The real estate industry is swamped with apps, portals, widgets and gadgets, and outsourcing is growing at a fast pace. In this industry, we are forever looking for that unique point-of-difference. You can’t get that from an app that every other agent is using or a portal that’s available on every real estate ‘shelf’.

Uniqueness is the agent themselves and the truly stand-out experience the customer has through their service. Uniqueness is eroded in the frantic pursuit of devices to do a job for you, causing the customer to perceive your service as less valuable.

Don’t look for ‘things’ to do the important jobs for you. Put your uniqueness out there and give customers the help they need to disseminate their choices and make their decisions.

Agents must be valuable, worthy, advantageous and profitable for the customer. That’s how you earn your place in their real estate experience. If you distance yourself from the customer, you not only lose your point-of-difference, or uniqueness, you may be discarded for a ‘tool’ the customer finds themselves. Their real estate experience may be poor; they may find it satisfactory.

Customer satisfaction just isn’t good enough in 2016. What’s satisfaction… if not just a ‘pass’ grade? Even by definition it means ‘acceptable though not outstanding or perfect’. That’s not good enough to deserve a place in the customer’s experience.

Developing a customer relationship is a process of stages. It begins with the potential seller or buyer as the ‘prospect’. From that point, it is up to you to progress them through the stages of prospect, client, repeat client and referee to the highest level, the advocate who gives the unsolicited testimonials that constantly fuel your business.

And don’t fail the buyer through offering a poor experience or you’ll never be their agent-of-choice when they become the seller. For a customer to become your advocate, you can’t merely satisfy. They must find you sensational not so-so, masterful not middling, awesome not okay… The Holy Grail is a one hundred per cent prospect-to-advocate strike rate! The advocates deliver the greatest volume of our future business, through resulting referrals and repeat business.

The onus is on the agent to demonstrate merit through every stage of the developing customer relationship, and to buyers, sellers, investors, landlords and tenants alike. The customer will only see your worth through an overall remarkable and unique real estate experience.

The proliferation of all the new ‘toys’ is not only confusing to the industry but to the industry’s clients! However, if a customer thinks an app or portal, for example, can satisfy them for half the price of your service, where do you think they will turn? I’m not inferring that we outright discard the apps, the portals and all the rest.

However, I’d like to see the focus on the person at the very core of our business – the customer. The sheer volume of gizmos is blurring our focus but the few diamonds amongst them will shine because they benefit the customer. New apps, portals and other innovations and devices will keep coming but we must be fixed on the customer, making them the nucleus of our business, and delivering the exceptional.

The trend we most need in 2016 is agents proving they can deliver an exceptional real estate experience and therefore deserve to exist.