PropTech Insights from “The Effortless Experience”
Let me preface this article by saying this book was gifted to me by a wonderful man whom I have great respect and admiration for - one of the smartest guys in PropTech, Shayan Hamidi of Rechat.
If you haven’t read, I highly recommend picking it up.
To understand the insights below, I’ll need to give you a very brief primer on the themes from “The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty”. It’s an extensive study, so I’m glossing over a lot, including a ton of supporting examples and evidence presented by the authors.
So let’s get to it.
Effortless Experience Themes
The main theme for The Effortless Experience is that investing in delighting customers is not an effective strategy.
The average service interaction is much more likely to make a customer disloyal than loyal. Even when customers are delighted by a service experience they are only marginally more loyal than those whose needs were simply met.
So what fuels disloyalty?
Customer effort. And let's be honest this probably tracks for you as well as it did for me. Let’s use the example of credit card payments failing for an agent's CRM subscription.
To resolve, they spend 20 minutes on the CRM site trying to figure it out before calling a rep who provides excellent service and solves in minutes. The agent might rate the experience with the CS rep excellent, but how would you rate your overall experience, including before you made that call?
If you’re anything like me, the answer is not good. This experience has not made me more loyal, it’s made me more disloyal. The best service interaction is the one that doesn’t need to happen at all.
The key to building loyalty is reducing customer effort across all channels.
There is a very strong correlation between reducing the amount of work required for a customer to resolve their issue, and increased customer loyalty. So how can we action these concepts in proptech?
Insight 1: Measure Effort
Whether in brokerage or tech, start measuring customer effort in post support, or general surveys.
Your first step in reducing effort is to find the areas of your business where customers (or agents) are spending the most effort.
Once you start getting data, look first for easy wins, where people are expending high levels of effort to resolve simple issues. Understand their journey and make it easier for them to get where they need to go.
CS interactions are going to happen, but when they do it should be for more complex tier 2 issues, where the effort required for a customer to resolve is high.
Insight 2: Agent Onboarding
One of the most critical windows for building confidence in a brokerage's ability to execute is onboarding.
A bad experience here can create instant disloyalty and hamper any attempts to get agents using company technology and process. Having a system to measure this will give you feedback to see where the agents are spending the most effort.
Practically, high effort steps might look like getting agent contacts into the company sponsored CRM. Or finding relevant collateral and designs to promote their new affiliation. For the first, you could have them email their contacts to your experienced and tech savvy admin team for upload. For the second - update your onboarding emails to include links to relevant promo materials right after they join.
These two steps will result in reduced effort, a smoother onboarding experience and increased loyalty.
Insight 3: The Right Channel
Every time a client switches support channels their effort increases. They may not find what they need on the support page, so then have to explain themselves on chat, then again to a live agent.
What should have been low effort for you and the customer ends up taking much more effort to resolve.
It is worth the effort to aggressively simplify common self service issue resolution and identify the types of issues early.
Rank effort to resolve these issues and direct clients to the right channels early. If you know 80% of customers with issues like this wind up on the phone, don’t waste their time by providing an option to self-serve or chat. They (and you) will expend more effort then required for an overall experience much more likely to decrease loyalty than increase it.
Summary
High customer effort to resolve issues will erode loyalty, in this post I shared three actionable insights from “the Effortless Experience” for proptech companies and brokerages.
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. So start measuring customer/agent effort in post interaction surveys so you can find and address simple issues requiring high effort to resolve.
Streamline agent onboarding by identifying the high effort steps and tailoring your process to introduce the right resources at the right time.
Avoid channel switching and get your customer to the right channel for their issues as fast as possible by identifying the issue type early and directing to the appropriate channel.
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or thoughts I’d love to hear them. Comment below or connect with me on LinkedIn.