm, support, and guide.
Because builders and customers are imperfect, service response systems are still needed alongside service initiatives. Companies must sometimes take corrective steps because their performance fails. And they must act quickly to contain the damage when faced with a difficult or dishonest customer.
Builders need a combination of insights, procedures, and trained staff so that their service program can both initiate and respond. Builders also need the wisdom to recognize when to do which. This begins with the ability to see a situation clearly, identify pertinent factors, arrive at fair conclusions, and promptly take appropriate actions.
As you create procedures, establish policies, and train personnel to achieve your customer service goals, you will face many choices. For some subjects, no universally right method exists. Search for the combination of policies and procedures that results in a service program that is appropriate to your company’s circumstances.
As you proceed, you will define your company’s customer service vision and develop a framework for training employees to implement that vision. The resulting services will gratify your home buyers and generate the benefits that a good service reputation can bring to your company.
This column is an adaptation of the introduction to Customer Service for Home Builders by Carol Smith, available from NAHB’s Builder Books at www.builderbooks.com.
