Consumer Expectations Drive Everything (or, 'How I got my son to the airport')

I recently had to get my college-aged son to the Orlando airport for a 7AM flight. He had no car and was staying with some friends in a rental house about 45 minutes away, so we needed to make sure someone was able to pick him up by 5:45AM on a Sunday so he would get to his flight on time.

If you've read my past writing, you know I am a big fan of Uber, their business model, and how so many of the concepts about that business should be applied to real estate (i.e. easy to get a car, great app, transparency). Since I practice what I preach and pretty much Uber everywhere, I suggested he call them to get to the airport.

I've never had an issue getting a car that early in the morning. But I live in Miami, where at that hour, a lot of people are just getting home from a night out and there are plenty of drivers available. My son was staying 45 minutes outside of Orlando in a very residential/quasi-rural area, so we weren't 100% sure that there would be any drivers and didn't want to take a chance, so we decided to reserve him a cab.

Not having called a cab company in years, I started with Yelp, skipped the sponsored ads and settled on a company that had pretty good reviews and was about halfway between the airport where my son was staying. That was the easy part...

• I was running errands when all this was going on, so was having to do all this on my iPhone. Their site was not responsive and I almost went elsewhere. I did not want to have to go back to Yelp, so I suffered through it.
• There was no estimate for what the fare would be, so I had to jump off their site and go to a cab fare estimator. I was shocked when I saw the comparison. Uber was in the $30-35 range, while a regular cab was in the $100-115 range!

• Now, being a natural salesperson, I thought I could call the cab company and negotiate a better deal. I called and got a guy named Chester on the phone. I asked him how much it would cost to get from Davenport to the Orlando airport. He said he would have to get back to me. WHAT? He told me he would call me back in a few minutes. When he came back, he said it would be $92 plus tip. I tried to negotiate and he said that if I wanted a shuttle service, I should call Super Shuttle. We didn't have much of a choice, so I told him that I needed to make the reservation.
• Chester, who, by the way, ended up being pretty nice, started taking down my information. Name, pick-up address, drop-off address, credit card, expiration date, etc. Very painful and took 15 minutes or so. Then I asked for a confirmation. "We can't do email confirmations," he tells me. WHAT? He said he could send me a text confirmation. After a few minutes, I got a text confirming that I paid $92 plus tip on my credit card—nothing about picking my son up the next day!
• After two or three more rounds of phone calls trying to get everything agreed to and confirmed (another 15 or 20 minutes), Chester was sensing I was getting frustrated and finally said he would pick up my son personally.

Let's compare this to what I would have experienced had I gone with Uber. Other than the issue about who would be available at 5:45AM in a totally suburban area, which would not be the case most of the time, here is what would have happened:

• I would have gone to my app and requested an Uber that would either know where I was, or I would type in my location, and I would have typed in "Orlando Airport" and it would have also estimated the fare for me if I asked. Time to accomplish this? Less than a minute.
• I would have paid $30-35, not $92 plus tip; and,
• I would not have worried about my son having money on him because everything was already done when I signed up for Uber a couple of years ago.

Now let's take my experience and apply it to real estate.

• Do you think consumers are ever frustrated by how much they have to pay in commissions in relation to the level of service they perceive to be getting?
• Do you think that consumers have a higher expectation of the service they should be receiving and that it should be easy, pleasing and, most important, not overly time consuming?
• Do you think there are companies out there today, ones we know and ones we don't know, that realize all this and are trying to become the "Uber" of real estate and put the "cab companies" of real estate out of business?

I know certain people think Uber is taking advantage of the situation. I am not agreeing or disagreeing with that position. All I am saying is that consumers have higher expectations today and there is someone always out there trying to figure it out in new and exciting ways to address consumer expectations.

If you are not positioned to be the firm that questions everything, places consumer experience above all, and is willing to embrace a combination of technology and offline customer service to be the market leader, someone else is going to get ahead of you and make you look like that cab company I had to deal with.

To view the original article, visit the PCMS Consulting blog.