Transform Masters 2017 is brought to you with thanks to our sponsors Property Tree, realestate.com.au and Real+
In this preview of his Transform coaching session, Scott Downing, Chief Customer Officer at Rockend explains the role of customer experience within the real estate industry, how it is evolving through self service and cloud technology, and share the ways in which Rockend measures user and customer experience.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Scott: I’m Scott Downing. I’m the Chief Customer Officer at Rockend. I look after the customer experience and the advocacy strategies for the business. I also look after some of our operational teams.
Q. What is customer experience?
Scott: Customer experience can be whatever you want it to be. So I think there’s a bit of a cliché around everyone’s customer-centric, and everyone needs to know what the customer experience is. But we’re all customers so we have a very different view of it.
So, a customer can be many different people, and what you think is a great customer experience to me will be very different.
It’s really about knowing your customer and then delivering what they want and what matters to them versus making them fit your mould.
Q. Is self service technology a threat to the industry?
Scott: No, I think self-service technology is actually going to enhance property management and the real estate industry. The industry is evolving but the world is also evolving at a rapid pace. So I think this is a rare opportunity for the real estate industry to be on that bandwagon in a really positive way.
Enabling property managers, for example, to be able to do things faster, streamlined, workflow what they’re working on and stay connected to people gives real estate the opportunity to work on new things.
To be able to grow their business, and grow what they want their customers to have from their service. So, I think we’ll see a real shift in the industry very rapidly.
Q. How does the cloud improve customer experience?
Scott: Embracing the Cloud is really important if the real estate industry wants to get on that, as I said earlier, bandwagon around technology.
Embracing Cloud technology means that people have access to their data rapidly. If you’re being asked something by a customer, or even by the person that’s running your office you’ve got access to that technology wherever you are, as long as you’ve got your device. Be that your tablet, your iPhone, your laptop, your android whatever that is.
So, it removes that need for manual backups. It removes that need for large servers in your office. It removes that need to, “I’ll get back to you when I get back to the office, Mr Customer.” It means that you’re actually on the front foot all the time. Because you’ve got all of your information at your fingertips.
It also speeds up everything that you’re working on. You know, I don’t need to take a million photographs, then get back to the office and, you know, get my data stick out, plug it into the machine and upload all that. It’s all going to be timeless and seamless. So, it ultimately makes the users experience better, as well as the customer’s experience because they get their information in a much speedier manner.
Q. How does Rockend measure customer experience?
Scott: We measure customer experience here in quite a few ways. One of the measures that probably a lot of people have heard about is NPS, so the Net Promoter Score. So, what our customers and the industries think of our business. How we rated against other technology providers globally.
We measure certain types of interaction. So, should someone call into our support queues or our sales team or any of our customer-facing operations, we will send a questionnaire and say, “How was your interaction?” That’s really about the interaction between me and you. So, how satisfied were you and did we follow through on our commitments.
In addition to that, we also measure our employees’ experience as well. Because, like I said, it’s really important to deliver an amazing experience for your customers, your employees need to be happy.
We measure customer and employee experience after an interaction. So, for example, a training experience. If we did a training in your office, or you came to our office, or even a webinar we’d ask you for feedback on that. How was it for you, would you like us to change? What would we change, etc.
