What is really exciting about the time we are living and working in, is how fast things are changing. The tools that you have available to build a client experience and to design the job roles of today are not the same as they were only 12 months ago. For most of us we haven’t fundamentally looked at our business model and how are businesses are designed since we set out. Probably the most useful question I think it’s worth asking yourself is

“If I was to start the business again today, would I set it up in the same way?”

If the answer to the question is “no” then perhaps is worth writing out how it would be different today starting with the next question which is

“Does your customer have the same expectations of your business today that they 5 years ago?”

It’s clear to me that our customers have radically changed how they want to interact with businesses and services. They have significantly less desire to spend time on what they consider to be low value (to them tasks).

A lot of us will be spending time planning for the next year once we’ve had a well earned break from another exhausting year (slightly autobiographical). When you get your mind back into planning, why not have a look at this grid and consider what tasks you think sit in each box.

Eliminate (low value to the customer, low value to the agent)

Are there things within your business that don’t add much value to your business and don’t add much value to the customer, basically we do them because we’ve always done them. These might be questions on a registration form where the answers don’t inform a next move. This might be the fact that we make a customer to three AML checks, one for the lawyer, the mortgage broker and the estate agent – is there a way you could eliminate one of them?

Simplify (Low value to the customer, high value to the agent)

A customer not showing up for a viewing is a huge waste of time. If you are accompanying it, it’s a waste of time, and you have to explain to the seller that they tidied up for nothing, if your seller is accompanying it, it’s even worse as they’ve given up their time as well. So how easy do you make it for a customer to cancel a viewing? Why not create an automatic text message to go out to the viewer the morning of the appointment to check they still can attend? Better to have a cancelled appointment than a no-show.

Encourage (High value to the customer, high value to the agent)

Agency is a people business and the biggest influencer of success, regardless of technology is going to be people. If you have poor quality people, executing poor behaviours you will fail. If you have exceptional people, delivering exceptional behaviours then you will have a successful business. Never, ever lose sight of that.

However people are expensive, especially good ones, so where you deploy them and what you get them to do is probably the most important decision you will make.

In my opinion the key elements we are looking to create in our businesses is trust and assurance. This is a very difficult move that people make, and having one person in your corner that you can trust to guide you through the process is a huge part of the decision as to which agent to choose. What are the key parts of the process where your best people should be spending their time?

Automate (High value to the customer, low value to the agent)

I’ve had a demo of two excellent bits of kit in the past month. One was Moneypenny’s AI receptionist and the other is a platform that will allow agency businesses (or CRM’s such as the one I’m building at Greenhouse OS) to build their own AI agents. To be clear, this is a version of a LLM (like ChatGPT) that either does or doesn’t have access to lots of information about you and can respond in real time to your customers over the phone.

Automation should first be deployed into areas which are lower value to the business but higher value to the customer. Think about appointment booking and lead handling. What a customer wants is a quick, simple way to book an appointment on a property of interest, what you want is for your team to be spending their time working the ancillary business opportunities (more viewings, more FS, more valuations) rather than asking people to spell their e-mail addresses.

I could spend a lot of time on this, but this is why 38% of all sales viewings are booked end to end in Greenhouse OS and I believe that this is the first place that we will deliver voice to voice AI.

Final Thought

Changing your business model is a big and frankly overwhelming challenge. There are so many choices to make, and not only do you have to be convinced it’s the right thing to do, so does your leadership team and your broader team. Because it’s intimidating most people ignore it, and try to make what we already have just a little bit better. Iterative improvement isn’t necessarily the wrong choice, but there are structural changes taking place in the world which mean that eventually your model will become obsolete. The Innovators Dilemma (if you want some end of year reading) deals with this much better than I ever could.

So why not start with looking at each one of your processes from marketing to completion and consider them against each axis. Once you’ve done that you can then start to think about CRM and business model choices like whether developing a self-employed model or might be appropriate.

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