Service is all about attitude, caring for, and keeping your customers happy. Isn't it? It's doing whatever it takes.

In today's high tech world, great service requires more than a good attitude and good intentions. Competence, accountability, reliability, consistency, meeting deadlines, communication and fixing things when they go wrong are even more important than attitude and intentions.

Consumers are much more interested in what is supposed to happen, in knowing what's going on and knowing what to expect. A happy, cooperative demeanor and a good attitude aren't enough for today's service professional.

The service process and the details surrounding the real estate transaction are mysterious, invisible and even secretive for the average consumer. The transaction moves, stalls or falls apart largely unobserved and beyond the control or influence of the principals.

This lack of understanding on the part of the consumer, in combination with an absence of well-defined responsibilities, creates low professional accountability. Being in the dark is not acceptable to today's consumer. The need to know is escalating to the need to participate. These factors, combined with the service "costing too much" translates into potential for high levels of consumer frustration and dissatisfaction.

In a world that has rapidly migrated from a manufacturing to a service based economy, "quality service" is the key to success and today, survival. And while most organizations, especially in real estate, talk about quality service, unfortunately quality service remains more talk than reality. Creating and marketing the spin is understandably easier than truly raising the bar, as evidence by the number of marketing companies launched in the past few years under the banner of "customer satisfaction" social media programs.

Quality service has become a cliché — an over-used, undefined, unmeasured and meaningless expression that is void of a process, accountability and consistency.

Traditionally, real estate has been a parochial business governed by local customs and practices where closely controlled information has placed the real estate practitioner as the gatekeeper of that information. Today's technology radically changes the aggregation, delivery and access of housing related information.

And while many REALTORS® continue to fight to guard "the gate," consumers are finding an increasing number of "other gates" open to access the information they seek.

If information is the heart of real estate service, we are in the midst of a heart attack — and one that may not be possible to fend off. A trillion-dollar real estate industry is attracting all forms of competition — new and old — with capital, intelligence, technology and resources on a global scale. Consumers will pursue and the marketplace will find ways to deliver better service and greater service value. Who will do it and how it will be done defines the future of real estate services. Service has become a serious business.

The Service Value Crisis

The service delivery process surrounding the real estate transaction does not offer the consumer a consistent, reliable, predictable service outcome and provides low-level professional accountability. This contrasts to other high fee professional services e.g. accounting, architecture, law and medicine. Real estate practitioners (over one million of them) individually determine what, when, how and if something is to be done related to service.

The real estate industry may be the last on earth where practitioners rather than consumers define and drive service. Individual practitioners may and do provide a very different service process from day to day and even from morning to afternoon. An external event affecting the emotions, psyche or physiology of the service provider may be a determining influence in what is done, how it is done or if something is done at all.

Sadly, such a service delivery system could be described as biorhythmic i.e. the biorhythms of the service professional define the service. Consumers experience a service that is process-less and outcomes that are closer to random events than managed processes with predictable results.

Customer Demand Raises the Bar

Consumers increasingly recognize this absence of a standard of practice. They are becoming adept at accessing housing information anytime, anywhere. This awareness is improving judgment in the selection of service providers, which raises the level of competition and service accountability. Service providers who simply choose to ignore this shift are increasingly at business risk.

Consumers Perception of Fees and Service

When asked about the perceived value of real estate brokerage services relative to the price paid, home buyers and home sellers almost universally offer that the price is too high. Is that so bad?

In the history of the American free market economy, serious or long-term dissatisfaction with what consumers have paid for the goods or services versus what they have received, has always been the precursor to change, destruction or invention.

Consumers Seeking Value Through Price

With any product or service, value is the relationship between quality or the qualities of that product or service and the price. Consumers will always seek to maximize value, and in an industry like ours where differentiation is unclear, that pursuit is increasingly focusing on price.

The Value/Quality/Price Formula

Value is the relationship between the quality of service and the price. One way to increase value is to decrease the price. Or increase the value by increasing the quality.

Yet quality, related to service in the real estate industry, is just a word and more often just talk. For the consumer, price becomes more measurable, more meaningful, and more certain.

Consumers, relative to real estate services, have more confidence and certainty in pursuing price as the pathway to value than the vagaries of quality. The result of this pursuit is, of course, the continuing downward pressure on fees as a percentage of sales prices.

For many practitioners, aggressive pricing (discounting) is a dominant or primary strategy for competitive advantage and market share.

Pricing as The Primary Strategy For Success

Pricing, as in a low or the lowest price, is not a sustainable competitive advantage. Anyone can then offer and will offer an even lower price for service. Indeed some may be willing to charge nothing at all.

There are many reasons low pricing or "free" is adopted as a strategy for customer acquisition or market share. Certainly such a strategy is easy and requires no special commitment, skills or resources. Price is a consideration rather than the answer. A product or service, regardless of price, must be worth possessing; even free has a cost of possession.

Free can be very expensive. If price is the answer, why haven't discount cell service providers taken over the mobile industry? Consumers have more to consider than just price when making a purchasing decision.

Maximizing Value by Providing Quality Service

Can a strategy focusing on quality rather than price have a hope of success in today's business environment? In a world where, for many, time is a more scarce resource than money, there are numerous examples to support such a premise.

But such a strategy requires that quality be more than a word and more than a promise. Service quality from professional service providers must be measurable, meaningful, substantive and definable. It must be complete, credible and open to scrutiny / independently validated. It must be real, not a marketing gimmick designed to highlight only the satisfied.

Quality professional service must offer consistency, reliability, predictability and accountability — a defined process — a managed outcome rather than a chance event.

Value Through Quality — Beyond the Standard

Customers recognize that the current system does not offer the value they expect. Brokers and owners can see that measurably better service quality will reap the benefits of customer loyalty, repeat business and referrals, improved risk management and lower operating costs. Providing quality service is serious business, demanding principles, systems, processes, resources, training, and solutions that work and really make a difference.

Can it be done?

It's already been done, and not only that, the process is alive and thriving! Throughout North America, hundreds of real estate companies, REALTOR® associations and tens of thousands of agents are having great success utilizing the Quality Service Certification (QSC) survey process, reporting tools, and other resources.

Lane Barnett, former GMAC Real Estate President/CEO and Coldwell Banker Sr. VP/Director of Marketing, credits QSC's program stating, "Brokers using the Quality Service Certified survey program have been providing objective third party agent and brokerage evaluations for years. QSC's reputation and process is impeccable". Join those already focused on the metrics of providing a quality experience for consumers and reaping the benefits.

Kevin C. Romito is a founder and the COO of Quality Service Certification, Inc., who administers the RatedAgent.com website and the REALTOR® Excellence Program (REP). For inquiries contact Kevin at [email protected] or 888-547-4772 or go to RatedAgent.com.