Very early on in this series I presented a definition of marketing for housebuilders – housebuilder marketing involves every employee, supplier and subcontractor in building superior customer value at the lowest possible cost.
A very important word is value – understand where you can create it and how you deliver it to your customers and you are well on your way to delighting them. Misunderstand and you will create terrorists.
It has been suggested to me recently on more than one occasion that increasingly new home buyers seem to be out to get whatever they can out of the poor defenceless housebuilders and that it is becoming impossible to satisfy them.
Indeed there has recently been a seminar supported by many top names in the industry to discuss how we can spot the most troublesome customers. Quite right too! It matters not how wonderful our delivery of value if there exists a small fringe out there who are intent to do companies damage - not just housebuilders.
But let us get things into proportion. I am becoming increasingly frustrated by this “we’ve got to educate the customer – they make unreasonable demands upon us” sentiment that I keep hearing from some quarters.
I would stake my whole career on the belief that if you deliver to your customers what you say you will deliver then 95% of them will be at least satisfied and some of them will be delighted. Indeed I happen to believe that it is relatively easy to delight a buyer. What’s more if you can treat the 95% well it will make the troublesome fringe much easier to manage.
You must manage your delivery
As a housebuilder you absolutely have to manage your total delivery to the customer – and your delivery consists of a very long chain of experiences and events.
From the moment your prospective customer sees your advertisement, visits your web site or just drives past your development you are creating and delivering perceptions of what your company and its products will be like.
Your brochures, sales presentation and the way you answer questions all build on these perceptions. If you choose to use words like craftsman built, quality and care then by the time the customer gets to legal completion the emotions and dreams are running at a very high level and you have been delivering your company for several weeks already.
The moment you hand over the keys the perceptions change to reality. If your delivery matches the customer’s perceptions and continues to do so then fine, you will satisfy. Even when the odd remedial job is required, as long as you deliver the service according to your stated policy you will have no problems.
By the way, you tell the customer how you will deliver both emergency and non-emergency service, don’t you? Because if you don’t, you are asking for big trouble.
If your delivery doesn’t match expectations it is the most crushing experience for the customer. The feeling of betrayal is not much different to being told your partner doesn’t love you anymore. What makes it worse is that the customer cannot get out of it easily.
Buy a can of beans or a pair of trousers and if you don’t like them – you just take them back. You can’t do this with a house. You’ve invested too much emotional energy and stress into it just to turn your back on it and besides, who would want to go through the whole process again?
Just don’t play with my emotions
So, if you are going to liberally sprinkle your brand values all over me in that long period up to legal completion. If you are going to build up my emotions until they reach a peak that I will rarely reach in my lifetime and if you are then going to let me down with a house that isn’t clean or finished or just one you don’t want to fix when it goes wrong – I AM GOING TO SCREW YOU!
You play with my emotions like that and I want some revenge. This is not the behaviour of some lunatic fringe of society, it is the typical behaviour of someone who has been betrayed.
The fact that there are more and more people behaving like this is not that the housebuilding industry is going backwards, it’s because almost every other company that your customer deals with is seen to be improving. I’m sorry but your customers do not unplug their brains and become something else when they visit your developments.
And when you have raised perceptions of value and you don’t deliver, who’s the individual who invariably gets it in the neck? Your site managers. No wonder so many of them seem to be so stressed out these days. Sometimes it may be their own fault but very often they are having to take the brunt of customer dissatisfaction which has been caused by poor delivery further up the chain. To them it must seem like customers are just out to get them.
Where is the terrorists camp?
But let’s say I’m wrong – if the world really is full of customers whose sole intent is to screw the housebuilder come what may – where are these people?
No one I know would buy a house with the intention of terrorising the housebuilder – would any of your friends or colleagues? The people I know just want a place to live that is designed with care and delivered as promised. A place that works as it should and which is fixed when it goes wrong – they just don’t want any hassle – they lead far too busy lives to want to become embroiled in some pitched battle with a housebuilder.
It’s your call
At the end of the day creating value, communicating it and delivering it all comes down to three words – management, leadership and motivation. You either have them or you don’t, it’s your call.
An apology
To those housebuilders who are demonstrably trying to improve their delivery and service I apologise for this little rant. But until some of you become super brands able to raise yourselves above the pack you will continue to be dragged back by those builders who seem to be disinterested. It may be the minority spoiling it for the majority but while so many consumers and the media think, “they’re all the same these builders” you’ve got a problem.
I applaud Building Homes for sponsoring a customer care and quality conference in October and I encourage the industry to set up a forum to recommend minimum standards for finish, emergency and non-emergency service. If we had this it would be a lot easier to manage customer expectations.
Think Skoda!
It’s relatively easy to delight a new homebuyer. Why? Because the average new homebuyer approaches the purchase of a new home with some trepidation. Each and everyone of us has a friend, a friend of a friend, a work colleague or a mate down the pub who had a bad experience in buying a new home – almost always due to poor after sales service. “Once I was in they didn’t want to know.” This “baggage” that exists in the ether means that customer expectations are often slightly negative. What this means is that if you just do what you are supposed to do, that is supply a new home complete, clean and ready and with all the services you promised the customer then likely as not you will exceed the customer’s expectations and you will delight them. It’s a bit like buying a Skoda. Mention Skoda and most people will laugh. Most will have a multitude of reasons why they wouldn’t buy one. Yet the truth is that Skoda has the third highest level of customer satisfaction in the UK car market – the brand beats BMW and Mercedes (who set high expectations against which they don’t always deliver). Customers buying a Skoda do approach the purchase with some trepidation despite the assurance from buying a new car from a company owned by Volkswagen. However the ownership experience is good. The dealership is OK and the car is OK – reliable, comfortable and great value for money – the result – exceeded expectations and a delighted customer. The key issue is this – you only have to exceed customer expectations by a tiny, tiny amount to begin delighting them.Source
Building Homes
Postscript
Malcolm Pitcher is a director of PCL, a consultancy specialising in marketing strategy, brand strategy, culture change, change management, marketing research and customer satisfaction monitoring. Before starting PCL, he was marketing director for Wimpey Homes and held senior posts with Volkswagen and Honda. PCL can be contacted on 01666-510813, e-mail: info@pitcherco.com
