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Watch the video on Customer Satisfaction.
As consumers get more involved in building their own homes, the homebuilding industry has evolved to improve homeowners' satisfaction. Builders have established a schedule of weekly updates to improve communication and ensure customer satisfaction.
When building a home, the customer's major concern is that the home is built the way it was envisioned, on time and with the highest quality imaginable.
Is there a better way for builders to ensure that quality?
Communication is probably the highest driver of quality in a customer's mind. If a customer receives frequent updates during the process, his assumption is that the home is being built to high quality because he's followed its progress. When customers are asked to rate their experience, if the communication was good and on time and frequent, they'll almost always say they had a great, satisfying experience.
What is the best practice to ensure customer satisfaction?
- Let customers know their responsibility, review it with them regularly and communicate weekly via phone or personally in the field. If you do that every week, increased customer satisfaction will almost always follow.
- Set up meetings with the buyer for signing the sale agreement, starting the financing process, making design choices, reviewing the construction schedule and signing papers when the property closes.
- During construction, meet with the homeowner on a weekly basis to provide updates on the construction process. In the past, builders would only communicate with homeowners when there was a problem... in other words, when it was too late.
- Weekly updates also make the homeowner feel important to the process and greatly improve the overall experience.
Regular communication with the homeowner also means that potential problems can be dealt with before they even become problems. There are no surprises and, at the end, this involvement with customers and their mortgage company ensures that the closing process will be as smooth as possible.
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