Real Estate Service Design of the future

Hello from Austin, TX!

I’m here for a conference - not a real estate conference or an AI conference, but for a change, a conference focused on my marketing and publishing business, which I’m looking forward to, especially once I get out of my little jetlag haze!

To speed up that process, Mark and I have spent a day wandering around Austin just exploring different parts of town - and we’ve been using ChatGPT a lot, starting with:

What should we do in Austin for the day?

ChatGPT gave us loads of great suggestions, but last night at the bar we struck up a conversation with one of the servers who was a local - and decided to get a second opinion on the robot’s recommendations.

She took my phone and scrolled through the answers and said, " Good suggestion, good suggestion. Wait. Terry’s BBQ is better than Franklins, and while you’re down that way, you should…”

Then she helpfully found a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down her prescription for a pretty jam-packed day, which included some robot suggestions and a few of her own.

Yes, we gave her an above-average tip for the info, but I feel there was a lesson in that exchange: it may not be too different from a real estate conversation you’ll have with your customers in the future.

Your customers will have already asked the robot about market stats, recent sales and property values. They’ll have done their REA/Domain/CoreLogic research. They will have analysed your contracts. As a result, they will have pretty decent information—it will be up to you to be the expert over and above all of that. There will be no hiding behind a lack of product or hyperlocal knowledge; that will be the price of entry.

Similarly, another situation rammed that home to me, and that was in the lounge in Auckland on our way to Austin.

The flight path we chose to take to Austin was Brisbane-Auckland-Houston-Austin. In the lead-up to the trip, we had been studying every airline, every plane, every seat map, every points hack, and every comment to work out the best seats for the best money on the NZ-US leg. (If you didn’t know, dozens of Facebook Groups and subReddits are dedicated to this very topic!)

So, long story short, we did our research and handed over some points + cash to choose our seat when we booked.

When we got to NZ, it turned out that one of the seats we’d booked was out of action, and we’d been bumped backwards. Total bummer!

When we were called to the lounge to have our boarding passes reissued, the conversation was strange, to say the least.

No, it wasn’t anyone in the lounge's fault, which was all they could say. But when trying to get to the bottom of what had happened and what our options were, it was clear that Mark knew way more about the plane we were flying on and its seating configuration than the airline employees did.

Again, if you’re a business owner that’s a mismatch in expectations in both Sales and PM that you probably want to avoid in the future. You just can’t have customers knowing more about your plane than your employees… this is just the world we live in now.

As we finally boarded United for the last leg of the trip—a short fling int the air (literally) from Houston to Austin—I looked out the window, and it reminded me of a service design lesson from Brock Fisher. The lesson included the hilarious “United Breaks Guitars”, - created 14 years ago and still a masterpiece with only 23 million views…(so it shows what a pissed-off customer can achieve with a camera and a YouTube account)…

Anyway, I thought I might round up this post with a ChatGPT prompt on service design, which works pretty well - but will require a bit of effort on your end with the result:

Imagine you are a customer support manager tasked with implementing omnichannel customer support for a growing [Business Description] business. Write a detailed plan outlining the strategies, technologies, and processes you would employ to seamlessly integrate support across various channels such as email, live chat, social media, phone support, and self-service portals. Consider how you would ensure consistency, efficiency, and personalised experiences for customers regardless of the channel they choose to engage with. Also, consider how to keep my team's product knowledge ahead of the customers. 
Business Description: [insert your business and niche description] 

When you insert your [Business Description], make sure you include some detail—e.g., ‘real estate sales, luxury property in [suburb]’ or ‘flat rate property management service for mum and dad investors’… because your level of service needs to also match your pricing and marketing.

Finally, for extra points (if there were any!), try this prompt twice with a couple of different types of target markets (the examples above even if you aren’t feeling creative!) and see how the recommendations change…

Let me know how you go!

Happy Hunting 🚀