Toby Boyce is a big wheel in the NAR Young Professional Network. He blogs regularly on their "YPN Lounge" site. For some reason, like I probably signed up for it and then forgot about it, they send me updates whenever someone posts an interesting insight or piece of advice. This is awfully nice of them to do since I am encroaching on the 60th anniversary of my first spanking. Well scrubbed, college educated and brimming with enthusiasm these young practitioners are adept at things that I am not.
Todays' piece by Toby showed that some of the younger folks in our industry 'get it'. His perfectly arranged applecart of appointments, working his numbers, getting his alphabet soup of designations on his professionally designed website was overturned by real life. His father-in-law was admitted to the emergency room in a hospital hundreds of miles away. For four days he was away from the office consoling his wife and her mother, talking to medical folks about things far removed from lot size, gross living area and the age of a roof.
What got Toby was the fact that so many of the staff, including housekeeping, security, receptionists, and so on, understood his plight more than he did. Aside from the obvious, they knew that he probably under packed for the trip, didn't know where to eat, and didn't know the ins and outs of the hospital environment and its anxieties. In short, he was a fish out of water who learned the importance of a question he will never learn in a classroom or seminar.
"How may I help you?" The questioners weren't looking to make a sale, only to take some of the edge off of a stressful situation. Some guy mopping the floor gave him a tip as to where they could find a hot meal at 11 o'clock at night after a tense day of worry. Another, perhaps delivering linens to a room, gave them advice on where to get personal items, like toiletries or socks. In short, Toby came away with an 'aha' moment from this class. "How may I help you?" As baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra once said "Sometimes you can see a lot just by observing."
Toby realized that we sometimes overlook, or even complain about something we understand, and forget that this transaction is the biggest thing in the world to our clients. They don't know what the heck is going on, or why the bank is giving the buyer such a hard time about the loan. There are some things that they just don't know and it scares the crap out of them. This was a great piece on service and, if I knew how to do it, would re post it.
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