Philip Foster
Jul 20, 20132 min
Recently, I’ve been involved in the purchase of a new home. Because we are moving further into the country we decided to take advantage of a particular loan product for more rural development. The problem is that these products are slow to close because they involve the ever-so-slow Federal Government. We knew going into this process that it would be a longer than usual closing. Circumstances required us to close by a certain date and our loan officer assured us we would close by that date if not earlier. Through a series of misfires in the revelation of certain key information, we began to get frustrated and angered over the lack of information flow. The closing date promised came and went and what was to be a 24 day process ended up taking nearly 50-days to complete. This culminated in our contacting the bank and telling them we were abandoning the process and planned to do something else. Needless to say, our anger over the matter caught their attention and culminated in a meeting with the Vice President. Here is what went wrong… from the very beginning; lack of information began to erode our confidence in the organization and individuals we were working with. This is human nature – we need to know we can trust someone. When we withhold important information from our clients it destroys the trust factor altogether. I agree with Guy Kawasaki in that we would have rather had the bad news at the beginning rather than to be surprised and angered in the middle of the process. Because we are human and humans are infallible, we have to accept the fact that we will disappoint and fall short of our promises. The key to success is not in the failure but in owning the failure and providing as much information as possible and as soon as possible so that all parties involved can make a better decision. This may require coaching your employees on how to respond to a failure and how to help the client through that process. Silence and blame games will only upset and frustrate and already exacerbated situation. Finally, after threatening to walk away, the bank took our concerns serious enough to sit with us and listen to where we felt the failure in the process came in. Even though our meeting didn’t change the fact that our closing took longer than promised, we are now able to make more informed decisions. Equipping your clients is a good thing… even if it means that they jump ship and abandon the project. The key here is not necessarily a completed project in-so-much as a client who knows you have their best interest in mind and that they TRUST you and your organization. You may lose out on a short-term financial gain but you will keep a client much longer. Trust is more valuable than Gold because trust produces referrals and referrals build businesses… not anger.
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