As a home builder, you pride yourself on building great houses for potential customers. But long before they move in, it pays to wow them with a superior home builder customer experience.
A customer experience (CX) priority matters in every industry. Treat your prospective and current customers right, and your revenue has the potential to skyrocket. And if you truly wow them, you might just set yourself apart from competitors looking to draw them to their own houses and construction plans.
When it comes to the homebuilding industry, the topic becomes even more important. After all, this is the biggest financial decision many consumers make in their lifetime. This guide will cover not just why home builder CX matters, but how you can leverage it to set yourself apart and wow potential customers.
Why You Need To Knock Your Home Builder CX Out of the Park
Research shows that the average customer takes between 11 and 27 months from looking at houses to making their final purchase. That makes intuitive sense. They’ll invest hundreds of thousands into the new construction they’re buying from you.
During that time, prospective homebuyers will interact with you countless times. They’ll have initial questions, which turn into more in-depth conversations about the types of homes they’re looking for. Even as those conversations become more functional after the contract is signed, their experience with your company will impact their perceptions.
The most important reason your customers buy from you is still the quality and style of home you offer. But CX can make a difference on the margins, especially as they’re still considering multiple homebuyers in their buying journey.
And here’s the thing: that process is becoming increasingly digital.
Millennials now account for 37% of all home purchases, and 89% use technology at some point in the research and consideration phases. It’s why homebuying has seen a digital revolution in recent years. With that shift in behavior comes new expectations in customer experience.
Research shows that 73% of customers across industries view their online experience with a brand as a crucial factor in making a buying decision. That number rises as the purchase amount rises. Potential homebuyers have come to expect a superior experience and will gravitate toward home builders that can offer it.
Finally, their experience also shapes how they will talk about your brand during and after their engagement.
More than three-quarters of all consumers rave about their positive experience with a brand to their peers, increasing your reputation and unearthing potential future customers. Conversely, dissatisfied customers will tell nine to 15 of their peers about their experience, reducing the organic awareness growth of your services and properties.
How To Wow Potential Homebuyers with a Superior Home Builder Customer Experience
There is no doubt that home builder CX should be a core consideration when engaging with current and future customers. These seven best practices can help you get there.
1. Streamline the Home Builder Customer Experience Throughout the Buyer’s Journey
CX matters from when your customers engage with you for the first time until weeks after the construction is finished. That’s a long process, making streamlining it an important component for home builders and their audiences.
Start by mapping out the customer journey, including all touchpoints your prospective buyers have with you. Identify the touchpoints that are essential to keeping things moving and those that might be unnecessary or even frustrating.
For example, you might not want to get too detailed on pricing nuances in the early research stage. But shortly before the purchase, those nuances become increasingly crucial. The more intuitive the information you share with customers depending on their needs at any given time, the better.
2. Track Core CX Metrics for Ongoing Improvement
As with any communications effort, it pays to avoid operating on hunches or theoretical best practices. Instead, track your efforts to improve home builder CX through some of these common customer experience metrics:
- Customer Lifetime Value
- First Contact Resolution
- Sentiment Score or Analysis
- Customer Effort Score (CES)
- Employee Satisfaction
You can also measure satisfaction with individual interactions, like a customer service inquiry or chatbot conversation. That way, you’ll know which of your efforts help to improve your CX, and which of them might detract from it.
3. Personalize Your Messaging
Make no mistake: personalization matters as homebuying processes increasingly become digital. In fact, it may matter more now than it ever has.
According to Salesforce, 52% of millennials assume that brand content will be personalized. When it is not, they will become exponentially more likely to be frustrated or dissatisfied. It’s why 63% of marketers across industries have seen tangible conversion improvements due to personalized content.
To get there, you need a CRM that allows you to store lead and customer information to build more relevant messaging. But you have to be careful not to lose the human touch, using tools like conversational AI to create an intimate experience that connects digital and personal encounters between your audience and your brand.
4. Prioritize Transparency and Honesty
In any communication with potential homeowners, relying on marketing speak is tempting. After all, you’re proud of your business and construction and want to sell how much you believe in them to your audience.
At the same time, if you want to create a positive home builder CX, it’s crucial to avoid stepping over the line. You must stay honest and transparent about what you offer, from clearly communicating prices early in the process to sharing elements like construction timelines that help your audience envision the journey ahead.
Increasing the transparency in your communication has a central effect on your customer experience. It’s key to gaining the trust, especially of young homeowners, though all demographics benefit from it. With a decision as large and significant as a new home, you have to ensure that your audience sees you as a trusted partner rather than a business just trying to get their money.
5. Embrace Interactive Digital Tools
A digital homebuying journey calls for more than just linear communications like email or text-filled web pages. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the need for engaging virtual tools instead of physical open houses and home visits, and those trends didn’t stop as life has slowly begun to return to normal.
Instead, it’s time to embrace these tools as a core part of the journey for your future customers. Tools you can leverage include:
- Virtual tours of both current model homes and renderings that show models of new construction you haven’t built yet.
- Pricing calculators that allow prospective homeowners to envision not just their mortgage, but also how additions to their home may change their finances.
- Interactive timelines that help homeowners understand the best time for financing, locking in a model to build, buying the property, etc.
- And more.
Which of these tools matters most depends on your exact audience and needs. Previous interactions help you gain those initial insights, while tracking the above-mentioned CX metrics allows you to understand how each of them performs and whether it may need more attention.
6. Keep Your Communications Consistent
As much as we’d like to tell you that your prospective customers will immediately lock in on you as the only homebuilding option, especially in the early research stages they’re probably looking at some of your competitors as well. It sounds like a minor thing, but consistent communication may actually become the key to differentiating yourself.
Engaging with your audience means speaking in one consistent brand voice. It also means ensuring that content across all touchpoints, from your virtual tour to your website and your emails, says the same things in the same way. Even your visuals can become more effective and memorable when you keep them consistent with customer experiences and expectations.
7. Leverage Conversational AI and Texting
Finally, don’t underestimate the impact that conversational AI, especially in the form of chatbots, can make. In fact, the right digital assistant can help your audience throughout their homebuying journey, from marketing to sales and customer service after the close.
Digital assistants and chatbots can communicate via your website and text, which has quickly become most audiences’ preferred means of business communication. Conversational AI also improves response times, creating a more engaging and caring experience in the process.
Most importantly, chatbots create efficiencies without compromising user experience. With the right database and learning algorithm behind it, the conversations remain natural and intuitive, each of them adding to the software’s repertoire to make the next conversation even more natural.
Ready To Set Yourself Apart Through Home Builder Customer Experience?
In an age where digital customer experience has become vital, the homebuilding industry is at a crossroads. Brands that can offer a superior home builder customer experience have the potential to stand apart from their competition, attracting and closing more details thanks to an intuitive, helpful, trustworthy process.
Of course, getting there isn’t automatic. Following the above best practices can help amp up your CX, but you’ll still need the right tools in place–like the chatbot AtlasRTX provides home builders. Ready to start boosting your customer experience? Request a demo today.
