Running a service based business, I’m forever thinking about the service I receive as a customer from other companies and it makes me wonder what makes good service.
The first thing I just cannot get my head around, is that there is no excuse for poor service. Service costs nothing and when you’re on the end of poor service you literally want to tell everyone you know. The negative impact of that could be huge for a company so why don’t they just offer great service from the very beginning?
Estate Agents and Recruitment Consultants always get a bad reputation and it comes down to one main factor. Neither provide the level of service they should do. Both of these industries look for ways to make a fast buck and forget to build long term relationships with their customers. I’m talking first hand experience here as I’m trying to buy a house at the moment, and after sharing my details with 7 different estate agents, only 1 could be bothered to contact me. If anyone of them took the time to make me feel special and valued I most certainly would have spent time viewing their properties. However, 6 of them treated me like a number and just added my email to a generic database. Nothing personal, minimum effort and very undervalued.
At the end of the day, the only difference between the thousands of estate agencies in the country are the list of properties they have to sell. Estate Agents believe their customers are sellers, but what if they treated buyers like they treat the sellers? You make buyers feel special and within a matter of months every buyer in the area will want to view that Estate Agents property portfolio. Then with an influx of buyers, why would sellers want to work anyone else? Famous quote from Field Of Dreams, “if you book them, they will come!”
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you sell a product or service that has loads of competitors, because if you offer the very best service, more customers will keep coming back and good PR won’t cost a penny.
