Saturday
morning, I walked out into our backyard and noticed that the pool sweep hadn’t
done a very good job the night before – it wasn’t covering the entire floor of
the pool in its sweeps. I turned the
sweep on to see what it was doing and quickly noticed that it didn’t like
making right turns. While this is good
for NASCAR drivers, this presented a problem for the pool sweep.
Fortunately,
the pool sweep we have is a very simple mechanism with very few moving parts,
so I was reasonably certain I couldn’t screw this up. I took it apart and soon figured out that
there’s a group of small gears (not much bigger than the size of a half-dollar
coin each) that are stacked atop one another that engage the rest of the unit
and allow it to move in either direction.
One of those little plastic gears (for a reason I still can’t figure
out) refused to budge, so the rest of the gears refused to move, too. We’re talking about, probably, five cents
worth of plastic in this little gear, but it was keeping the entire sweep from
operating properly. Crazy! After replacing that gear (actually, I was
forced to buy the entire gearbox package – and it was far more than five
cents), I reassembled the pool sweep, hooked it back up to the hose, and
dropped it back into the pool. The thing
darts around the bottom of the pool turning in both directions now.
Like
the small, seemingly inconsequential plastic gear in our pool sweep that has
the power to stop the whole process, the lack of a small, seemingly
inconsequential “thing” called customer service can derail an entire
transaction. Let me give you just two
examples:
• An
agent referred a gentleman to us who wanted to purchase a home, but the
gentleman only had Social Security as his active income. The agent and his client had been turned away
by a handful of other mortgage companies the moment they saw how little the
buyer received in Social Security each month.
This transaction was obviously important to the buyer, and it was
important to the agent – this was his means of supporting his family. Knowing that, we didn’t turn them away. We got a complete financial picture from the
buyer and came up with a solution that not only got him in a home but . . .
well, I won’t give away all our secrets in writing – if you call me, I’ll fill
you in.
• One
of the LOs in our office was working alongside a realtor in the process of
getting a young family into their first home.
The father/husband got a little excited in the process and went out and
bought his family a new truck – before the home deal closed. Our intrepid LO, when he learned about the
borrower’s exuberance, not only convinced the man to return the truck, he was
able to convince the dealership to take it back and nullify the
transaction. The family is in their new
home now!
You
may view those two examples above as a shameless commercial for our company
(that’s your choice), but I put them out there for you to ask yourself a couple
of questions: (1) Would you, as an agent, have given up at some point in either
of the two scenarios above? (2) If not,
why would you allow a lender to give up?
It’s your paycheck; it’s your living.
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