Dealing with unhappy real estate clients

Even if you are the best Realtor® on the planet, you will eventually come across an unhappy customer.

Regardless if the situation is out of your control, you still want to do everything you can to try and make your client happy. Realty Today offers these five suggestions for turning that unhappy client into a returning customer.

1. Initiate. In most normal cases, when the customer or client is not satisfied about a certain service or transaction, he would be calling or wanting to meet you. If you will be talking to him, always remember to face the situation for whatever it is. It is the time to initiate a conversation that would likely acknowledge the concern of the customer and his feelings. Try to show some sympathy on the given situation and yet stay grounded on possible reasonable solutions about the concern. Don’t let you customer hear out any feeling of doubt or uncertainty. Having done that, chances are great that he would be lowering his voice and if not, he would be aware and reasonable on his approach.
2. Seek. Now that you have acknowledged the concern of the customer and in a way shown sympathy, you may begin to ask some questions relating to the main concern. It might be in the form of an open-ended question or a closed-ended one. For whatever might be applicable, always remember to listen carefully, so that you may reflect back the information in order to check that you have similar understandings on what your customer is trying to say. In doing such thing, you are deepening your understanding of your client’s point of view.
3. Establish. After reflecting back on the issue, it is time to establish some possible options. You need to gain agreement with your client, which is the purpose of this step. You need to present solutions that would directly address the client’s issue, and such solution would hopefully be mutually beneficial.
4. Resolve. Now that those solutions were presented and hopefully agreed upon, it would be nice to explain the next step. In such a manner, you are actually showing to your client or customer how the issue would be resolved. For example, you may explain the time frame involved in the said resolution or the types of services or changes that would be made. Most clients would need to hear specific ways on how a certain concern would be resolved.
5. Value. After all has been said and done, you might want to add some value on your service. But, most of us, when we hear the word value, we associate it with a monetary compensation or reward. That might be correct. But there are some ways on how to add value to the service without cashing out. By just simply summarizing the discussion you had with your client and giving him tips on how to avoid such issues to resurface, is already a form of adding value. It does not need to be glamorous. You may also add value by just simply asking any more of his or her concerns regarding the said issue, and by doing so you are actually saving his time to report other probable concerns that he might have forgotten. This will save both of your precious time.

How do you deal with unhappy clients?