How to turn a real estate technology problem into a marketing opportunity
On Friday, LivePerson, a tool I use to monitor several of my business websites, had a major problem. They went down… the service was completely out.
If you’ve been dealing with technology in your real estate business, having a piece of technology fail to work as advertised is probably no surprise. Websites go down, email stops working, computers freeze, gadgets and gizmos lock up and reboot at the worst times.
When you’re dealing with technology, it just happens…
But excellent businesses are always looking for the hidden opportunity in everything… even adversity.
And there is a lesson for all of us that own businesses and have relationships with our clients.
Here is just one of the 3 emails I received during the outage:
Dear LivePerson clients:As you may know, your LivePerson service was interrupted this morning. At this point, most critical services are up and running as normal.
Our expectation at LivePerson is the same as yours: system downtime must be as close to zero as humanly possible. Our track record over the past 5 years has been consistent, as we have delivered uptime performance levels well over 99.9%. As with any computer based system however, 100% uptime is simply not yet possible.
Today’s outage was caused by a local power failure in Virginia, which is the site of our primary hosting facility. Backup generator power at this location was automatically triggered, but failed to remain at full consistent power for some time, which prevented servers from being fully restored. Since the time estimate for full power restoration was short, we chose not to fail over to our offsite backup facility.
Our failure was to assume the time estimates for power restoration were accurate; they were not. We should have failed over to our backup facility more quickly, regardless of the information we were receiving.
I want to assure you that we take this event very seriously. We have invested a significant amount of time and money, as have you, in the value the LivePerson service provides to you, our customers. We expect our investment to prevent this type of occurrence.
We will provide more details on this occurrence as we have them, and have already begun taking remediation steps to support our ongoing improvement process.
Rest assured that, despite today’s issue, LivePerson will continue to provide the very highest level of performance available today in the hosted software service marketplace, and will continue to enable you to build your business in partnership with us.
Best regards,
Robert LoCascio
Chief Executive Officer
So how exactly did LivePerson turn their troubles into an opportunity to deepen their relationship with clients?
1. They admit their mistake.
2. They empathize with how their clients are feeling.
3. They keep a steady supply of information coming – making sure their customers know exactly what is going on.
4. They do it all quickly.
What is the effect of LivePerson’s actions?
They’ve deepened the relationship with me (their client). I think more of them today than I did before the outage.
Sounds weird and backwards, but that’s my feeling.
So what does this have to do with your real estate business?
The next time your emailed document doesn’t reach your client or your computer crashes and you lose important client data, always be looking for the marketing opportunity hidden somewhere in the mess.
The old adage is true: Stuff happens.
You can either endure it or you can do your best to benefit from it.
