Delivering a Superb Customer Experience

BuilderRadio interviews Jane Meagher, President, Success Strategies.

So you build a great home and you pride yourself on the quality you put into every house.  Good for you.  You should.  In fact, quality should be the baseline – the ante – for every builder in today’s market.

But quality can’t be your marketing message.

Instead, says Jane Meagher, “what we really need to focus on is being more aligned with consumer demand, acting more like a retailer and thinking more like a consumer.  We tend to lose site sometimes of what the buyer really wants and how to deliver it.”

Meagher would like to see more builders think more about delivering a compelling customer experience through the sales process.  Her company, Success Strategies, helps builders do just that through Design Studios,  “environments conducive to presenting products in a visually compelling way and delivering the product.”

Today, it’s all about giving customers the ability to personalize their homes - providing options and services that customers want, being able to present those options in a clear and compelling way, and being able to install them in an efficient and cost-effective way.

“I do not believe that we should we should offer everything under the sun.  It’s not really about giving the buyer complete control; it’s about the builder taking a strategic approach to offering a reasonable amount of choice, but the right choices in a way the increases buyer comprehension and allow them to make quicker and more confident decisions.

Consumers want their homes to reflect who they are and to solve their lifestyle needs.  Today, it’s about creating a product that is appropriate for the individual consumer.  Think about how we can personalize our cell phone or we buy our orange mango pineapple juice.  Every consumer goods product and service that you interact with on a daily basis allows for a level of personalization; we’re retailers of a product as well.”

So, the question now is, where is the line between enough options and too many choices?

“The best answer I can give you,” says Meagher, “is that if a product isn’t selling, it doesn’t belong in the store.  What we need to do is to understand what products are selling, what the trends are, what our buyer’s real needs are, and to be able to educate our consumers about the choices that we offer.  And, we need to be able handle their objections in a positive way if they ask for something we don’t offer.  We don’t have an obligation to offer everything to everyone, but we have an opportunity to offer strong selling products and to present them in a way that the customer will by highly satisfied with their personalization experience with our company.”

Setting Up Your Design Studio.
Jane Meagher offers these tips for creating an effective showroom:

1. Get a handle on what you’re selling and what you want to sell.
Look for high-demand products that you can sell and install profitably.  Meet with vendors and begin compiling your options list.

2.  Determine your main needs and objectives for your design center.
Prioritize your goals.  Is your first objective to maximize revenue, to craft a superb customer experience, or to create an environment that you can leverage as a sales and marketing tool?  Define your priorities to get a clear picture of what you want to accomplish.

3.  Think like a retailer.
Use retail strategies to create a compelling, interactive environment that makes it comfortable for buyers to make choices without becoming overwhelmed.  A good studio should educate consumers and make it enjoyable experience.  “I advise all of my clients to go spend several hours at a mall or at high-end retail specialty stores and to look at how consumers shop,” says Meagher.  “We study extensively consumer behavior and what buyers are looking for from their shopping experience.”

4.  Promote your Design Center.
Letting your prospective buyers know that you have a professional design studio at their disposal builds trust and confidence that they will get a home that is personalized to their tastes. Use your studio as a powerful marketing and sales tool by promoting it heavily on your website, in your literature, and as part of the model or community tour.

5.  Control Access to the Studio.
“What you don’t want to happen,” says Meagher, “is for buyers to be in the store without being accompanied by a sales person.”  The design professional might be able to answer product questions, but the salesperson should be on hand to help guide the buyers to options that will fit their needs and budgets.   Open houses and special events might prove exceptions to that rule and are good times to open the design studio to the public.

Should I invest in a Design Studio?
“As builders struggle to make a profit on the home itself, options sales are excellent opportunities to maximize per-home revenue,” explains Meagher.  “You can’t just put products out there and hope they sell, though; you have to prove the product promise.  But if you do that, a strong profit opportunity remains.

Secondly, we all want to create raving fans – evangelical customers that will rave about their experience with us.  Unfortunately, research often points to the personalization experience as not being a highly rated part of the home buying journey.  That presents a great opportunity to get that level of customer satisfaction through this design studio journey back up to where it should be.

Another critical outcome is the opportunity to leverage the design studio environment and experience as a critical part of their up front sales and marketing effort – communicating to the buyer that they are going to get what they want, that they’ll be able to afford what they want, they’re going to get all the assistance that they need to make confident and informed decisions and create the home of their dreams.

Does the prospect of opening your own design studio sound daunting?  It shouldn’t.  While the trend is to place design studios in higher-traffic areas, Meagher says you don’t need a lot of space to get started.  With proper research, careful planning and your objectives clearly in mind, opening your own design center can be profitable, differentiate you from other builders, and help you win more business.

Listen to the audio interview at: http://builderradio.com/blog/?p=789