Called the Father of the Quality Evolution, Dr. W. Edwards Deming once said "It's not enough to do your best, you must know what to do, and then do your best." We all want to do our best when serving our real estate clients, and I'm sure most of us are doing our very best. Unfortunately, in many cases, we really don't know what to do. Without a thorough knowledge of every aspect of a well planned process for service delivery, our best simply isn't good enough in many cases.
A quality assurance process in the real estate brokerage, broken into its most basic components, would include:
A basic understanding of our overall mission, and the development of a mission statement
A survey of our past and present clients to determine what they want, what we did well, and what we didn't do well
Break out our core service components in order to develop processes
Develop detailed step-by-step procedures for each component process
Thoroughly train personnel in the procedures and implement them
Continually check the results and success of your procedures and modify as needed
Base any bonus or rewards on the success of the procedures in client satisfaction
Note that most of the list items center around knowledge of what to do. As Dr. Deming said, you must know what to do, and then do your best. When all of your agents and office staff know precisely what to do, and when to do it, doing their best will result in excellent client service. Excellent client service will result in referrals, and that's always a better source of business than marketing.
