Typically, the festive season means office closures, skeleton staff and slowing down on site, but that doesn’t mean your customer experience needs to suffer. Let’s explore how you can plan ahead to support your clients to receive continued care and communication throughout December, January and beyond.
Prepare and pre-empt
To understand the expectations of clients better, you can more accurately forecast what you’ll need to put in place by examining both the volume and content of queries received during this period in the previous years.
Keeping track of these communications will help you understand:
- Approximately how many queries you expect to receive during this period
- What clients are asking about specifically
- Where you could improve the client experience
All these metrics will show you where you might be able to pre-empt needs and provide proactive information so clients can self-serve what they need to know.
Here are some typical themes we see over the period – with some hands-off, automated solutions from Constructive.
- Questioning the next steps and when their build will re-commence – See Customer Portal to create an integrated milestone communication strategy
- General, frequently asked questions – Set up a FAQ page in Customer Portal
- Defects and warranty issues — See Constructive Maintenance
- Wanting to progress the selections process — See Constructive Online Selections and 3D Selections
Our in-house experts have some further advice on actions you should take as soon as possible to set you up for success over the holiday season.
Set expectations early
“The majority of home builders officially shut down for a period over the festive season, and while most office staff have a staggered return over the course of January, trades and suppliers often take extended leave,” explains Emma Lord, Client Success Manager.
“It’s really important to let clients know not only about your office closure, but also about the slow start to the industry as a whole during January. Many clients do not understand trades are typically sub-contractors and sole traders and their holiday period can mean work on site can come to a grinding halt.”
“Set those expectations nice and early so clients aren’t expecting work to start again the day the office opens its doors in the new year.”
“It’s imperative to communicate to clients that during the holidays, slow progress due to potential scheduling conflicts, annual leave and supply disruptions is the norm”, says Gemma Elliott, Client Success Administrator.
Client Success Manager, Steph Schumer agrees. “Setting realistic expectations with clients about whether there will be any progress on their home and for how long up front, really is best practice.”
“It’s also good to be upfront about your office closure to indicate that even the administration process may take a little break. The Customer Portal dashboard welcome message space is a great location to advise clients early in the piece of closure expectations of your office and site workers.”
Provide 24/7 online access
Make sure your clients are registered to access their build progress and selections process with Customer Portal, Online Selections and 3D Selections. This way, clients can use the holiday period to review where they’re at in their building journey, prepare for the next step or payment and work on their selections from wherever they may be.
“If you can, book some selections meetings in advance for the new year and double-check clients have access to Online Selections so they can start to get inspired, organised and make some decisions ahead of time over the break,” recommends Emma.
Aim to provide an online defect and warranty logging platform, like Constructive Maintenance, so clients can log issues themselves and alert you to any urgent problems.
“For all maintenance questions, it’s good to be upfront about the point of contact for any post-construction issues over the break,” says Steph.
“If key staff across your business are taking extended leave, re-allocate jobs so clients can see who their point of contact is in the interim,” adds Emma.
Get clients excited for the new year
“If possible,” says Emma, “book some work into the new year in advance – site work, or admin work for clients still in preconstruction. Turn on your forecasted start dates in Constructive so clients can relax on holidays feeling assured there’s a plan of what, and when, things will pick back up.”
Delve into data
During this slower period, take advantage of the quiet time to examine your data to see where you can improve in the new year.
Use Constructive Intelligence Analytics to review and adjust:
- Your most, and least, popular client selections
- Never selected products
- Where your upgrade revenue is coming from
- Jobs that contain discontinued selections
- Gaps in your communication strategy
- Volume of photos uploaded by supervisor
- Online engagement KPIs
- How long it takes to finalise selections
- How clients engage over the entire job life cycle
- Survey results
Safeguard sites
“It’s also good practice to ensure all homes under construction are safeguarded against being vandalised over the break,” advises Steph.
“This may mean supervisors are locking properties, water meters and the like, to limit the amount of potential vandalism or damage while their property has no one on site.”
Festive season customer service can be disappointing for clients with office and site closures. Providing proactive support for a continuous and smooth customer experience is easy with the right builder client portal software.
