With an average of 15 years of home building experience, each AVID Advisor relies on best practices
to provide expertise in four key areas: Organizational Development, Sales & Marketing, Home Quality
& Lean Construction, and Customer Experience Management. We have worked with more than 400 homebuilders
throughout Canada and the United States, giving AVID significant experience in almost every North American
market. Program development and training is typically delivered at your location. Half-day workshops
are our most popular offering, but we also deliver two-day Boot Camps customized to meet your business
needs. In addition, many homebuilders engage us to provide ongoing training and employee development.
Our growing list of builder impact workshops and programs includes:
AVID Leadership Organizational Development, Company Culture,
Management, and Processes
Focusing on Customer Delight
The best way to ensure customer delight is to have everyone in your organization focused on your homebuyers’
needs. Designed to increase your organization’s customer focus, this program explains the impact
of customer loyalty on profitability and how this process is linked to every person in your company.
This training session will also explain your customer loyalty program to your staff, dispel myths about
customer surveys and satisfaction, and present best practices for continued success. The program can
even include breakout sessions for action plan development.
Mapping Your Process and Integrating Touch Points
Process mapping will not only identify inefficiencies and waste, it will uncover opportunities for savings
and service improvement. This program helps you map the hundreds of touch points you have with homebuyers
and shows you how to maximize the opportunity each one provides for improving customer communications,
boosting efficiency, and delivering delight. We use non-invasive departmental interviews to extract
the actual day-to-day processes within your organization and document each process by department, job
title responsible, and time frame to complete. We define existing processes, as well as propose best
practices tailored to your business.
Creating a Customer-Centric Company Culture
Quality products and outstanding service are great, but today’s consumers want to know how something
is going to benefit them personally. This program explains the direct link between your profitability
and how well you cater to individual homebuyers’ needs throughout the home building process and
at every level of your organization. You’ll learn best practices for creating a customer-centric
company culture and develop you own action plan that engages every person on your staff.
Launching Successful Communities
Oftentimes, communities with low customer delight are the ones that were not launched properly. There
are myriad details — from supplier bids to subcontractor agreements — that need to be worked
out before a community can open for business. Indeed, opening up a model home before you’re truly
ready to deliver the goods can get the entire project off to a bad start. This program helps you develop
all of the “scopes of work” and processes needed to get started on the right foot.
Improving Employee Development
Professional and knowledgeable employees will always be your most valuable asset. This program covers
all of the human resources topics you need to know to develop the strongest team possible — from
hiring, training, and succession planning to job descriptions, compensation, and performance evaluations.
We’ll train the trainer and help you custom develop your own “university” for staff
development, including procedures that are documented, understood, and updated on a regular basis, with
added emphasis on ongoing training.
Boosting Employee Loyalty
Companies that suffer from a lack of customer delight usually don’t have much employee loyalty
either. In this program, you’ll learn how to stop the finger-pointing that often leads employees
to damage your company’s image with homebuyers. In addition, you’ll discover how a well-developed
training program can boost employee loyalty at every level of your organization, thereby reducing staff
turnover and improving customer communications.
Supercharging Employee Incentives
Incentives are a valuable tool for realigning a company’s culture and getting its employees to
focus on delivering customer delight. Incentives, however, are a tricky and complicated strategy that
can backfire if not implemented properly. In this program, AVID will outline successful incentive plans
that use national benchmarks to set the score for each level of incentive. You’ll learn how to
set employee compensation to align with your customer loyalty goals and how to avoid the costly pitfalls
that plague many homebuilders’ incentive programs.
Controlling Survey Talk
Customer satisfaction surveys are popular because they provide valuable insights for companies looking
for ways to improve customer relations. Some companies, however, impede the survey process and actually
lower customer loyalty by going beyond “survey awareness” and engaging in “survey
influence.” This program teaches you how to prevent “survey influence” from short-circuiting
the survey evaluation process and how to develop company policies that address this important topic.
We’ll teach you the right way to communicate about your surveys so that you get the truest results
while preserving the all-important customer relationship that you’ve worked so hard to foster.
Empowering Neighborhood Quality Teams
There’s a lot of buzz surrounding neighborhood quality teams (NQTs) and their ability to boost
customer loyalty. But buzz doesn’t translate into benefits if you don’t know how to use
NQTs effectively. This program explains what NQTs are and how they are best used to empower low-level
and mid-level employees to take ownership of customer issues and resolve them effectively. You’ll
learn everything you need to know to establish high-performing NQTs that will give you a serious advantage
over the competition.
AVID Selling Marketing, Lead Management, Sales Training
Knowing Your Customer
Your ability to delight your customers begins with knowing who they are and what is truly important
to them. This requires a deeper understanding than just knowing whether they are first-time homebuyers
or active adults. It calls for keen awareness of their personal preferences and priorities. Only after
you have this knowledge can you tailor the home buying experience to meet their needs. This program
demonstrates how to acquire a better understanding of your ideal customers and how to best appeal to
this valuable target audience. After all, it’s a lot easier to create customer delight and generate
referrals if you’re selling to the right homebuyers from the onset. Without such strategies, you
are more likely to attract buyers who will be less satisfied in the long term, leading to negative word-of-mouth
advertising, declining referrals, and employee frustration.
Cultivating and Managing Sales Through Realtors
Outside realtors who sell through homebuilders can be a great source of revenue, but also a detriment
to the customer experience. That’s because many real estate agents have a tendency to over-promise
and misinform homebuyers. Yet, no builder can reach its full sales potential without the support of
real estate agents. This program explores the best techniques for working with the real estate community
and making real estate agents your allies, not your adversaries. You’ll learn how to educate them
about your home buying process so they don’t inadvertently circumvent it and cause problems. You’ll
establish working guidelines to ensure that real estate agents are not only driving business your way,
but also collaborating with you to deliver customer delight.
Identifying Your Selling Proposition
The unique value you offer — otherwise known as your selling proposition — is the main reason
consumers buy from you, and it plays an integral part in delivering customer delight. Because your selling
proposition sets up certain expectations, failure to fulfill those expectations can spell disaster for
a homebuilder. Whether it’s your product, process, people, or pricing, we’ll help you determine
the optimal value proposition for your company and show you how to best use it in your marketing efforts.
We’ll also look at your brand identification and market penetration to see how well you stack
up against your competition.
Selling for Delight
Selling for delight requires a lot from sales professionals — from setting realistic expectations
and instilling trust to advocating for each homebuyer’s needs and validating his or her purchase
decisions. This can be a lot for sales professionals to master, especially when they are scrambling
to close deals. Yet, The McKinsey Group and AVID Ratings research has shown that customer ratings and
homebuyer loyalty suffer when builders rush to contract. This program is designed to train your entire
staff on how to sell the best solution to each potential buyer to ensure long-term delight and loyalty.
When you have a sales team that prioritizes these goals and a system to monitor them, you have a high
probability of delighting your customers.
Implementing Relationship Marketing
People tend to buy from companies they like — especially from those that add value to the transaction
above and beyond the cost of the goods and services being sold. They also tend to be more forgiving
of the companies they like when problems arise, making them less susceptible to dissatisfaction. Once
you’ve structured your organization to deliver outstanding home buying experiences, you need to
develop a solid marketing campaign that communicates the kind of relationship you are going to have
with your prospective homebuyers. This program shows you how to change the tone and direction of your
marketing efforts to focus on the relationship and benefits to individual buyers rather than merely
product features and lifestyle promises.
Boosting Referral Marketing
Success in today’s home buying environment dictates that builders garner as many referrals as
possible from previous customers. Without it, survival is twice as hard. That’s because a referred
prospect is twice as likely as a regular prospect to buy from you. This program helps you establish
a formal referral program and tracking system to measure referral rates and sources. You’ll learn
how to focus on your happiest customers and how to run a successful marketing campaign that encourages
customers to make referrals.
Maximizing Awards
Awards are common to the home building industry, but they can raise the expectations of homebuyers and
cause problems for builders down the road. AVID can help you incorporate awards as part of your marketing
strategy and properly balance awareness with homeowner expectations. You’ll also gain insight
into what kinds of endorsements are appropriate, what methods of media should be used to best present
your awards, and what not to do with your awards.
AVID Built Building Sciences, Quality Control, and Lean Construction
Preventing Construction Problems
Surprisingly, many builders encounter the same issues with their homes year after year because they
don’t have a well-designed program in place for identifying construction problems and implementing
changes for prevention. Yet, without such a program, construction and warranty costs escalate and greatly
diminish a builder’s profitability and customer loyalty. This program focuses on the best methods
for avoiding construction mistakes and inefficiencies. It gives you the tools you need to engineer away
problems so that you don’t have to spend costly resources fixing them later, thereby greatly reducing
construction and warranty costs.
Implementing Construction Quality Control
Delivering quality products and services doesn’t happen consistently without the use of control
systems. This program outlines proper quality control methods for every phase of the construction process
— from the initial dig to pre-close inspections. You’ll learn how to monitor and maintain
high quality throughout the building process and how to use quality control systems to reduce warranty
costs, thereby increasing profits after closing.
Mastering Construction Schedules
In the end, your profitability and customer delight are determined largely by the clarity of your construction
schedule. This program shows you how to establish and monitor a formal construction schedule to maximize
efficiencies and profitability, while ensuring customer delight at every phase of the home building
process. From an IT perspective, you’ll learn how to create schedules that prevent trades from
tripping over each other, reduce cycle times, and cut product waste. We’ll show you how to accurately
forecast and manage workloads and get the most out of even-flow and other best practices.
Winning With Proper Home Specifications
It’s much easier to communicate what a homebuyer wants when you have all of the options and upgrades
clearly specified. From a construction standpoint, we’ll show you the best way to define which
items are standard, which ones are upgrades, and which ones are custom features — and why it’s
important to have all of this detailed before the start-up of a neighborhood. Then you’ll learn
efficient and economical ways to clearly document and communicate buyers’ choices — including
changes and additions — to the field so that mistakes are minimized, costs are reduced, and corrections
are largely a thing of the past.
Managing Expectations
Wherever expectations are exceeded, you’ll find customer delight. Most builders today, however,
do not do enough to properly set expectations with homebuyers. This program reveals how homebuyers form
expectations and how homebuilders can influence those expectations without negatively impacting their
brand. You’ll also discover ways to uncover a homebuyer’s true desires and how to bridge
the gap between what the homebuyer expects and what you can deliver.
Inoculating for Dissatisfaction
In medical terms, inoculation occurs when a doctor immunizes someone against a particular disease with
a single dose or a series of vaccinations. You can use the same concept to inoculate your customers
against dissatisfaction. This requires introducing potential problems to your customers early on so
that they are “immune” to the problems should they actually occur. This program shows you
how to effectively communicate the realities of home building to customers to reduce the shock of things
that may go awry later in the process.
Resolving Customer Issues
When a homebuilder has a problem or warranty issue, an employee’s ability to influence customer
delight is strongest at the point of initial contact. As time goes by, the buyer’s impression
of the homebuilder is more solidified and it becomes increasingly difficult to affect the home buying
experience. This program will teach you how to administer proactive warranties, document customer issues,
improve response times, achieve conflict resolution, and even know when it’s OK to say “no”
to customers.
Managing the Customer Experience
With the typical home taking anywhere from two to eight months to deliver, builders need to carefully
manage the customer experience to ensure delight and garner future referrals. This program reveals how
the best builders are doing just that through regular updates, mandatory meetings, and other communication
strategies.
Creating Seamless Homebuyer Transitions
Without a doubt, the transitional points in the home building process are where builders can really
lock in customer delight. Though high levels of customer service should be provided throughout the sales,
construction, closing, and warranty periods, it is at these transitional points where you can really
make a difference and impact your customers’ long-term delight and eagerness to make referrals.
This program helps you develop documentation procedures for the transition processes that can be used
by everyone in your company.
Implementing CRM Technology
This workshop teaches the key components of CRM software and helps you match the best enterprise-level
systems for your company. We’ll help you develop and implement the right IT solution for all of
your customer relationship management needs, including scheduling, customer management, sales, accounting,
warranty, scheduling, and more. We’ll even show you how to integrate existing software and how
to perform a cost/benefit analysis of any CRM solution you’re considering.
Wowing Homebuyers
One of the best ways to solidify a customer relationship is to offer a unique product or service that
totally impresses your customers and differentiates you from your competitors. This is known as your
“wow factor,” and it represents your ability to be original and special. This program helps
you identify and develop your own wow factor, and then shows you how to master its delivery throughout
your organization and to make it part of your corporate culture.
Harnessing Relationship Value
Many homebuilders that score high in customer loyalty do so because of the strong relationship value
they have created with their customers. “Relationship value” refers to the emotional bonds
(both real and perceived) that are created among the customer, the homebuilder, and the brand. This
corporate improvement program shows you how to create true relationship value by connecting personally
with homebuyers on various levels before, during, and after construction.
Managing Tough Customers
Every business encounters customers who are dissatisfied. Sometimes their anger is justified; other
times it stems from unrealistic expectations. Either way, these potentially hostile homebuyers can present
serious problems for homebuilders. This program shows you how to deal with the toughest customers. You’ll
learn when and how to say “no” to customers, as well as how to develop an effective SWAT
Team for dealing with hostile homebuyers.
