In medicine, post-mortem examinations often yield discoveries that help save future lives. In business, examination of customer feedback offers insights that can help keep customer relationships alive, too.

As market conditions return to normal, strong business fundamentals remain the key for sustaining business success. If you believe that consumer-centric service is one of those key business fundamentals, then employing science and the careful examination of customer service performance is essential.

Traditional analytical processes associated with real estate brokerage and home services are myopically focused on sales, productivity, expense management and profitability. It's always been about sales and productivity. They are important. But in a consumer-centric world, it's the total service process not just the sale that counts. Making the sale does not ensure a satisfactory service experience and does not ensure future sales or referrals. And the cost of acquiring new customers along with the costs and risks related to poor service demand a new orientation of high productivity and high customer satisfaction.

The recent trend in agent ratings has lead to dozens, if not hundreds, of sites and services offering "consumer feedback." The problem is, nearly every available system in real estate attempts to shortcut the effort and expense serious research requires. Open sites, "invite only" and marketing companies can offer the perception of credible, reliable, and complete information but, in reality, feedback is gathered based on convenience, not research.

Investigators and forensic analysts collect all available evidence to identify the facts. Imagine if those same analysts got to pick and choose which forensic evidence to collect; the incomplete data would only create more questions and lead to false or misleading conclusions. The same holds true for managing service in real estate. Without complete and honest feedback, we cannot assess the quality of our service as professionals.

A wonderful byproduct of employing a serious service management system is the option to share the forensic service evidence collected: a complete and validated record of customer feedback. Combining serious service management and agent ratings demonstrates a commitment to service excellence and transparency no other ratings system can match.

Service Forensics

The results of over a million real estate service autopsies conducted in North America over more than a decade reveal the following:

• Less than a third of buyers and sellers are contacted by their agent following closing
• Post sale follow-up reduces dissatisfaction by 40%
• Highly satisfied clients express agent, company and brand loyalty
• Highly dissatisfied clients are 10 times more likely to initiate threats, claims and suits
• Negotiating assistance, frequency and quality of communication and attention to details are the three areas of greatest dissatisfaction with real estate brokerage service
• High productivity and high customer satisfaction/high quality service are not highly correlated
• Real estate professionals are surprised by the findings of independent survey results (for good and bad – many who fear feedback are pleasantly surprised, while a few confident of their own exceptional service learn that their own opinion is not consistently shared by their clients.)
• Systems, standards, metrics and higher service accountability produce higher customer satisfaction and substantially reduce the number of dissatisfied customers (80% or more)

Service Excellence Creates Organizational Energy

Creating service standards, measuring results, benchmarking progress and eliminating patterns of service problems offer an exciting culture for every member of an organization. The impact of a meaningful quality service strategy, based upon measurable results, can be felt in recruiting and retention of agents, competitive differentiation, productivity, profitability and the cross selling of other products and services. Every member of an organization enjoys a feeling of pride when quality is more than a word.

Utilizing existing science, technology and specialty resources to examine individual and collective sales service data, offers cost effective insights of equal value to any financial and managerial accounting system.

Nicholas Murray Butler, former president of Columbia University and a Nobel Prize laureate puts it this way, "There are three kinds of people in this world: those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; and those who don't know what's happening."

Service is serious business. Service forensics is an emerging science that offers service organizations just what the doctor ordered, to keep your business properly focused and to keep your customer relationships healthy.

Kevin C. Romito is the COO of Quality Service Certification, Inc. For more information, visit www.RatedAgent.com, or call toll free at (888) 547-4772.