During Super Bowl LV, Rocket Mortgage released a series of humorous commercials with a memorable brand promise: certain is better.
While some real estate agents and homebuyers may question the validity of Rocket’s promise, it speaks to the effort by the nation’s largest mortgage company trying to improve predictability and deliver a consistent service level.
Brands are built on certainty, which drives higher profitability
We expect McDonald’s hamburgers to taste the same pretty much anywhere in the world. Much less so for real estate, where the customer experience is unpredictable. The that’s a big problem for brokers, for several reasons:
- It’s hard for to build a consumer brand when the “product” varies significantly;
- Which also means that customer loyalty is lower than other services industries;
- And also leaves brokers with increased risk from errors & omissions
The agent’s independent contractor status is a double-edged sword for brokers
The most obvious reason for the consistency dilemma is that in most brokerages, agents are independent contractors. Brokers pay a small fortune to recruit agents and provide the infrastructure to support them. But because the agents are not employees, brokers have virtually no control over what they do. Agents can be great or terrible at sales and service, and the broker can’t actually make them do anything — including follow specific processes, adopt best practices, or cross-sell transaction services.
Milestones helps brokerages instill best practices, and that’s great for business
As a customer experience platform, Milestones helps the broker gain some control of the overall process. Agents bring consumers into Milestones hubs, whereby the entire home purchase or sale process is pre-configured based on customer segment (e.g., first-time homebuyer, all-cash buyer) and location. From this, the broker gets standardized service delivery and best practices, which in turn help boost sales, identify agent coaching opportunities, reduce risk, and so on. Agents get to guide clients on autopilot, which saves time by reducing repetitive tasks. And consumers get more consistent experience, regardless of which agent they work with.
Finally, training new agents is a lot easier when the process and workflow of buying and selling a home is directly built-in Milestones hubs. Tasks can be auto-assigned to agents and hidden from clients. Ditto for agent-facing tools, such as CMAs or offer management. While the real estate experience will always reflect the unique personalities and circumstances of each transaction, Milestones can help your brokerage make everyone involved feel a bit more certain.
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