In the last 2 years, I have had quite a lot of experience of dealing with Estate Agents in Dublin. The selling of my mum’s house, the search for a new rental for myself and my partner and the buying of a new apartment for my mum. To give you an idea of how I felt treated, I will use an image to portray what the experience has been like
What I find hard to understand is how it appears that the property industry appears to have very few regulations or controls to support and protect the customers. My dealings with the number of different estate agents over these 24 months will put the majority of the industry to shame. Please forgive me, for those of you who take you jobs seriously and act in a professional and courteous manner, although this point really needs to be discussed. Do they actually understand that their businesses rely on how they deal with their customers? Or is this new property boom, we are going through got them so dizzy, that they just don’t care? It baffles me. Frustrates me. And at the same time amuses me, because they are creating their own demise.
One of the first rules in business, “Know EXACTLY what the fundamental needs of your customers are…“, this may seem pretty obvious. So, how can you do this? At Plugmedia, we follow 4 simple steps to understanding our client’s customers needs.
- Who is the Audience?
- What is the message?
- Where are they?
- “When”/”How Often” do we communicate with them?
Step 1 requires the most effort and is the most important. It is all about Empathy. Without it, you are wasting your time. Sending out communications, across different channels, at various times is like throwing caution to the wind. The more effort and more focused your results of Step 1 are, the better your outcomes and incomes will be. It also means you care enough to find out. The payback is worth the effort.
When selling my mums house last year, due to incompetence from the first estate agent, I asked one of the directors of 2nd estate agent we were trialling, “What’s your strategy to sell the house?”. There was a long pause. “What do you mean strategy?” I said, “I mean, what plan do you have in place, to sell this particular house?” Another pause, “I’m not sure I know what you mean. We have it up on Daft and on our own website. Is that what you’re talking about?” I was a little dismayed. We’re paying a fee of 2% of €500,000+ and this was the response. A couple of weeks later we took it off the estate agents and decided to sell the house privately. With my team, we developed the Who, What, Why, Where formula and ran targeted Ads on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. We had an open viewing. One of the people who had seen the Facebook advert ended up buying the house 2 months later.
What do you do to understand your customers? How well do you think you know them? How can you build a clearer picture of them? What will be the impact of knowing them better be to your business? What is the long-term effect of knowing their pains and motivations? The bottom-line. How important are they to you? To me, recently I realised, they are everything to us. And, I have made mistakes over the years, that may not have shown that statement to be true. Although going forward. We are making it our mantra. Our customers are everything to us.
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At the newly launched Lyons Club, I focus on 1 thing. People. We have historically worked in Digital, Community, Education, a variety of amazing projects. Although very recently, we decided to go back to the thing we love the most. People.
I design better ways to reach people, by understanding who they are. I do this using a variety of tools such as Personas / Journey Maps / Communication Strategies & Plans / Empathy Maps / Process Chains / Market Segmentation / Positioning / Targeting / Pyramid of Influence / Observations / Ethnography / & Innovative Strategies.
Want to hear more from us. Drop me a message samuel@lyons.club
