effortless: requiring no physical or mental exertion
At risk of sounding like I'm ranting, but sometimes customer service is effortless, and not in a good way, with an emphasis on putting the LESS in effortless.
I use USPS Informed Delivery, so every morning I get an email with pictures of the day's expected delivery. Recently I was expecting a signature required delivery and there it was in the morning email. Delivery comes that afternoon I get the "sorry we missed you while you were out" slip in the mailbox. Except I was never out, not even for a minute. The driveway alarm never went off, the doorbell never rang, it was an effortless delivery. A day later I went to the post office and picked up the letter from the desk. A day or two later in our mailbox another "sorry we missed you" notice. Pretty obvious that the mail carrier had prefilled all the missed you notices for the required dates and was just dropping them in our mailbox rather than come up our driveway.
FEDEX? Can't say they're at the top of my list for delivery companies either. The picture with the 5 boxes is courtesy of our recent Chewy delivery. I won't argue that delivering five 40 lb bags of kitty litter is enjoyable work, but it's within the job description. There wasn't any snow on the ground, just dark. If Chewy didn't send a "delivered email", the boxes would have stayed overnight until the next time I went to leave the house and either been rain soaked by the coming storm, or giving some porch/driveway pirate a herniated back when they went to swipe the boxes.
Am I going to raise hell with the post office or FEDEX? Nope. At this point I just want to get through the last few months of living here with as little delivery pain as possible. I'd rather not have my mail start to go "missing", and I've made more than one complaint to FEDEX local office and nothing ever changes.
On the other hand, not all customer service is effortless. Today was our monthly Amazon delivery, and it's heavy. 4 more 40 lb bags of kitty litter. Cases of dog and cat food. Miscellaneous other stuff. Bezos probably loves us, the drivers may not :) Saturday we had 6-7" of the white stuff fall, and our driveway is a couple of hundred feet long. My ticker doesn't think it's a good idea to hand shovel it, and my Scrooge side doesn't like the cost of hiring a snow plow unless it's past the point where I can't readily drive either of our cars out. I do have a snow blower, but when the temps are flirting with zero and I can still drive out, it can stay in the shed. So all that sets up today's delivery from Amazon. I don't expect them to come up the driveway, and I'm not going to be totally surprised if I get an undeliverable message. But instead, I get a text from the Amazon driver. Rather than a hit and run, the driver lets me know of arrival at the street. I tell them it's okay to drop the boxes at the gate and I'll come fetch them. A couple of texts back and forth, a have a good evening, and I'm in my car heading down the driveway to fill up the back with all the boxes. The driver took out the LESS and put in the EFFORT. Net result, I'm happy with the service under the conditions.
1 of 3 "gets it".
Now none of this may seem like it has anything to do with real estate, but isn't a large part of what determines our client's happiness is how we make the effort so things are as EFFORTLESS for them as possible?
Clear explanations of the home buying and selling processes.
Setting expectations of what we do (and don't do).
Creating web pages that have the pertinent information, not just a few listings with no context.
Using the communication method that most suits the client.
Doing what we said we'd do, and if we can't, communicating that too.
To be honest, none of it requires much effort on our part. One could say it's almost effortless, once you're used to doing things that way :)
TLDR version: don't be a knucklehead with your customer service. and unhappy customers aren't always going to tell you they're unhappy.
Until next Tuesday, just Ask An Ambassador if you need help,
Bill & Liz aka BLiz
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