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Episode 22 - Part 1 - How being relatable and approachable can prevent claims
46 Plays2 years ago
In this week's episode we are speaking with Marion Ellis from Love Surveying.
Across the three parts we discuss relatability and approachability and how these can be the keys to a successful surveying business.
Marion has over 20 years of experience in the residential property sector and has seen the profession from every side with a focus in much of her career on customer complaints and claims.
In Part 1 of this episode we're looking at how being relatable and approachable can help you prevent claims. We discuss:
🏡 The importance of understanding the home buying and selling process
👩🏫 Marion's experience of transitioning from corporate to coaching
☎️ How approachability and relatability result in better communication
😱 The challenges and fears of surveyors
🙋 The importance of asking questions and seeking help
😡 Understanding a complaint is usually due to a number of issues
👂 The importance of empathy and understanding when dealing with complaints
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Survey Booker Sessions
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Survey Booker Sessions. Tune in to hear from people working in a range of industries and roles to provide you ideas that you can take away and use in your own business. I'm your host, Matt Nalley, the founder and director of Survey Booker, which is the leading CRM and survey management system for surveyors.
Guest Introduction: Marianne Alice
00:00:15
Speaker
So on this week's episode, we have Marianne Alice, who's the director of Love Surveying. So thanks for coming on. You're very welcome. Nice to speak to you. Always.
Marianne's Background and Career Shift
00:00:24
Speaker
For those that don't know, and I think most people probably will, but do you want to give us a bit of background as to what you do at Love Surveying?
00:00:30
Speaker
Well, it feels like a hobby sometimes, my work, not what my husband says. I coach surveyors. My background is in defect and valuation claims as a residential surveyor. That taught me a lot about how things go wrong, how I don't set up for success, that surveyors don't set out to do a bad job, and yet sometimes it just all goes really wrong.
00:00:55
Speaker
And, you know, so in doing that work, it taught me, you know, how you set yourself up for success, but then also the other side, the whole customer journey side. And we've talked about that and I know the work that you do. And when I left my corporate role a few years ago, I couldn't, for health reasons, do a problem with my neck. So I couldn't lift loft hatches and things like that. I thought it'd be off more than I was on. So I just explored different avenues and
00:01:21
Speaker
you know, the best thing I ever did was give myself time to be curious about the different things that I could do and explore. And that led me to coaching, coaching and mentoring, specifically small businesses, or career change surveyors.
Balancing Work and Family
00:01:37
Speaker
So I love it, you know, so I run a mastermind, I do some one to one consultancy, but I really do
00:01:44
Speaker
It sounds a bit of a luxury, whatever I fancy doing, and whatever time allows with my family and the work that I do. So yeah, but I'm pretty, I do like survey, I am a bit of a geek, even though I don't practice it, as they say. Although I feel like I practice answering the questions a lot, you know, as to what's this and what's that. But yeah, so a bit of a long answer, but I have a bit of fun in my business.
00:02:14
Speaker
That's important, I think, isn't it? I think that's probably part of what we'll come onto today through our topics is how you have a bit of personality in there and enjoy what you
Relatability and Approachability in Business
00:02:23
Speaker
do as well. But I suppose the topics for today then I think we were looking at were relatability and approachability and how that ties into having a successful surveying business. And as part of our first topic we're going to cover, I think
00:02:36
Speaker
is really interesting. I hadn't thought of it from this perspective. How does relatability and approachability prevent claims? I think before we discuss that, do you want to explain what we mean by, or what you mean by relatability and approachability and what that is? Well, you came up with that title, Matt. Did I? You did? Yeah, they sound like big words to me. I think
00:03:02
Speaker
When you run a business, particularly a small business where you work for yourself, you are your business. And a lot of people, the only experience we have is being in a corporate. And so we leave our corporate roles, we set up our own businesses and we become mini corporates.
00:03:20
Speaker
and actually people buy from people at the end of the day. It doesn't matter what you're selling. If they like the look of you, they like the feel of you, they like how you make them feel rather than they buy into you as a person. And so the more that you can be relatable to your client, even if you're
00:03:41
Speaker
you know, chalk and cheese, then the more likely they are to be able to engage with you.
Communication Challenges in Surveying
00:03:47
Speaker
Similarly, you know, when it comes to claims, one of the things I'd see is just that clients are just sometimes too scared to talk to surveyors. But guess what? So, surveyors are too scared to talk to clients because they might ask a question and you might not know the answer or they might be difficult.
00:04:07
Speaker
But being able to be approachable means that if you've got ultimately having a good relationship with your client that they can ask you those stupid questions. They can tell you about their fears and worries about buying their property or the work you're doing for them. And it means that you can prevent things. You can nip things in the bud. If you've missed something, you can address it. If they've thrown you a curveball, they didn't at the start, then you can tackle it.
00:04:36
Speaker
And so, you know, those things are really fundamental and yet we overlook them totally. Yeah, yeah. I suppose that the, an aspect of that as well then as you get more out of your customer at the very beginning of the process, if they feel comfortable to ask you or tell you what they're concerned about. Yeah, sure. What do you think stops people from building that sort of, I suppose, engagement with the customer or that trust?
00:05:06
Speaker
In terms of surveyors, I guess most of them have never had to do it. If you think about corporate work or getting work from a panel, it served to you on a plate to say, just turn up at this property, do this, let's speak to the customer beforehand if you can get hold of them. They've never had to do it, so it's something that you need to learn to do.
Corporate vs Small Business Challenges
00:05:35
Speaker
recognize the value of it, for sure. But on the other side of it, I suppose if you've got a huge fear, there's a fear culture and surveying of fear of being sued, fear of being too big for your boots as who do you think you are? You're an ASOC, not an FRICS, and all of that malarkey. It can be quite judgmental. And professions like that where it is all about technical qualification,
00:06:04
Speaker
I think we are judgmental of each other. It's how we compared each other. Where do we fit in the hierarchy of things? But all of that creates fear. And you've got to shake that off. If you're a business owner, you need to be in front of your business, not hiding behind it. Yeah. Does that mean then we have potentially a bit of a trust and relatability or approachability issue
00:06:34
Speaker
between surveyors as well. So in terms of being able to, if you don't know the answer to a question or you want to get a bit of a second opinion, are there barriers there that people feel being able to talk to each other? Because whether it's the assault Rick's Emmerich thing or whether it's other factors?
00:06:49
Speaker
I don't necessarily think it's the qualification levels and I think that just muddies the water really, you know, some of the best surveyors I know on RICS surveyors, you know, so I think that's in many ways a red herring, it doesn't really help.
00:07:09
Speaker
But if you think about back in the day before mobile phones and tablet technology, we're used to go out and do our inspections, go back to an office and have a chat with the guys in the office about what we've seen in a day, how we'd report as a
00:07:25
Speaker
As a graduate, as a student, that's what I did. I built up my confidence to ask those stupid questions. But equally, you know, there was still a culture of if I was doing an evaluation and I found some comparables on file, I wouldn't use his because, you know, he's not very good or, you know, I would always use his because he does better. And I say he because they're generally he's and they were in my office.
00:07:51
Speaker
You know, so, but at least you could break that down by the office manager coming in saying, sort yourself out and all talk to each other, or you'd have CPD sessions or whatever.
00:08:01
Speaker
And we just don't have that. We just don't have that physical aspect. You know, lots of offices were closed down, people worked from home, and we've all had to learn to engage digitally. Now COVID was a blessing in some ways for that because now everybody knows what Zoom is, for example. Whereas a lot of people hadn't, you wouldn't do that in your role as a surveyor typically. So we've all had to learn to do it.
The Surveyor Hub Community
00:08:30
Speaker
And I run the Surveyor Hub.
00:08:31
Speaker
which is a Facebook group for surveyors. We started it before the pandemic and it's sort of grown. And it's been a real learning experience. It wasn't set out to give technical advice or things like that. It was really just to engage with people and to see whether it would work. Part of that curiosity piece, I guess, that I was talking about before.
00:08:56
Speaker
But what we've learned through that is that some people don't know how to talk to each other. Some people get the wrong end of the stick. We have lots of arguing and grumbling. People are very judgmental. But they all watch it because they check it every day because they want to see what's happening and to feel part of something. And I think being in forums like that, whatever they are, I mean, that you're more likely to go out and
00:09:26
Speaker
reach out for help when you need it. I get a lot of private messages from surveyors saying, I'm really stuck, but I'm too scared to post or don't know where to ask. And by other people sharing like that, sorry, posting in forums and things like that gives permission to others to say, it's OK to ask these stupid questions. It's OK to reach out for help. And so it's like a learned behavior, I think, that we've got to re-engage with.
00:09:56
Speaker
It reminds me actually a totally different front. I remember when my babies were little and speaking to a health visitor, I went to a breastfeeding clinic and I was talking to a health visitor and she said, the thing is, we don't really need to help people like you because you know to come here. It's the people that we never hear of that we want to find and that's how we manage our resources.
00:10:23
Speaker
And I think there's something powerful in that of, you know, who don't I know and who doesn't appear anywhere? Not that there's anything wrong, but what support do they need? Because as surveyors, you know, we have to keep, we think we have to keep a lot of information in our head when actually we just need to know where to ask or to look most of the time.
00:10:43
Speaker
Yeah, and actually, no one's expected to know everything. And you should always be coming across something new. And therefore, asking the questions is appropriate and the right thing to do.
Effective Complaint Handling
00:10:53
Speaker
But interestingly, what you said there about the people having a way of speaking and discussing things, now we've got Zoom rather than just going on emails. And in the groups, people quick to fire off messages. And it might come off the wrong way. Not always, obviously, but in terms of certain conversations, you see that everywhere now.
00:11:13
Speaker
Is one of the tools then for effectively handling a complaint, not just to stick to emails, because there might be that wanting to keep things in writing. Does that then potentially escalate things because both sides misinterpret things and the language goes the wrong way? Should you get on the phone instead? Absolutely. That would be my first spot of call. But I think you have to look at each complaint
00:11:43
Speaker
as a whole, you have to look at what happens at the start, the very start of that customer journey. Until it's taken a step back a bit, so we talk about this sort of relatability and being approachable.
00:12:00
Speaker
When a client comes to you, wants to work with you, they should know a lot about you, a lot about the way that you work. So the conversation is how do we work together? Rather than tell me what do you do? What's the difference between a level two and three, all of those things. And that's where marketing, personal branding, putting yourself out there means that a client gets a sense of all of that before they then come and work with you. So you're not repeating yourself. You're not educating them on a really quick,
00:12:30
Speaker
quick phone call. So when a client comes to you and you start working with them, you know, or I've got a good idea of, do they know what a survey is? Have they ever had one before? You know, is their uncle Bob giving them advice and saying you don't really need a surveyor, but get one and then you've got a guarantee if something goes wrong. You know, we should know about these things because we're providing a service and it's a tool for people to use going forward. So understanding the context of how somebody's come to buy from you,
00:13:00
Speaker
is really important. How to deal with complaints and claims is a big old topic. You'll see lots of CPD and advice on how to deal with a claim. And yes, there's legal things. Yes, you want to keep things in writing visit because it helps you defend a claim. You've got to have terms, you've got to have boundaries over the service that you're offering. And then for RICS, we've got
00:13:29
Speaker
you know, rules of conduct, ways of dealing with things, regulation, you know, it sets a framework for how things need to be done. But in my view and in my experience, it's a complaint until it's a claim. Now, we typically think it's a claim once the property is exchanged or, you know, there's been legal completion. But what that means is you go straight into
00:13:58
Speaker
serious letter, serious letter, serious letter. Actually, if you can talk to somebody with, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, this has happened. Tell me about it. Okay, this is what I'm going to do. You instantly, and having that rapport, I have dealt with so many different complaints and claims over the years from silly PVQs to multi-million pound defect evaluation claims.
00:14:27
Speaker
I've seen the whole lot and there is nothing, the most embarrassing things ever that I've come across and you can fix it. You can get over it if you've got a good relationship with your client.
00:14:41
Speaker
It doesn't mean that the complaint will go away. It doesn't mean you're not going to pay out money if you've done something wrong, but you can make it much better and easier to deal with if you've got that good rapport at the start and you maintain that all the way through dealing with the complaint or claim.
00:15:00
Speaker
So I would be very much pick up the phone. I'm so sorry this has happened. You know, letters and emails can be really turned to the point whereas, you know, you speak to them on the phone. Oh, well, you know, I just thought I put it in writing. Let's have a chat about it. And of course, you document those those things. So you've, you know, you've got everything. But there's a lot that you can that you can do for sure. That means that you can handle things
00:15:25
Speaker
more quickly, more efficiently, in a friendly way, and it doesn't have to be the horrible weight and difficult situation that it has to be. Interesting. From your experience of the different claims you've looked at, is it a common theme where it was a breakdown of communication that was the issue rather than the... Obviously, it depends on why someone's called up, but as often it
00:15:50
Speaker
the way it's escalated due to the communication side of things rather than necessarily the core issue itself. People don't complain about one thing.
00:16:01
Speaker
So for them to put something in writing or to raise something and say, I want to make a complaint. You know, a lot of people don't. They say, can I just ask this thing has fallen off or this thing is broken or whatever. Yeah. And that's where you've got to say, actually, look, let me tell you my complaints procedure, but let's deal with it. You know, you still got to be approached in the right way.
00:16:25
Speaker
But people don't complain about one thing. Unless it's a pretty serious, significant, this has just happened, you know, end of the world and they will contact you about that. What they will do is say, okay, well, this isn't right.
00:16:41
Speaker
And actually, do you know what? That wasn't right either. And then they sit down and they make a list. And it will be everything from, you said that you would call at three o'clock on Tuesday and you didn't, and there's typos and there's this and there's that all the way through to, there is this problem, you know? And so you always get a list of things. So, you know, when you, when you get complaints in,
00:17:04
Speaker
first thing you need to do is triage. Triage it. What am I dealing with here? How much of this is an admin error? How much of this is, you know, service, something was delayed, something was annoying. And we can very often disregard that, you know, it's a little thing, you know, that's not important. Yeah. But it is because it's service and you've paid a lot of money and
00:17:30
Speaker
And surveyors will always argue about fees being more, and I say, put them up. But it's not just about the money that's been paid. It's about dealing with your home. It's about the fact that I put my faith and trust in you, and now I don't feel that was right. You've made me feel foolish. I now feel vulnerable and at risk in my home, and you're dealing with that emotion. So the fact that you didn't call on Tuesday or did whatever,
00:18:00
Speaker
is magnified times 10 in the customers and clients mind. So it's important that you first of all triage, what have you got, what you're dealing with, how much is emotion, you know, focus on and sort of break it down and you might find, you know, different parts of your business, you know, the admin might sort out something, you will deal with something else, you know, but sort of really, really break it down. It's key.
00:18:28
Speaker
I think that's a very valid point, actually. It's how you go about it. It's very important.
Emotional Challenges in Handling Complaints
00:18:35
Speaker
if you go back with an aggressive or quite strong stance on something without, you know, empathizing and understanding their perspective and the emotion that's behind it, it sounds to sort of escalate it further, I think, and you're going to struggle to resolve something because both of you start to get your back up about something rather than being able to soften things and, you know, look at it more objectively.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah, and from a surveyor's point of view, you know, from a surveyor's point of view, you've just had somebody criticise your work. And that triggers all sorts of things. You know, it triggers how good we feel about the work that we're doing. You know, that that mental you had 25 years ago, who said you were rubbish, means he might have been, you know, telling the truth, you know, all those sort of things, as well as how on earth could I have missed that?
00:19:29
Speaker
I don't know if I've missed that or, you know, this is going to cost me money and I'm a small business. And so you've got highly charged emotion landing on top of, you know, a spark, if you like, and it just blows up. And handling complaints and claims is a skill. You know, there's a legal side of it of how you defend things, you know, but there's a skill to it. And sometimes recognizing that you're not the best person to handle it,
00:19:57
Speaker
it takes some strength, but it also means that you get to have some perspective and it can get resolved quicker. So, you know, surveyors having buddies that they can work with or outsourcing it to somebody who can help is really, you know, can really help, but it's very triggering for people. And I remember, you know, part of the thing that sort of made me think about failure and I'm quite interested in that, how we fail and why we fail.
Trusting Instincts and Effective Management
00:20:27
Speaker
And when I was doing lots of complaints, I'd phone the surveyor up and say, look, we've got a problem with. And the first thing they would say nine times out of 10 is, oh, I bloody knew that one was going to be a problem.
00:20:43
Speaker
And it was because it should have been a level three, not level two. It was because the vendor was following the round and there was something going wrong. It was because it was during a time of a really difficult, you know, something that was going on in their life. There's usually a something little niggle and surveyors don't trust their instinct.
00:21:03
Speaker
to either stop what they're doing, either to give something more attention, to give the client a bit more attention, to make sure the vendor's okay. Just sort of listen to that gut instinct that there's something about this job and this work that doesn't feel quite right.
00:21:19
Speaker
let me do a double check. It's not just the technical side of doing the inspection, it's also the service around it. The more you can hone and learn to trust your gut instinct, the better. What tends to happen is surveyors approach it through fear. They might speak to a client who's got 20 questions that they want to ask before they have a survey.
00:21:47
Speaker
And their instinct will say, that client is hard work. I am not going to do work for that. It's a claim waiting to happen. Well, actually, they just want to know what you're offering and how, because you've not made it clear.
00:22:04
Speaker
And so they write off difficult customers when actually they could be your best customers and best advocates and referrers. So it makes me laugh when I see surveyors do that, but it's okay when there's other work you can do it, but when there's not, you've got to think again. It's a difficult one, isn't it? Because I think when you do something every day, you forget what's
00:22:28
Speaker
what's normal for you is something that's completely alien for someone else and so that process of getting a survey of it's something you do every 20 years is nerve-wracking and yeah you might someone who's not confident that the process will stress with other things going on will have a million questions and they could as you say be your best advocate afterwards because they're really pleased with how you handled their concerns and everything else but
00:22:52
Speaker
I suppose the only other question I had then was around this part was the buddy system you mentioned. Are there ways people can find people that can help support them in those scenarios? Because I think the key is, as you say, to pause and not emotionally react to something, because you will have that emotion come in straight away, obviously. So is there a way of handling that better? So you have that pause, you refer it to someone else, or the ways you can find people to help you with that in the industry?
The Importance of a Support Network
00:23:19
Speaker
Well, I think it, you know, it's not just claims, it's anything that comes into your business, you know, big bills or, you know, something happening, admins quitting, you know, whatever, RICS getting in touch, whatever. I think it comes back to you being, recognizing you're a business owner, not just a surveyor.
00:23:42
Speaker
And the work I do with my mastermind and consultancy is really thinking about what network of support you have.
00:23:52
Speaker
And if you think about a business, a typical, you know, large business that will have a board of directors, you will have somebody who makes decisions, you will have a finance director, marketing sales, somebody who does HR, somebody who looks at technical side of things and making sure all ticking all the boxes, you know, you have a team of people around you. And when you work for yourself, you don't have that, you're all of those things. And certain things start to, you know,
00:24:20
Speaker
get into a state of lack, so for example sales and marketing.
00:24:24
Speaker
Well, I don't need to do that because I always get word of mouth referrals, as people say, and I get panel work. But when that dries up, you're on the back foot and you see people paying lot for Google ads or Facebook ads and quite erratic strategies. When it comes to managing money in your business, people often don't get their accountants to work better for them.
00:24:51
Speaker
You know, they don't want to pay an accountant a lot. And it's just, you know, just do the tallying up at the end of the year and do my returns when really you want somebody to act as a financial director capacity within your business to help you manage cash flow. You know, cash flow is a thing that gets businesses every time.
00:25:13
Speaker
So asking your accountant or your bookkeeper to help and support you to do a bit more on that side or making decisions for you, but they're giving you the insights and letting you know how profitable you are and all of those things.
00:25:27
Speaker
So there's lots of different things and different people that can support you. And when it comes to getting complaints in, that is really hard. There are very few people out there who are complaint handlers.
00:25:47
Speaker
Sometimes I help my clients with very bits and pieces. I don't necessarily write the letters for them, but it's being a sounding board and that's mostly what's needed. It's a very difficult landscape for surveying because we don't talk about complaints.
00:26:05
Speaker
Insurers don't want us to talk about complaints. There's no data stats anywhere on these are the types of complaints out there and these are the worst surveyors and all of those things. There isn't that data for obvious reasons, but unhelpful reasons too. We don't talk about the experience of it, of the mental health of having to deal with some of these things. It can take years
00:26:31
Speaker
for some cases to be resolved when the client comes back and says, and another thing, and another thing, and another thing. I don't think insurers personally help small businesses. When a complaint comes in, the first thing I will say is tell us, tell us about it. I was speaking to a surveyor recently and the broker, it was an asbestos claim,
00:27:00
Speaker
They've read it to their broker and their broker took 10 days to come back. This is a sale on a train. 10 days of, can you help me? What's going to happen? They were quite unhelpful when they came back. It's really important that you've got that network of sounding board of people that you can talk to about it.
00:27:26
Speaker
Obviously, it's going to be confidential. It's going to be a trusted, you know, sort of safe circle. But then also, I think the other side of it is then really understanding with your insurer and your broker, if something comes in, what do I do? At what point do I contact you? And my view would be...
00:27:45
Speaker
you know, it's not, it's a complaint until it's a claim, is that it comes in, you triage it, you get a sense of what the problem is. You understand, get quotes, you know, do what you need to do, and then tell your insurer. But you can't take forever to do that because claims are on a claims made basis, it's going to be, you know, registered with the insurer, so that if it does, you know,
00:28:11
Speaker
go off, at least it's covered by the insurance that you've got. So, you know, there are, I'm not saying you're going to drag it out forever.
00:28:21
Speaker
But I think that triage part, understanding what the problem is and what some of the solutions are, are really vital. Now, some insurers will say, well, we've got brokers, we've got people that will do that for you. And some don't. And some promise that the Earth and they're not there to help at the end of the day. So I think it's a real letdown in that we don't have the support to handle claims better.
Building a Supportive Team
00:28:48
Speaker
Brokers and insurers don't always help us handle them better. And if we're not sharing feedback, information on how to be better, we're just a cash cow and it's just feeding an industry and that's not good for us and it's certainly not good for consumers either. No, I think an interesting point you touched on there was
00:29:10
Speaker
building your team around you, but before something comes up. So, you know, have your accountant there available to provide insights when you need them. Have, I don't know, know what the process is with your broker or insurer beforehand. You know, have a lawyer that you know you can speak to in certain times if you need to. Because if you're scrabbling to find that, when something goes wrong, then it's much more stressful because you're then trying to vet certain suppliers at the same time and it's the nightmare.
00:29:39
Speaker
Yeah. And it all comes back to having a plan, you know, and thinking about, you know, where's your business heading and what you're doing. And at the start, most people are just, well, I want to earn money. I'm going to do this kind of work because I can do it and I'm going to earn money. But you get to a point where
00:29:56
Speaker
You don't love what you do. You want to do different kinds of work. You don't know how to evolve it, but you're tied into the panel or you want to move away from valuation work is a common one that I come across, get more private work, but you don't know how to attract private work, all of those things. So there needs to be a plan in the background. And part of that is what support do you need? And support can come in in different ways. So yes, it's people, but sometimes it's just educating yourself. How does that work?
00:30:26
Speaker
What kind of tech is out there? What's happening in the industry, in the profession? And that can range from anything from podcasts like this, which are really useful to people, all the way through to attending courses, getting qualifications, or finding an accountant that's really helpful. It's a huge mix. Definitely. I think that ties us in nicely to our second topic. So about tuning in for that one.