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Great service is crucial to the C.O.R.E. system, and to an agent’s long-term business development. First, great service is key to actually generating income, since you only make money if your service helps your clients fulfill their primary need of buying or selling a home: without strong transactional skills and real estate knowledge, your listings won’t sell, your buyers won’t buy, your deals won’t close.

Second, without great service, you’ll always be living hand-to-mouth waiting for the next lead that your broker hands to you or that you generate through hardcore prospecting, since you won’t be getting repeat or referral business. The only way you’ll get new business is through people who don’t know any better at a time when more and more people do know better. Great transactional service brings you more clients, through repeat business, referrals, testimonials, reputation, and online word-of-mouth. And great non-transactional service is crucial to Service-Oriented Lead Development, since your services to your sphere of support, expired listings, and other potential clients is crucial to winning them over to working with you on their eventual transactions.

Third, if you give consistently great service, you’re going to find yourself more confident in everything you do. You’ll be eager to generate new clients, because you’ll be confident that you actually do offer them something better than the average agent. And you’ll be fearless in meeting with clients in your consultations, because you know you’ll be able to show them the testimonials you’ve gotten from past clients and be able to point them to online resources where they can see just how happy your clients have been. Nothing gives you more confidence than knowing deep down inside that you’re really good at your job.

So it’s clear that great service is not just the cornerstone of the C.O.R.E. system, but also the foundation of a successful real estate career. Sadly, though, we don’t see a lot of great service in the real estate industry. I have never met an agent who said they give bad service, or they’re not good at their job, but when I ask groups of agents about whether they themselves would work with over 50% of the agents in the industry, no one raises their hands. Even the agents in the industry would not work with most of the agents in the industry. That’s appalling.

Sadly, most agents want to give great service – no one likes to think that they’re not good at their job. But they don’t know how. Most educational systems focus on sales, not service, so the industry does not provide real training for it. Even the training on service (like all those indecipherable NAR designations) tends to emphasize behavior that adheres to an extreme level of ethical compliance, but not actual client service.

If you want to give great service, then you need to have a plan, a blueprint of what constitutes great service that you can follow every single time you work with a client. The key to great service is automatic consistency, the ability to identify the best practices for a given situation, and then deliver those best practices every single time.

The problem most agents have in service is that they wing it, or play it by ear. They want to give great service, but they do it on the fly, making it up as they go along. They are very unlikely to actually create a rigorous plan on exactly what they’ll do to take care of their clients. Most have a general philosophy, say, of returning calls promptly, or taking good pictures of listings, but few agents actually create and follow a standardize blueprint that sets out the best practices for every function they have to perform when taking care of a client’s needs.

The C.O.R.E. system teaches you a method of delivering service that incorporates the best practice of the industry, but which provides a simple and almost automatic way for you to adhere to those best practices in a consistent and efficient way. We start with the basic three-part C.O.R.E. methodology of (1) identifying the client’s need, (2) determine how to service that need, and (3) execute and build the relationship. If you focus on the client first, you get oriented to think about what their needs are. That leads to you thinking hard about how to service that need, and then all you need to do is use the tools and resources you have to actually perform that service.

The C.O.R.E. service methodology has three principles:

First, follow a “Project Plan” for great service. We identify the best practices in the industry, and provide you with a “Project Plan” for providing the best possible service to your clients. The blueprint is in the form of a checklist, which gives you an easy way to keep track of the tasks you need to do, and the tasks you’ve already completed. The animating spirit of the blueprint is to “keep your windows clean” (based on a story involving the book The Disney Way), meaning that you should create a situation in which your clients never experience a situation where they have to call you with a problem, because problems never crop up.

Second, look for opportunities to “Bring the WOW!” The “WOW!” is the experience we all have when someone does something wonderful for us in a service relationship. It’s not just great service, but it’s the “blown-away” moment when you’re taken aback by a considerate gesture or unanticipated courtesy. You won’t always have the opportunity to bring a “WOW!” to every client you work with, but you’ll be much more likely to wow them if your focus is intensely on their needs.

Third, develop your knowledge about the business. You cannot give great service if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s not just knowing how to send a fax or read an MLS sheet, but having a depth of expertise in the complex aspects of the real estate business. It’s knowing how to use new technology. It’s knowing the tax implications of home ownership. It’s knowing how to get the taxes right on your new listing. It’s knowing the school district lines. The foundation of great service is actually knowing your business.

When we talk about Service as part of the C.O.R.E. system, though, remember that we’re not just talking about service to transactional clients. Everyone needs a real estate agent, so you want to provide great service not just to people buying or selling, but also to everyone you come into contact who might have real estate needs.

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