High prices, high interest rates, stubborn cost-of-living challenges, and the moving targets of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, etc., constantly assault the average American household’s threshold for pain, or at least its capacity to withstand the effects of vertigo.

And then there’s buying a new home, which occupies a category all its own when it comes to pain points and loss of balance. Commonly, people describe the experience of purchasing the most-valued and most expensive consumer durable of their lifetimes as a crucible that brings them literally to tears.

It’s no wonder a homebuyer wants – no, expects and demands – clear, reliable, consistent, and responsive treatment during their purchase experience these days.

Sparing those customers of frustration, worry, disappointment, fear, wasted time, and helplessness during their buyers’ journey – in the past 10 to 15 years since the Great Recession – has relatively dramatically evolved customer care and focus on customer experience from a homebuilding organization departmental gulag to a strategic, operational, and business cultural bedrock.

For that to happen, it first took commitment from organizations' strategic leadership through operational leaders and managers to rebuild their teams, practices, and systems around putting customers’ needs at the top of every day’s priorities.

It also took more than that: Investment.

It’s one thing to embrace the notion of making buying a home simpler, more straightforward, more predictable, more adaptive, and more responsive for a family going through what typically means a several-month financial and emotional roller-coaster ride.

It’s another thing altogether to do.

Ben Sokoll, Vice President of Customer Support at Westwood Insurance Agency, speaks of the nexus between “getting it” and “doing it” so that homebuyers don’t simply hear about homebuilders and their partners’ efforts to extract the pain, but feel the effects in ways that ultimately drive value on both the sellers’ and buyers’ sides of the purchase equation.

It’s imperative to include a seamless customer experience focus,” says Sokoll. “Westwood has made an investment in technologies so that a customer can reach us at their leisure, rather than only during standard hours of operation. If you look back 20 years ago at how insurance companies and agencies serviced business, the change is drastic. We’ve gone from mail and phone centers to people being able to contact us through multiple media channels or even access their policy through a self-service portal. Customers need and want to be able to do things at their leisure and on their time. Investing in the technology helps ensure a long-term relationship and a positive insurance experience.”

Sokoll notes that a high-level indicator of the return Westwood Insurance Agency gets on its investment in offering customers a trusted, positive customer experience shows up in the firm’s high retention rate among customers.

Transparency, clarity, optionality, and peace of mind, it turns out, are all doable in the domain of a homebuyer’s customer journey. However, it takes both a full commitment and a whole-hearted investment – in talent and expertise, in a trusted network of relationships, in data, machine learning, and information technologies, and in household-by-household focus on the particulars of each situation and its varying nuances – to bake it into what customers experience, and learn, and react to during that path to new homeownership. 

A financial and often withering flashpoint – and a moment of truth for the full impact of an operationalized customer journey support platform – in the homebuyer purchase process comes as a customer pares their consideration set from several choices to the home and homebuilder they want.

One of the factors substantially impacted in recent months is the cost of insurance which plays directly into a buyer’s ability to afford a home,” says Sokoll. “So these days, one of the very first questions that we're seeing is, ‘How is my insurance going to impact my monthly payment?’ Our role is to give customers the option of looking at various policies, each showing an array of coverages and deductibles. This helps them choose the right policy and customizations to fit their needs and budget.”

Nowhere is the impact of commitment and investment in improving customers’ new home purchase experience at a time of accelerated – seismic – shifts in households’ payment power than in the realm of home insurance. It can’t escape any of us these days: Home insurance – its availability, its soaring cost, and its future challenges – has bolted into a rarefied field: news cycle status, fueled by a constant barrage of multi-regional natural hazard events that bring damage and destruction to homes almost every day of the year.

• “New research points to a striking pattern: Higher premiums are being charged in states where regulators apply less scrutiny to requests for rate increases, compared with states where officials question the justifications offered by companies and try to keep rates low, the data show.” – New York Times
• “After suffering a sharp drop in profits, reinsurers raised rates and cut coverage at the start of last year. That hit home insurers, making it harder to manage their losses from storms and other extreme-weather events. Many of them passed on the higher costs and reduced coverage to their customers.” - Wall Street Journal 
• “Housing insurance is melting down in several property markets as climate change renders old assumptions obsolete.” - Fortune

In a quickly evolving, dynamic, and consequential inflection point for homeowners and would-be homeowners, having invested deeply in the data, trusted-network partners, trained associates, and plain-old common sense care stands out as a differentiator that can give customers and prospects the peace of mind they expect.

Our builder partners have become more attuned and more fluent in their understanding of how insurance availability and affordability can differ depending on the locations where they build,” says Sokoll. “By partnering with Westwood – and the relationships we have with multiple carriers – we can tap into emerging trends in the marketplace through the insurance rates, adjustments, and different types of policies in the data we collect. We also see the trends of where the reinsurance market impacts the ability to offer insurance in new builder markets. This is where Westwood shines. We pass this information on to our builder clients to help them make informed decisions. This all feeds back in as part of our investment in customer experience and a positive homebuying journey.”