What is the Quality Service Certification Designation?

Larry Romito sits down with Mark Eibner to talk about what the QSC, or Quality Service Certification designation, is in this video from Broker IPTV.

Interviewer: Hello, we are here today with Larry Romito and Larry is the founder and CEO of the QSC designation, Quality Service Certification, and Larry, welcome to the show.

Larry Romito: Mark, it's nice to be here, thanks.

Interviewer: So maybe you could explain little further the acronym QSC, what it stands for and the variables within that designation?

Larry Romito: The Company is Quality Service Certification and the professional designation is Quality Service Certified and what's really behind it is an effort to bring more discipline and processes to the service delivery process. There are lots of resources and lots of metrics and lots of systems that are related to customer acquisition prospecting, sales and marketing communications, the promise of service, when it comes to the delivery on the promise, now that I have this customer, what do I do, there is a void, not only is service different from company to company in the marketplace, it's different from office to office in the same company. It's different from agent to agent in the same office and frequently it's different from morning to afternoon with the same agent.

Interviewer: Oh, isn't that the truth? So tell me, what's the age of the designation, when did this, when was this founded?

Larry Romito: We founded it officially 11 years ago though it's been a passion or subject of mine for over 20 years in the industry and the genesis of it is simple: consumers do not feel great about the service that we provide because of the inconsistency, the lack of accountability, the reliability and the lack of responsiveness, and as real estate professionals, we are unfortunately obsessively focused on sales and production, and so what QSE is all about is to help, to provide real estate professionals with the suite of resources that helps them that helps them manage their service quality and their customer satisfaction with the same kind of effort and discipline they currently manage their sales and production, while providing consumers with better information about an area that's important to them in selecting their real estate professional--that is, how did the real estate professional perform not just in terms of sales and production, but in terms of their service quality that's being rendered and the customer satisfaction.

Interviewer: Yeah, absolutely. I think we see a lot, of course, the big thing, I have sold 2500 homes and 260 sales to date and we see all that, but I know there is a lot of people that are disenfranchised with the experience they had with that producer, whether they are doing 200 deals a year or two. So maybe you could tell us about some of the underlying, underlined principles of the QSC designation as far as you were talking about processes, written guarantees, training, etcetera.

Larry Romito: There are five things that we do. One, we bring consumer-centric education to the table for the real estate professional and I know that's a kind of a fancy word, but our industry is very much steeped in a provider-centric mentality, meaning the business has been more about us than hesitant about the consumer in terms of what we do and yet the very definition of a top producer in the industry is he or she that sells the most, that's how we define a top producer.

Interviewer: Yeah, right, you bet.

Larry Romito: When we talk about what consumers want in terms of an excellent service provider, their definition is very different, there is a disconnect and that disconnect of how we define excellence and how consumers define excellence, that gap costs us. It costs us in terms of the value proposition that people see in what we do, it costs us in terms of relationships. So, one of the fundamental things that we do is we help real estate agents and owners better understand what does a consumer-centric service process mean and where and how and when does, what we do fall short. The second thing that we do is we help real estate professionals organize their behavior to keep the promise of service in a more disciplined way, including the use of a written service guarantee. More often than not, we have been involved in more than two million customer satisfaction service.

Interviewer: Wow!

Larry Romito: What we see overwhelmingly is the perception of bad service on the part of the consumer isn't so matter, so much a matter of an agent not knowing what to do, but more often an agent, for whatever reason, not electing to do the things that they know they should do.

Interviewer: Delivery.

Larry Romito: And so the written guarantee does two things. One, it helps create and manage expectations. So the consumer knows exactly what to expect, they are not expecting a poodle skirt and saddle shoes, something we didn't intend to deliver. So its the creation and management of expectations and the second thing that it does, is it forces me then because it's in writing to do the things that I really know that I should do and so it creates a higher level of accountability.

Interviewer: Interesting.

Larry Romito: The third thing that we do then, is we provide a customer service, quality service and customer satisfaction assessment in virtual real time, or at the end of every transaction, every buyer and seller receives a customer satisfaction survey that not only assesses the overall satisfaction, but what was the level and range of satisfaction with 14 or 15 key points of service, so that if the agent has a satisfied client, but not a very satisfied client, they can now look at all the different areas where they have an opportunity to improve. We independently validate that information, so it's, the things that agents are doing well get reinforced, those things that they are not doing so well and would not otherwise find out about, when they you ask the client how did I do, sometimes the client just says "Fine," whether they did well or not.

Interviewer: Sure, yeah right.

Larry Romito: They might want the agent to go away. So it's a feedback mechanism to reinforce the good things and to provide them with some valuable feedback on where they can improve. The last thing that we do, then, is make that information available, it can be published on the Internet used by the agent and personal widgets or company widgets.

Interviewer: Right.

Larry Romito: To publish their independently validated customer satisfaction rating, and that's important because maybe one of the hottest topics in real estate today is the whole subject of realtor ratings and its come about because those of us who time is a scarce resource, we don't have time to investigate every product, every opportunity every time, so increasingly as consumers, we are looking for shortcuts.

Interviewer: Absolutely.

Larry Romito: How can I take advantage of other people's experiences? How can I take advantage of independent assessment of quality whether you are choosing a restaurant through Zagat's or a hotel through Trip Advisor or a caller through JD power? If I can leverage and make better decisions through more information by going to an independent source, consumers want that. Well, one of the principles of marketing is if we understand what consumers want and we deliver what they want, that's a competitive advantage.

Interviewer: Great. Well, Larry, lots of great information. I appreciate you being on the show today.

Larry Romito: Mark, thanks for having me.

Interviewer: You bet.

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Posted on April 26, 2010 14:18:08 by Blog Author