Home buyers will remember little of what you say and do, but they will absolutely remember how you made them feel. This is the reality of doing business in today’s “experience economy,” where customer satisfaction is now the price of entry and no longer a differentiator.

Companies that understand this — such as Walt Disney and Harley Davidson — have long focused on creating loyal customers who advocate for their businesses. Now, leading home builders are following their lead — no longer simply delivering a product and service but rather creating a unique and differentiated customer experience.

To begin aligning your processes with today’s experience economy, follow these guidelines:

Identify your key customers: This means more than just compiling market research data to summarize demographics, income levels, or current home ownership status. It means determining what your customers truly value and developing a keen awareness of their personal preferences and priorities. Furthermore, it means meticulously understanding what drives customer loyalty. Only then can you begin to develop strategies to deliver customer experiences that are consistent, intentional, differentiated, and valuable.

Knowing your customers also means understanding that their needs are constantly changing. Therefore, you should continually measure and monitor what matters to your customers.

Develop a value proposition: A value proposition should clarify who you are, what you do, and what it is about your people, product, and service that distinguishes you from the competition and provides value to your customers. Your value proposition should be thought of as a 30-second elevator pitch. For example, it might sound something like this: “We are home crafters, not just builders. We combine simplified, yet carefully selected, options and flexible designs to create unique homes for each customer. Our easy selection process ensures that home buyers choose only fully tested, high-performing options that enable them to create a signature home without the high cost traditionally associated with custom construction.”

After developing a value proposition based on your customers’ needs and priorities, make sure it is aligned with your brand position and is easy for customers to understand and to buy in to. Note, however, that it is not profitable to try to be “everything to everybody,” as attracting the wrong home buyers is a recipe for disloyalty and increased costs.

Create your brand promise: Once you understand your customers’ values and create a targeted value proposition, you can craft your “brand promise.” According to authors Shaun Smith and Joe Wheeler in their book, Managing the Customer Experience, a brand promise is your “articulation of what a customer can expect from their experience with your organization.”

Creating your brand promise is like deciding what you want to be famous for. For example, a home builder could promise “the best care to make you feel at home.” This brand promise implies that the home builder exacts care — in product, process, and service — while also evoking comfort, security, and other values associated with feeling at home.

This is the time when a home builder must look beyond the lens of building homes to the bigger picture of delivering dreams to their customers. Only at that level of insight is it possible to capture the full essence of what a brand promise must accomplish to succeed in the “experience economy.”

Construct happy processes: Mapping your process is no small task; however, it’s necessary in order to identify the hundreds of touch points you have with home buyers. By developing a comprehensive process map, you can then work to understand customer expectations at each touch point and create opportunities to enhance the value that home buyers experience.

By maintaining a customer-centric viewpoint during this exercise, you’ll readily identify any arduous processes that a customer must currently endure. When re-engineering these touch points, consider what customers are hearing, seeing, feeling, and doing. It also helps to view home buyers as “guests” in your process, thus providing an insightful perspective on how they should be treated at each touch point.

Foster a culture of caring: People set the culture in any organization, and in this “experience economy” organizational culture determines future success. In fact, a major cross-industry study conducted by The Forum Corporation established that employee satisfaction is a predictor of customer satisfaction.

Meanwhile, a Gallup survey of 6,000 consumers found that a company’s “people” are the most important determinant of customer loyalty to brands — far more important than product, price, and promotions. Combine this with the findings from a study by Satmetrix Systems that determined that a “5 percent increase in customer loyalty increases lifetime profits of a customer by up to 95 percent,” and it's clear how important loyal employees are to your company’s success.

Loyalty from customers and employees starts with leadership, and value-based leaders are the driving force behind today’s successful organizations. “Passion” has replaced “policy” as more organizations understand how imperative it is to engage, train, empower, and reward employees to deliver their brand promise to customers.

As a home builder, you cannot avoid being in the customer experience business today. Houses are still being built from concrete and wood, but leading brands are being built from exceptional customer experiences.

Tim Bailey is General Manager of AVID Canada, a leading provider of customer loyalty research and consulting to the home building industry. Through the AVID system, Tim’s team improves referrals, reduces warranty costs, and strengthens the brand of its industry-leading clients. He can be reached at tim.bailey@avidglobal.ca.