How the Houwzer Team Built a Culture of Coaching and Self-Improvement

Our favorite kinds of blogs are the ones where we get to celebrate the awesome work of our own customers. Not only is it fun to brag about their achievements, but hopefully an exciting read for you, as you begin to learn the incredible transformations that are possible for your business. 

Houwzer is a modern, socially responsible real estate and mortgage brokerage for savvy homeowners. They’re rebuilding the traditional brokerage model around the customer, utilizing technologies and investing heavily into their frontline employees. 

They’re on a mission to become a customer experience led organization. To make that goal a reality, they needed to embed customer feedback into their day-to-day operations, coach their agents using that feedback, and ultimately deliver a consistently awesome customer experience. 

Houwzer set themselves up for success with a strong service promise: 

“We exist to make your dream of homeownership come true and celebrate with you when it does. We provide you with the most exceptional service at the fairest price.”

Need to brush up on service promises? We’ve got you. 

Houwzer knew what their service promise was, but prior to using AskNicely they didn’t have the tools to effectively deliver on it every single time. Houwzer needed to build a culture where employees truly felt empowered and supported to deliver on what made their experience brand unique. 

Enter real-time feedback and coaching with AskNicely.

Since using AskNicely Houwzer have been able to create an immediate behavior change mechanism for their employees, holding them accountable to deliver on the service promise and wider company values. Weehoo! 

What does that look like?

• Management has a daily review of feedback and team performance. Like AskNicely they believe NPS is a coaching metric, and present agent and location ranking company-wide 2 times per month.
  
  
• Every week, the frontline has 1:1s with their manager to review NPS responses. Coaching conversations are now started from a meaningful place.
  
  
• Each location sales manager follows up with an immediate phone call to all detractors.
  
  
• The Houwzer team receives real-time customer feedback that validates the relevance and importance of their service promise. 
  

Putting emphasis on a customer experience culture has led to some pretty magic results. Using AskNicely, Houwzer was able to create a referral pipeline with a revenue impact of $225,000 in the first 60 days. Yes, that’s just two months. 

You can save that stat for the next time someone tries to tell you frontline coaching doesn’t impact the bottom line. 

So, what has truly made the difference? 

Houwzer are successfully capturing what their customers truly value, and are using it to guide business decisions. For example, they’ve learnt "over-communication" is a key factor in how positively customers view their service. So what did they do? They made “over-communicating” part of their service promise and a benchmark to measure frontline success. When frontline members make an effort to overcommuncate, they are recognized and rewarded within the AskNicely platform. 

They've even started to proactively educate their clients about industry conditions, which has led to an increase in NPS for their seller agents even when homes don't sell. 

Furthermore, Houwzer has increased their Yelp reviews from 3.4 to 4.5 stars – something they hadn't been able to achieve before using AskNicely. This jump in review rating and NPS is proof that when you support your frontline to deliver on what matters to your customers, repeat business and referrals are yours for the taking. 

David Speers, VP of Client Experience at Houwzer has been blown away by the impacts of frontline coaching —

“Agents are obsessed with the AskNicely app and their personal NPS score, it's a point of pride. Looking at AskNicely together has become our number one coaching moment, since the feedback is directly from the client.” 

To become a customer centric service business, you must first become an employee centric business. When you support the frontline and coach for daily behavioral changes that matter most to your customers, you not only create an awesome culture for your employees to thrive, but a booming, loyal customer base. 

Want to win on customer experience and see results like Houwzer? Our Guide to Winning on Customer Experience will teach how you modernize your customer experience program and connect your frontline to your bottom line. 

Download your free guide today.