I LOVE My Agent!

Tagged "Reputation"

I LOVE My Agent!

Blog by Karin Hanna

Tucson, Arizona

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I LOVE My Agent!

Have You Been Googled Yet?

Aug. 21, 2008

Categorized in: Building A Recommendation Bank

Tagged with: consumer ratings, feedback, google, i love my agent, karin hanna, reputation, reviews

I have and I love it. I love that people can learn a lot about me before they decide to contact me. I love that wherever I am in the world people can Google me and decide in advance if they want to get to know me further, if they want to trust me, and if i am a great fit for them as a client, a coach or anything else for that matter. I love the Google Phenomenon.

As many of you know I have been travelling around the world for the last year, (I am currently in Arizona) and The Power of Google has travelled with me. I applied for short term apartment rentals in places as far apart as New York to Paris to a tiny countyside town of Panjas in The Gers in France, in Tuscany, In London and I was Googled by everyone! I was both surprised and delighted to see this was how people globally were researching things that mattered to them. How they decided to see if I would be someone they should rent their homes to, and I was delighted at the results. It was easy as people already felt like they knew me, liked me and they already trusted me to look after their homes and pay them on time. How cool is that.

The Google Phenomenon is Building in ways I never imagined, Colleges are Googling prospective students, Google is Googling prospective Job Applicants, Customers are Googling Products and Services, We are Googling Everything. We are in Google Mania.

Why? Good old fashioned honesty and trust. We Know, Like and Trust Google, and we trust the results it delivers us, we know they will offer the best match they can find to our search and its unedited and untwisted by traditional spins we find in paid advertising.

The Google Phenomenon is not going away in fact its gathering steam and now more than ever we have an incredible opportunity to be proactive and really add some focus and activity to building our reputations online. We need to start working with all our clients from the beginning to ensure a wonderful customer experience, we need to let them know in advance we are going to be asking for their feedback during the process, we need to embrace a new vision, that the goal of working with a client is to get their feedback and an online recommendation not just a transaction.

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WAKE UP, BARBARA CORCORAN! Buyers (your customers) are not LIARS!

Aug. 15, 2008

Categorized in: Building A Recommendation Bank

Tagged with: barbara corcoran, cnbc, customer service is your secret weapon, donny deutsch, i love my agent, karin hanna, online reviews, reputation, the big idea, word of mouth

I love to watch “The Big Idea” on CNBC with Donny Deutsch. Last week aired “Customer Service is Your Secret Weapon ...”

One comment made by a recent panellist, real estate diva Barbara Corcoran infuriated me and made me realize that a wake-up call is needed.

WAKE UP, BARBARA! WAKE UP, AMERICA! This is your chance to learn something valuable and increasingly important to business profitability and bottom lines … BUYERS (Your Customers, your Employees) ARE NOT LIARS! And you need us more than we need you!

Barbara Corcoran and many more people just like her are at the helm of big business and they still don’t get it!

Do we think BUYERS ARE LIARS! NO!

We think Advertisers ARE LIARS! TRADITIONAL MARKETING LIES and BIG BUSINESS LIES … because guess what? They have a track record of spinning things to suit themselves. They have proven through their actions that they don’t really care about us. The most important thing to big business is PROFIT! Not us, we Buyers are Liars, an inconvenience that must be endured in the all important pursuit of money.

Comments like Barbara’s, “Buyers are liars” and others like them, (Buyer Beware) promote and feed an underlying misconception that business is war, an us (buyers) against them (businesses) mentality. And there is still a huge amount of money being spent on training today that continues to feed this rampant misbelief.

Barbara has carved a very successful profit and lifestyle in real estate dealing with people’s hopes and dreams of home ownership, investments and careers. Her buyers are all the people who have bought into the dreams, products, and services she has sold very successfully. Are they liars too, Barbara?

We are a world of Consumers (Buyers), we love to spend and yet we hate being sold to! The world is changing and becoming increasingly transparent as Web 2.0 technologies grow. Consumers (BUYERS) harness the power of publishing and mass communication and use their voice to influence who and where we spend our dollar, and show us the companies we will love partnering our talents. When we are ready to buy, do we readily believe what we are told by advertisers and controlled marketing? Not anymore.

Now we are turning to other buyers just like us and finding them on social networking sites and review sites. We Google people to find real comments about them -- from others just like us, we start and participate in discussion boards and we are asking more and more questions both on and offline to help us decide where we want to spend our hard earned dollars and who we want to work with. We want to do business with people we KNOW, LIKE AND TRUST!

We look for people who are just like us, who have been where we are considering a purchase, and we can see the outcome of their decisions. We want to know if they could go back with the benefit of hindsight, would they make the same decision again or go elsewhere.

Would they recommend that business or do they wish they had chosen differently?

We value Honesty and Transparency and we know we aren’t getting it from Big Business and Advertisers, who are always looking for the next angle; the next way they can spin things to their benefit and who think like Barbara that we (buyers) are liars. We are sick and tired of businesses and corporate heads that talk Customer Service but don’t deliver it!

Wake up and smell the roses, the power is shifting ... you don’t have it anymore; it’s in the hands of us LIARS!

So, Barbara and Corporate America, it’s time to change and get with the program, stop wasting time and money trying to control transparency, realize we are not LIARS, recognize we are your most important partners, that our feedback is your most important measure of future viability and continued success.

Keep your promises, listen to us, learn about what we want from you, meet our needs and if you can - exceed them! If you make a mistake, apologize and thank us for the lesson and learn from it, make us feel important, and leave us better off for having taken the risk of getting to know you and help us want to do business with you and tell our friends about how wonderful you are.

We are not the enemy; we want to believe you, to know you, like you and to trust you! We want to recommend you and be your biggest fans.

Some corporations do get it and are already operating this way and are reaping the rewards and loyalty of consumers. Just look at Maxine Clark (CEO, Build a Bear) another guest panelist on “The Big Idea” who said, “I could never understand when you wouldn’t want a customer coming back” For the record, I love Build A Bear and Maxine and send everyone with children there, If you want an education in customer experience, go to a Build a Bear store anywhere, and buy a bear or doll. You will love it, your kids will love it, and your kids’ friends will love it! Even the company’s online experience is fabulous, and filled with fun games for your children www.buildabear.com

I stumbled upon Build A Bear for the first time late in 2007 and have been a huge advocate ever since and a big customer! Smiley (our bear) even has his own pawsport (passport in non build a bear talk) and been travelling the world with us and collecting stamps in his pawsport as we do.

It’s time to stop thinking and believing that Buyers are liars. Start embracing a culture of trust and advocacy within your team and with all consumers. I believe it was Einstein who once said the most important question we can all answer is, “Do we believe the world is friendly or not?” I know it really is, so embrace this abundant mentality and lose the scarcity and fear mindset once and for all. We are all in this together, it is not an us-and-them situation.

We are all at some time buyers and sellers, we are all people, we all have needs, wants and challenges, we want to spend, we want to trust, we want to grow, we want to be respected and valued, we want to help, we want to work in great companies and to have fun and to smile every day . We are people just like you and we are now VOCAL. Listen to us and learn.

Luvyaa,

Karin Hanna

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