by Michael Wolter
Across the swath of careers in the property field, there is an equally vast array of qualifications and certifications one can obtain. If you’re a U.K. letting agent, there’s NAEA Propertymark accreditation and the estate agent diploma from CPD. The majority of surveyors, of course, are members of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. In any case, some form of qualification is strongly recommended, if not required, to practice in the property field, and higher levels of education almost unequivocally mean the professional will provide a better work product to their client.
But do higher levels of education always equate with an improved quality of service? Or can education sometimes impede the way a property professional provides their service by losing sight of a customer-centric approach to doing business?
Does Higher Education Mean Lower Customer Service?
There are a number of reasons why a correlation may exist between higher levels of education and a drop in the quality of client service. The College Board’s 2016 study, “Education Pays”, examines the various benefits a bachelor degree can bring to U.S. adults, which include at least 61% higher wages and an overall healthier lifestyle. Simply put, the higher the education level of U.S. adults, the more money they’ll likely earn and a healthier overall life they will tend to live.
Do these factors inflate the self-confidence of a property professional, perhaps making them consider their work product to be superior to others? Or is the education itself to blame, leading the professional to believe that since they have a wider breadth of knowledge than the customer, a quality level of service need not be offered?
Whatever link may exist behind advanced education and quality of service, it is incumbent upon service providers of all qualification and education levels to keep at the core of their practice an incredibly important ideal, something that is in the very title of their profession: service. As property professionals, we are here to serve our clients, as without them none of us would have a job in the first place. We offer a service, and although that service may come in many different specialties and degrees of expertise, it remains a service, and thus should be delivered to the client as such.
The Importance of Listening to Clients
This ethos of employment should apply not only to one’s personal style of service but also to that of business operating models. As clients’ needs change, so should business service models; if clients require a new feature or type of service, it is our duty as service providers to provide it.
Imfuna’s method of agile development has always been based around feeding our clients’ input into our produce updates. Some of our best ideas have come from our clients’ requests for new features or systems. Who better to tell us how they’d like our product to serve their needs than the very people who make use of our service?
Staying on Top of Property Inspection
As Imfuna grows, so does the way we view ourselves in the context of the world of enterprise. We continue to focus on our clients and their needs, and by using these as the foundations for our expansion year upon year, we build a strong, innovative product that adapts and changes with the marketplace. And it is by doing this that we have stayed on the cutting edge of not only the proptech world or the property world, but also positioned ourselves as service providers to multiple parts of the property field.
We look forward to continuing to serve.
