Real estate coach Travis Robertson discusses the importance of servicing clients as a part of your marketing strategy. How you service your clients is where repeat and referral business starts. Unfortunately, most real estate agents deliver mediocre service at best. Learn tactics and ideas for serving your real estate clients in this new video.

CLIENT SERVICE

Do you ever wonder how you can improve your service and communication with your clients? If not, you should. This is where repeat and referral business starts. Everybody talks about repeat-referral business, everybody wants repeat- referral business but this is where it begins. Unfortunately for most agents when they sign a new client, what happens to the marketing? It stops. Nothing happens. Instead you should start cranking up your marketing, prove more value, more service and more communication.

Why is this so important? Do you know what every clients biggest fear and worst fear is when working with a real estate agent? When we survey them, number one is always this: I’m gonna have to chase down or hunt down my realtor; they’re never gonna give me a call. This is a great opportunity for you to go above and beyond, improve that service, deliver beyond their expectations and get the start of that repeat-referral business.

EXCEED EXPECTATIONS

So what does this look like? Let me ask you a question. Do you tell people about services or experiences that just meet your expectation? Of course not. What are the things that you tell people about? When the expectations haven’t been met or when you’re expectations were exceeded. People don’t get excited about those things that simply meet their expectations.

Here’s a great example of this: I stay in a lot of hotels. If I were to go to a hotel, what do i expect? I expect the rooms to be clean and I expect the staff to be friendly. Now let’s say I go to a hotel and rooms are clean and the staff is friendly. Do I then all the sudden call all my friends, all my family and say “hey guess what? Good news! I’m staying in a hotel where the staff is friendly and the rooms are clean!” You know they’re gonna be thinking? What budget motel have you been staying at that you’re so excited about a clean room and a friendly staff?

Wake Up Calls are Miserable

I want to tell you about an experience I had at the Sofitel Hotel. It’s a French owned hotel chain that we had just stayed in for the first time a couple years ago and the experience was this: I went into with the same basic expectations: friendly staff, clean rooms. When we got there the staff started speaking French to us, started addressing us as “bonjour misure, bonsoir Mademoiselle.” It was just a fun little clever thing. Nothing that made you want to just run out tell everybody about it but as a nice little change of pace. However, that’s not the whole story. What really did it is this: I have to wake up a lot of times when I’m on the road at 4- 4:30 in the morning and I can sleep through an iPhone alarm so what I do is I call for a wake up call. Are wake-up calls ever pleasant experiences? Absolutely not. They’re horrible and what happens at 4- 4:30 in the morning when I wake up? What’s the first thing I need? Coffee. I need a hot cup of coffee. About 15 minutes after my wake-up call I get a knock on the door.  I open the door kinda surprised to see anybody there and guess who is standing there? A gentleman with a tray and two piping hot cups of coffee on that tray. He goes “Misure, would you like some coffee?” I said “yes sir. Please bring more.”

What they did is took a miserable experience, a wake up call, and turned in into a positive experience, and it cost them maybe 70 cents to bring 2 cups of coffee. By bringing the two cups of coffee, it changed my experience of a wake up call. Now would you agree that wake up calls still suck? Absolutely, but can you make a wake up call a little bit more pleasurable? You bet.

Benefits

Now here’s the benefit to you: in real estate would you agree that the bar for client servicing sometimes is set so low that it doesn’t take a lot to exceed our clients expectations? Absolutely. This is what I want you to think about: what are the small things that you can do to improve your communication or improve your service on those really low bars just to slightly exceed them? Those small things can mean a tremendous amount to group of people who are expecting that their realtor isn’t going to continue to call them back.