Get talking
To communicate with and enable his people, Romero needed to start talking to them. And with electronic media becoming more prevalent and delivering more options to business leaders, Romero quickly decided that Century 21 Award would need to make use of new media platforms to keep employees and agents focused and informed.
“While everybody was cutting back, we had a big technology initiative,” Romero says. “We launched a new company website, which is aimed at giving our people the tools to give consumers what they’re looking for.”
Romero and his team brought in an outside consultant to help set up a new website that would allow upper management to disseminate information and also give employees and agents in the field an opportunity to feed valuable pieces of information upward through the organization.
If you’re going to implement new technology as part of your communication platform, you need to know how you want to employ the technology, and then you have to figure out whether you have the people on staff to install and implement the technology or whether you need to contract or hire a specialist. Romero and his staff hired a third-party specialist after an 18-month search.
“I really reached out to an independent consultant first because there is so much stuff involved with this, so many different technologies, that I wanted to hire an independent company that specialized in real estate technology,” Romero says. “A lot of real estate companies do their own technology, but I knew that wasn’t the route I wanted to go, because technology isn’t our specialty. It’s not what we wanted to do. I also knew that I didn’t want a website that was a template. I wanted a totally customized site that would continue to grow and evolve as we evolved.”
With a new website and new functions, Romero was aiming to serve customers at a high level, which comes back to serving the employees and agents that interface with customers.
The people who connect on a face-to-face basis with your customers are the people who provide your customers with a name and a face. They are the most important representatives your company has in the field, and it is critical to keep them informed and enabled to perform their jobs.
“The best ideas come from our agents, so it’s best to talk to them and hear about what they’re seeing out there, hear about what their needs are,” Romero says. “Staying in touch with the people in the field is key. Things change so quickly now. There is no such thing as a yearly business plan anymore. You have to know exactly what is going on and be able to make adjustments quickly. That’s why you need to stay in touch — it allows you to make changes fast. If we’re in the middle of a plan and, 30 days later, we see that the plan isn’t working anymore, we need to be able to change directions right away.”
