Customer Service-The Lifeblood of Quarem

What do you think of when it comes to good, no great customer service?  I hear many things from our employees, friends, and neighbors.  All interesting feedback.  But what truly separates good and great customer service?

First, there are many ways to approach customer service. To offer great customer service experience, your company needs a solid customer experience strategy in place and a defined process for your team to follow.

1. Evaluate and define your company’s customer service experience in a manner that makes your customers feel that you do care about them.
2. How many touch points does your company provide for customer service interaction?
   • Phone
   • Email
   • Web Form
   • Live Chat
   • Social Media
3. Are your employees positive in their approach and trained in a manner that displays human empathy and quickly identifies the root issue?
4. Aim to always exceed expectations.  Think Platinum versus Gold.
5. Provide your customers with a quarterly survey to measure expectations versus reality.
6. Having great customer service can drive additional sales for your business at no additional cost.

When I joined Quarem we were a much smaller company.  We quickly realized that we needed to do things a bit differently than our competitors to create a discernable positive experience.  We tested many new customer service approaches and identified several that we continue to utilize today with our clients.   Here are a few of our best practices.

1. I know this sounds cliché, but hire the employees with a positive attitude, not their industry knowledge.  A positive attitude and approach always wins out over the product expert!
2. We empower our employees to make the “Right decision”.
3. We pivoted our business from being a provider of commercial real estate software to a service provider of commercial real estate software.  What is the difference?  After training users on how to use the software, we were consistently answering questions about how I enter this data, how do I build reports, etc.  After some serious soul searching, we asked ourselves, how can we improve the client’s overall satisfaction?  In layman’s terms let’s use the analogy of mowing your yard.  You go out and buy a lawnmower, gas can, and grass bags.  You are ready to go mow your yard, but you don’t know the first thing about mowing a yard.  What if you decided to hire an expert in lawn care? Remove the initial capital investment, the risk of injury, and the headache of maintenance.  With this being said, we decided to pivot and be the service provider and provide all the expertise to the end user.  We are in the application each and every day.  We talk to our customers, many weekly, asking the right questions, understanding their business and their real estate portfolio, and building the reports that help the client’s business. 
4. We make doing business with Quarem simple.  A decision many years ago was discovered regarding the length of contracts.  We as well as the clients were very accustomed to the 1-2-3-year contracts.  Based on building a very strong business, we again asked what can we do differently regarding contracts.  A decision was made to migrate our business model to a month-to-month contract.  This was extremely well received by the clients.   Our thought through today is we want the customer to understand that we always have their best interest at heart, from the initial data gathering, and implementation to ongoing support.  This touches every employee of Quarem from our software developers to account managers and executives.  We always strive to exceed our customer expectations.
5. Communications.  We encourage our customers to call us.  Pick up the phone and call.  We have found we can answer and solve a customer inquiry far quicker than typing an email and sending it to the account manager.  This creates goodwill for the customer and provides the account manager with yet another touch point.  This approach has led to increased customer satisfaction and retention.

I am not stating that our approach is the platinum answer to improving customer satisfaction, but it works great for us and provides Quarem ways to continue to retain and grow our relationships with our customers.  Great companies are always reviewing their approach to customer engagement and customer service.  We will always look for ways to improve our approach and service to our customers.  Finally, make your customers your # 1 priority.

Guy G. Gray
Chief Operating Officer
Quarem
713.408.4113
ggray@quarem.com