Home Seller Feedback – Let Your Customers Take the Wheel

Commentary by Carolyn Thomas

RISMEDIA, Feb. 12, 2008-Listening to and acting upon customer feedback is crucial to successful business. Today’s customers have more opportunity than ever to communicate their opinions of your business and service offerings. While word-of-mouth communication has always been crucial in the real estate business, consumer advocacy media and the Internet now amplify it. Paying close attention to all avenues of customer feedback, including what is received by your agents and office, presents an excellent opportunity to identify important trends and tailor your services to customer needs. In fact, using customer feedback to drive service is a crucial, yet often untapped, area to any successful business.

Keep Your Ear to the Ground
By identifying trends in their customer base and service region, real estate brokers put themselves and their agents in a position to be successful. Print and broadcast news are a great resource for paying attention to trends, but the Internet offers you an opportunity to know your customers in great detail and often in “real time.”

For example, as I was conducting research for this article, a simple Google search directed me toward http://orthomom.blogspot.com. One posting on this blog has the author discussing the important home-buying criteria for those of the Jewish-Orthodox faith. Her readers then provided comments on the article, effectively giving brokers an instant focus group.

What is important to single moms? Bachelors? Families? Widows? Researching your customer base in such targeted segments may seem daunting, but the benefits of a little work will identify useful trends within each group. All of these groups share opinions through various channels (Internet, media, etc.), and often provide insights into what motivates their overall purchasing decisions and product/service satisfaction. Look for your potential customers’ opinions in a variety of ways-in chat rooms on the Web, in media news stories, and in direct feedback to the broker’s office or a service provider.

Tailor Your Service Offerings
The information gathered from monitoring customer feedback and opinions provides what you need to create effective, practical applications for customer service. At American Home Shield®, we listen very closely to our customer feedback to identify opportunities for creating a more satisfying and efficient home warranty experience for our customers.

Recently, our customers indicated that they were interested in a quicker means of initiating a service request and wanted more direct contact with the local contractor scheduled to perform their home system or appliance repair. So we gave them just that: AHS® customers can now initiate a service request via our company Website and receive via e-mail the pertinent information about the contractors scheduled to fulfill their request.

Our e-follow-up program adds another feature to our service offering for our Web-savvy customers. Upon the completion of a service order, our customers automatically receive an e-mail, which allows them to provide feedback regarding their experience with our contracted technicians and American Home Shield service. This program has opened another channel of communication between the company and our customers and provides a new opportunity for us to use customer feedback to drive our service.

Listening closely to homeowners and new home buyers will help successful real estate brokers develop interesting and effective customer service practices while fine-tuning existing offerings. Even when customers do not speak directly with you or your office, the Internet and media provide an opportunity to hear their feedback. In 2008, translating feedback into creative and useful customer service offerings will differentiate the most successful brokers from their competitors.

Carolyn Thomas is in Consumer Research at American Home Shield.

For more information, visit www.ahswarranty.com.

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