Kicking The Tires in your customer satisfaction initiative can be Painful…as you’ll discover many things that are not perfect in your company when you really look under the hood.  There’s A Great Opportunity Here!

Fillmore Kicks Tires for Satisfaction

As Fillmore Real Estate is now just a few weeks into our Customer Satisfaction Initiative, where we are measuring the level of satisfaction for each of our buyers and sellers in the hopes of raising the bar of service in the real estate industry.  Perhaps we should have done this a long time ago, but if you’re like most real estate companies you still haven’t done this yet.  As I have indicated in previous posts, I will keep you posted of the journey along the way.

BABY STEPS
When we rolled out the plan on March 4th, we began calling each office as if we were a new buyer.  We wanted to discover how the phone was answered, if the buyers name and contact info was correctly recorded, if the proper source of the buyer was recorded, and then the timeliness that it took for the agent to call back if we couldn’t provide a live transfer.  Next, we asked a few questions to see if the agent knew about the home buyer tax credit program that we were pushing in a big way this week.

HOW YOU DOIN?
Some offices were AMAZING, and the Administrative Assistant managed to get all the correct contact information including email addresses.  Agents superbly handled many questions and engaged the prospects in conversation.  I think that some of our “Satisfaction Callers” (those hired to make the calls) were actually tempted to go and see some properties with some of the great agents that they spoke with. There were some, though that struggled with the tax credit questions, and we realized that there was a lot of room for improvement here.

WE SHOOK IT UP
It seems that when you run a program like this in BROOKLYN, you are about to ruffle some feathers.  We had  a bunch of agents attempt to bully us by trying to find reasons why we shouldn’t be doing this quality control effort, but that makes us realize even more that we need to do this more now than ever.
We can already see agents answering the calls better and taking their game up a notch.  More agents know that the call may be monitored as a customer service call, and more and more agents are bringing their “A” game each and every time.  Our goal; after all, is to treat each and every prospect as if they were our only customer.

LETS BE REAL
We are creating a new system here.  There will be challenges along the way.  We are not taking the approach that we are firing or lynching the people who aren’t up to our expectations now, but we are measuring, providing training and then giving opportunity to improve.  Most people want to improve, and we have to take responsibility as a company and as managers who haven’t been already checking for quality before.  After identifying the areas that need improvement, and training the proper methods we expect most people to understand and follow the corporate plan.  If some still don’t get it by next month, then we may have to look into the situation to see if the person is right for the responsibility.

AS FOR AGENTS
Agents will continue to be rated for customer satisfaction purposes.  Eventually, the excellent agents will receive more leads than the agent who are not rated so highly. We are also coming up with some special ways to provide benefits and rewards for those agents who are exceeding our expectations. It will be no secret, that those agents with the highest ratings will be increasing their sales this year.   Of course, part of satisfaction is also the ability of the agent to close the deal.  It’s nice to be nice, but you can’t lose focus on the main purpose why we’re here.  Great Agents with Great Customer Skills will thrive in 2010.

CHECK IT OUT
This program gives you a great opportunity to kick the tires at all levels of your company.  As we were rating the agents and offices, they decided to rate us also.  I thought that this was one of the most productive parts of the exercise.  We learned of weaknesses in our system and we were immediately able to identify areas of concern and improvement potential.  You see, we want people to check each part of the system out, and let us know how we’re doin.

LYNCH MOBS DISBAND

Don't Be A Bully - In any new quality assurance plan you will unveil areas of improvement. Use this opportunity wisely. Leaders show the way, Bullys push away.

There is no need for lynch mobs and bullying here.  We are all on a journey together and we realize that there is room for growth and improvement at every step along the way.  We don’t want to fire everyone who makes a mistake or yell at those who might have messed up.  As the president of the company, I take full responsibility for where we are today.  We haven’t had these systems in place before, but we do now. So, if someone on the team was called and messed up royally, use it as a learning experience and help them improve.  We need to all take responsibility for our companies areas of improvement.  Now is the time that we’re all called to task.
We have raised the bar of quality service, and going forward we will train and inspect each aspect of our business and I know that we will be an even more amazing company next year.

THERE WILL BE GROWING PAINS
Of course there will be growing pains…we would be foolish to expect otherwise, but at the end of day we will be proud of an even better company.  The consumer will appreciate us even more than they do today, and more and more customers will be attracted to our company.

EVERYBODY WINS
This whole effort will cause increased sales and satisfaction.  Administrative Assistants will provide greater services for the agents, Agents will be adding more value to their customers, and Fillmore will be known as the company that cares….really cares …for each customer in each transaction.

THANKS TO MY TEAM
Thanks for doing things a little differently today.  I know it’s been a little frustrating for some of you, but I believe that the extra effort today will pay off tremendously in the very near future.  I am proud of this great team, during theses most challenging times.  We are all going the extra mile to make things happen.  That’s what makes us number ONE.