It’s amazing what some companies take for granted.
It’s amazing what some companies leave on the table.
It’s amazing what some companies don’t do to blow their customers away.
It’s sad how little most companies invest in building affection with their customers. I could be talking about major real estate brands. I could be talking airlines. I could be talking about phone carriers.
My Verizon bill
After nearly dropping dead from the shock of my January cell-phone bill, I dialed 611 while pacing a trench in my living room.
As it turns out, the culprits were the hordes of Verizon folks who’d switched to AT&T over the holidays, reeking havoc on my free mobile-to-mobile minutes causing my otherwise stable charges to skyrocket. Just like that.
Verizon could have built an alert of some kind that recognizes when we, the loyalists, are on the threshold of a violent overage. But they didn’t. They could issue a voucher for it’s customers to be used against spiked minutes due to the anomaly of so many customers switching carriers at once. That would have been mind-blowing. But the company instead chose to do nothing.
According to a summer poll conducted by M:Metrics, roughly two-thirds of people interested in buying the iPhone (the leading driver of a lot of recent carrier-switching) are not currently AT&T customers. Verizon knew this was going to happen. And they did nothing.
And that also blows my mind.
Being stuck is not the same as being loyal
I could leave Verizon. And go where? In a sea of phone carriers, they’re all the same. One just as bad as the next. So I’m stuck with what I have.
Corporate folks, as they crunch numbers, tend to view this repeat business as brand loyalty. I disagree. And if the foundation of your business is built on that very same premise, I’d check it for cracks.
Had Verizon checked, it would have noticed that after getting over the shock of the bill, I had to wait over an hour to finally reach a salesperson who took another 40 minutes to investigate why my bill was over $600.
I hung up frustrated, abused, discarded.
What does this have to do with real estate?
Everything. What are you doing right now to mine the richest vein before you — your existing and past customer base? What meaning are you applying to your brand right now that could translate into genuine loyalty?
Brokers: What are you doing right now, from the top down, to relieve frustration among your customers? To embrace them? To make them feel respected rather than used?
Your brands are stabbed into America’s front yard. They know your names but they don’t know you. They are hard-pressed to express your value proposition. You are like everyone else. How are you leveraging your differences, your essence, to enhance a sense of loyalty?
AT&T partnered with Apple to create that new bond. Maybe it’s working. Who knows. I am already hearing a hue and cry from their newly converted about dropped calls and lousy service. Meanwhile, Verizon does nothing other push that oddball "Can you hear me now?" guy on us while it remains deaf to the gripes of its customers.
So this is my point: In the face of today’s market, with all of the issues facing the American homeowner — from shrinking equity to volatile credit markets to impending foreclosure — what new bonds are real estate brokers creating? What new offerings or alerts are you presenting to your past customers that could not only bring immediate benefit, relief, information or counsel but that also could assign some new, greater sense of value for you and your brands?
Vendors: In the face of today’s struggle to stay afloat, in light of the market and shrinking sales, what are you doing right now to drive new products, services, tools and pricing back to your current broker client base? Are you reengineering your technologies? Are you enhancing your old platforms? Are you working with modern code or are you just sticking to the same old, same old in hopes that your clients just continue writing checks because you’ve mistakenly confused the futility of finding a better vendor with loyalty?
Can you hear me now?
A new cell-phone carrier will one day emerge with a Zappos-like service ethic, an Apple-like retail experience and a Starwood-like rewards program built to cultivate affection and loyalty. Or not. What interests me is what this would look like in real estate. From consumers within the industry to homeowners outside it, all one has to do is gaze out across the landscape to see the millions of unclaimed, disloyal, stuck hearts looking, yearning and hoping for something they can fall in love with.
Don’t wish the cycles would turn; turn them yourself.
- Davison
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"Be the change." I like that. You raise a good point: the only thing that separates one commodity business from another is service. Entrepreneurs can hit home runs all day long on that one single premise: service.
I had to pay my way through college and, although I disliked being duct taped to the restaurant biz because of the flexible hours/good money, it was invaluable experience. To this day, it is still my rule to correct any bad service-related issue + 1. The plus one is the over-the-top move that is totally unexpected and very much appreciated.
In your example, the service rep would have credited the overage charges + your month of service. Would that have helped your opinion of Verizon?
Would not have changed my opinion Christian. Verizon knew about this problem. In a sense they anticipated it. Helped offset the loss of so many subscribers to AT&T.
Considering now how this is happening to so many people, it's clear they have no intention of doing anything about it either.
It's a shame when company are handed opportunities like this to do something profound and all they do is drop the ball.
I believe that creating loyalty is the single most important issue that real estate professionals face in today’s market. Most companies and practitioners in our industry have focused the majority of their efforts on chasing “that next deal”. Historically, they have sunk huge sums on marketing and years of time on SEO/SEM, advertising, listing services and other lead generation strategies. Now all of a sudden everyone is looking around the office asking “What happened to all my leads?”
I have two answers to that question:
1. “Clients that inquire about your services are not leads, they are People.”
I grew up in this business and I speak to real estate consumers all the time. They feel used, ignored, oversold and generally disenfranchised (I’m paraphrasing Davison’s popular viral video). Nearly everyone I know that hasn’t completely tuned out real estate has heard the story of the consumers in San Diego who are suing their realtor. It’s a popular story because people feel trapped in a gilded cage and they’re looking for someone to blame. The real estate community needs to accept that people are more important than data and act accordingly.
2. “If you want more business go ‘Back to The Future’.”
Professionals may not realize this, but the vast majority of their potential business is stowed away in the database of past clients. It’s a fact. NAR studies prove that you’re more than four times more likely to get new business from a referral than from online sources, signage, advertising and direct mail combined. In light of the slowdown, everyone in the industry should be reconnecting with past clients in a genuine way without overtly pushing their services.
If any of us expect to remain in this industry five years from now, we better abandon the “next deal” philosophy and stop taking our clients for granted. If we continue to treat people like data, we shouldn’t be surprised when they re-negotiate the Consumer/Professional relationship.
Think about it. Do they respect us any more than they respected their travel agents 10 years ago? Travel agents became all but extinct because there was no loyalty. You never know” maybe executives from a company like Expedia will try to enact similar changes in our industry. I say, let them serve up all the data they want, because it doesn’t matter if your people are loyal to you.
Well said Brian. Cultivating loyalty among past clients is highly regarded in real estate but the tools to mine that vein are few and arguably rudimentary.
Making phone calls, sending post cards or ending missives with "Oh and by the way" may arguably work once in a while but never really penetrate the emotional membrane and fertilize the loyalty egg.
To create loyalty in real estate, agents are going to need stronger swimmers.