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This post was updated Sept. 30, 2024.
Lately our team has been thinking about how to elevate our client experience even more. How do we create a luxury real estate customer service experience on par with that of a Michelin four-star restaurant or a five-star hotel? We have been reading books on hospitality and debating what we can incorporate into our client experience to deliver luxury customer service.
Where do you even start? There were several books on the topic, and of course, we can look around for examples of remarkable hospitality that inspire us. How did that maitre d’ know our names at that four-star Michelin restaurant? (Google — your photo is on there. Trust me.)
We watched the staff at The Breakers to see exactly what balance they strike: They are warm and connect with guests without too many personal details. How do they treat my husband like it’s his birthday when he dumped his eggs benedict all over a ridiculously gorgeous rug? (True story.) By giving him the benefit of the doubt and being incredibly positive.
As we explore hospitality concepts and what sets remarkable service apart, we keep returning to a simple idea: Incredible hospitality comes down to warmth and connection with our clients, allowing us to anticipate their needs and feelings before they know they have them. Empathy.
The system
When we first developed our buyer and seller processes several years ago, we started with the premise that we wanted to anticipate any question a client might have before they even asked it. We put ourselves in their shoes and used their questions to understand their feelings better.
Our goal was to remove any anxiety our clients may have while going through a process that is entirely foreign to them and inherently high stakes. As we were building this process, we used client questions as a prompt to improve our communication touch points, covering commonly asked questions long before the client would think to ask them.
This shifted our communication cadence with our clients from a reactive state to a constantly proactive approach, where we led them through the process. Empathy helped us tailor our communication to the needs of each client. Understanding how the needs of a first-time homebuyer require daily touch points during an inspection period, and an executive prefers the executive summary, bullet point approach.
For our buyers, this approach meant always telling them what comes next so they never have to guess, and for our sellers, this meant updating them on all the work that is happening on their behalf in the background.
When we tell our sellers what we are doing for them, we aren’t being self-serving and asking for compliments; we are letting them know every stone is being turned over on their behalf so they never have to wonder or worry if enough is being done. “Please don’t worry about getting a new doormat; we will take care of that.”
It is kind to give them the details of your efforts to avoid any unnecessary anxiety on their part.
Perspectives
It is easy to see how empathy with our clients’ perspectives and their experience could create a luxury customer experience, but can empathy with our colleagues and the other party to the transaction improve the experience our clients have? Absolutely.
Empathy in negotiations helps us be better negotiators. Think of this as negotiation jiu-jitsu. This may feel counterintuitive to someone with an aggressive negotiation style, but empathy can allow us to step into the shoes of the party we are negotiating with and collaboratively give on the terms that are less important to our client and help our clients prioritize the terms that are more important to them.
After all, the goal of a negotiation is not to feel like you “won” the negotiation but to come to a solution that works for you to move forward.
You represent a seller, and the buyer found mold during the inspection period? Try to understand their surprise and the need for more information. Allow the buyers a few more days to do their research and focus on the terms that are more important to the seller, such as the sales price, rather than focusing on winning on minor terms like timelines. You may win on the timeline and lose the buyer, which isn’t in the seller’s best interest.
If the other agent is tricky, so be it. Keep it to yourself, don’t infect the transaction with your feelings, and certainly don’t react to it and spend your client’s goodwill. You never know what another agent is going through; they could have had a fight with their spouse or had a child sent home from school sick that day. If you can give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt, you will avoid expending your client’s goodwill, and you may just make a friend for life.
Good will
Our team considers goodwill in a transaction to be a form of currency, which is not ours to spend. Goodwill is the currency of the principals, and it’s only theirs to spend on the contract terms that are important to them.
While helping you create a five-star luxury customer service experience, empathy also allows you to create a business climate where your clients are most likely to succeed in meeting their most important transaction goals.
You can extend this luxury service to your colleagues by having the grace to give them the benefit of the doubt, which will elevate your clients’ experience and give them better negotiation outcomes in the short term and bolstering your reputation for being a collaborative colleague your peers look forward to working with in the long term.
Jen Berbas is the team lead of the Berbas Group in Austin, Texas. Connect with her on Instagram and Linkedin.
