MAKING CHANGES IN YOUR BUSINESS

Change is a fundamental aspect of any business. Knowing what to change and when to change it is something experience helps us to identify. But not all businesses find it easy to abandon the ’We’ve always done it this way’ maxim and more often these are the ones who fail to leverage the commercial benefits the right kind of change can deliver!

We’re no different. In some regards we have never stopped changing. Our service remains rooted by the same principles we identified 20 years ago – professionalism, attention to detail, value for money and a focus on the customers’ needs. But how we achieve this is a never-ending debate – constantly looking to improve the way we do what we do, to raise standards, to better our service and ultimately to increase commercial viability. All achieved through change.

Some of the change may be minor; a meeting to decide whether the strapline on our website should be one word (Aftercare) or two (After Care). Other decisions are of a far greater magnitude; agreeing to move our entire CRM system from ‘on-prem’ to ‘Cloud’ and all the very far reaching ramifications that go along with designing the entirety of your IT structure with a partner like Microsoft and their powerful, world beating Dynamics 365 platform.

So, when we suggest to a developer that they consider outsourcing their customer care, we know only too well how an owner/operator, management team or boards will react.

Looking back at our investment in technology, did it cost us money? Yes, it absolutely did. Is anyone paying us that money back? No, not in the short-term. But I see the investment paying dividends in two crucial ways.

Firstly, it gives us the ability to deliver a highly stable service to our customer base, because it’s supported by one of the most capable technology partners on the planet. Furthermore, it enables us to grow and expand inline with fast moving consumer expectations – a requirement that has taken centre stage in recent times, such is the online world we now all live in.

So, when our customer takes the formidable step of embracing change by outsourcing their customer care to After Build, we understand the mental process they are going through. By contrast, they have sent a potent message to their customer … that as a business they take after care so seriously that they have outsourced it to the experts.

And as we’ve spoken about in past articles, there’s a value to After Build’s service beyond that of just ‘money saved’. That said, let’s not overlook the fact that there is a great deal of money to be saved (see the case studies on our website). The ROI of outsourcing your customer care is made in several ways. Direct overhead savings. Cost achieved through higher levels of customer satisfaction. If you want to achieve that 5-star HBF rating, we can help you. If you want to gear up for the New Homes Ombudsman, we can help you. If you want word of your quality product to penetrate the community of house buyers, we can help you.

After Build will improve your after care because we’re able to bring more experience, latest thinking and industry benchmarking to the table. But perhaps more than this, we’re highly flexible. No two businesses have the same needs and that’s a lesson we leant right at the very beginning.

• Often one service becomes two, then three and so forth. We might ‘in-fill’ a site or region to cover your internal resource issues (sickness, absenteeism, recruitment).

• Enhanced emergency cover or site services to bolster your bid for 5-star status.

• Managing a backlog of snags or finding new resource to address defect resolution where an original contractor has failed to support you.

• Guidance on warranty compliance.

• Improving your build agreement defect liability wording.

• Preparing for the Ombudsman.

• Devising a compensation scheme.

• Pulling together a complaints policy.

The right sort of change, made for the right reasons is always good in any business and we wanted to remind the development community that if you have a need for after care resource because you have a problem, call us. We’ll be only too happy to help.