An estate agency customer service tip

RAT 33 (Rawlings Agency Tip)

I recently attended a covert meeting in an unmarked suite in a secure area of Chelsea football ground. Few people knew about this meeting, and it was conducted in the utmost secrecy. There were around ten people present, all key players in the estate agency industry, including the Ombudsman himself.

The reason for the secrecy was that this was a meeting of one of the two judging panels for the Estate Agency of the Year Awards, which is to be held at Chelsea FC next month. We were setting out the standards by which the awards would be judged in order to achieve consistency and fairness across the 18 categories. Each judge was allocated a category to assess by way of extensive written submissions and detailed telephone interviews.

Each judge was handed a large file containing the relevant submissions. However, mine was not a file, but an enormous cardboard box. My category - customer services! Customer service is the one area of agency in which many good agents rightly feel they excel.

You may well feel the same - with punctuality, courtesy, respect, consideration and sincerity forming the cornerstones of your customer service. However, if you are to harness customer service in order to drive your business forward, your approach has to go way beyond these noble attributes. Your customers expect these anyway!

Being 'good' is the new 'average'. Even being 'better' in agency is difficult - can you really claim that you will definitely get a higher price than your competitors? Of course not - but you can be different. Different is refreshing, attractive and memorable.

But being different is not something that just happens. If being different is a strategic initiative, then you need to employ tangible ways of impressing your clients. There has to be a WOW factor. Something that will make people talk about you. And this always means going beyond not just what they expect, but what they could possibly have expected if they really put their minds to it (which they don't).

I can't share any of the exceptional techniques employed by the winners before the awards event itself, as this could hint at who they might be and I would be executed for breaking the Official Secrets Act.

However, this is a RAT (Rawlings Agency Tip) and you expect and deserve a tip. So here's one of my own: Don't put your mobile phone number on your business card! But when you give your card to someone, you want them to feel special, so make a point of writing your mobile number on your card by hand as you say 'and here's my private mobile number - please feel free to call me at any time, day or night' (and turn your phone off when you go to bed!)