Successful home builders make it their mission to build and sell great homes that homebuyers will love. These builders take pride in delivering a well-built home that lives up to homebuyer expectations. And by investing in a home from a particular builder, homebuyers are expressing their trust in the builder and their expectation of quality and durability. The customer care team takes on the responsibility of living up to that promise. It's their job to ensure that homebuyers' post-sale questions and issues are quickly addressed and resolved, ensuring ongoing homeowner satisfaction. After all, the customer care team is typically the last group to interact with the homebuyer, leaving an enduring impression that can often make the difference in how a customer feels about their entire homebuying experience. The customer care process is very important in creating and reinforcing a company brand, and a customer relationship management (CRM) system is key to helping builders ensure consistency and quality on that level. I'll focus on how builders can use CRM to support best practices in customer-care operations. When you stop and think about it, customer care puts the "relationship" in customer relationship management. The marketing team first opens up contact with potential homebuyers, and the sales team solidifies this into a home sale, but it is the customer care team that turns a sale into an ongoing association. And if your company is failing to focus on developing relationships with your customers, you're missing a huge opportunity to add to future sales. Unfortunately, many home builders don't see customer care this way. Instead, they reluctantly see it as a necessary drain on funds and resources, a cost item on the balance sheet—and this attitude ultimately becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Customer care does not have to be a cost center in your organization; if you institute some important best practices, it can be a profit center.

Streamline Processes to Save Costs

The first step to more profitable customer care is reducing its cost. A good approach to take here—since you certainly don't want to compromise on quality—is to look at any avenue for improving the efficiency of your processes. Builders can take advantage of automation features in CRM systems to streamline and speed up customer care processes, making it possible to do more with less. Some CRM systems allow homebuyers to submit their own service incidents through web portals,reducing the need for call center staff. Rule-based routing mechanisms allow service requests to be automatically routed to the right service agent or subcontractor, accelerating issue resolution. Work orders can be automatically generated and dispatched. Similarly, when service issues require more urgent intervention, their severity ratings can be automatically escalated. Furthermore, CRM systems can generate automatic audit trails for service incidents, reducing litigation risks. And since most builders already use their CRM systems to collect in-depth, centralized customer information, time is saved on hunting down details about homes, contractors, and homeowners—it's all instantly accessible within the customer profile. This also makes responding to customer inquiries about service status quick and easy. Taking advantage of these kinds of features reduces the need for intermediaries and paperwork and increases efficiency, saving builders time and money. Beyond that, it helps builders offer faster, more satisfying customer care, makinghomeowners happy.

Cut Off Problems at the Source

Resolving problems is one thing; getting to the bottom of them is another thing altogether. Greater cost savings can be achieved by preventing problems in the first place, which makes investigating the issues reported by customers and examining what lessons can be learned from them another important best practice for builders. Builders can use CRM systems to identify and understand problems, so that they can be not just resolved, but also prevented from reoccurring. Using CRM tools to track and analyze root causes can open the door to more proactive customer care. Issues are not always what they first appear. For example, a warped floor may not be a floor defect, but rather the result of a leaking window. The window leak may be attributable more to a problem roofline than the window itself. Getting to the bottom of service issues can help builders refine their designs, head off problems, select their subcontractors and suppliers more judiciously, and assign responsibility—and cost—to the party ultimately responsible for the problem. Integrating your CRM system with your back-office enterprise resource planning (ERP) system extends its value, linking an inventory of options selected in any given home to the vendor information required to follow up on service issues. Recovery of warranty costs through back-charges to vendors can then be tracked and administered through the CRM system. This ensures a vendor can efficiently recover costs without extensive and time-consuming hunting for underlying background information. Conducting thorough home inspections—but streamlining the process as much as possible—is another key pillar of smarter customer care. Builders can use some CRM systems to create simple check-lists to help gauge a home's pass or fail status. Making your CRM system available on mobile devices allows this information to be entered and assessed on the spot and recorded in the system. Supervisors can track overall or individual home inspection statistics and status through their personalized web dashboard.

Uncover Hidden Profit Potential

Once processes have been streamlined and costs minimized, builders can examine the other side of the customer-care coin: uncovering profit and value. With a full profile of each home and its owners (including past owners for homes that change hands while still under warranty) housed in a CRM system, builders can get a more comprehensive view of profitability and gain insight into sources of revenue. Surveying customers at regular intervals using CRM tools can monitor not just customer-satisfaction levels, but also new needs and opportunities, helping builders find good targets for up-selling and cross-selling. For example, builders might discover customers who are looking for a vacation home, or considering moving up to a larger house. They might also find new home products of interest to their homeowners, then partner with vendors to create co-marketing campaigns. CRM systems can also be used to run referral programs that encourage your happy homeowners—made even happier by the exceptional customer care you've delivered—to tell their friends about their great experience with your company. Mining the rich customer data in your CRM system can be a source of ongoing insight, decision support, and opportunity. Better knowledge of your customer base leads to a more profound understanding of customer value and potential. Few builders would deny that customer care is an important and necessary part of their operations. Where builders differ, however, is in their recognition of the strategic value of customer care to their overall corporate health. Smart investments in customer care, far from being just additional costs, are investments in the future of the organization, enabling builders to deliver better, more consistent customer experiences at a lower cost. Since satisfied customers are the best and most convincing evangelists for your homes, this could well be the greatest investment a builder can make.