Land American announced a new customer-focused business model in Colorado (LandAmerica Introduces New Customer-Focused Operating Structure in Colorado: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance). Exciting? Innovative? Not really.
This is just a cost-cutting consolidation of back office operations and kicking their settlement agents out of offices and forcing them to work at home.
Under the new structure, Account Managers will work remotely from offices in their homes and be connected to LandAmerica through a host of technology- enabled tools. These Account Managers will concentrate on providing personal service to customers based on extended hours of availability for performing closings. Non-customer-facing functions will be centralized in a Colorado- based fulfillment center. Closings will be performed at various locations convenient for customers, including existing LandAmerica closing offices, Realtor® offices and leased executive suites.
This has nothing to do with serving the customer and everything to do with cutting costs. Our agency is set up to work from home, but it definitely is not superior to working in a office environment. We use it for after hours work and the occasional emergency/illness. Being away from the transaction processing makes the routine exchange of information and knowledge very difficult. Technology can annotate a file, but you lose the finer points of the transaction. It's a factory, not a client relationship anymore.
Settlement agents will become nomads, disconnected from the flow of the transaction, showing up at settlement with a file and a notary stamp.
A+ for spinning cost control into a customer focused initiative. D- for really serving the customer.
2 comments:
Interesting point of view. When I read this it seemed like a neat idea to allow my staff to work from home. Saves fuel and perhaps will make the employee's job satisfaction higher. I can always monitor his/her production volume and quality from the office. So it looks like I'm caught up in the spin, huh? You're probably right that this is just a cost cutting idea. But damn, that PR dept is good.
Having worked from home, it can work, but requires the right circumstances, job description, and employee personality.
If any of the ingredients are missing, it becomes a disaster.
Monitoring isn't the biggest concern, its keeping your employees part of the team. Informal knowledge transfer and relationship building cease. It’s very hard to have a “team” that doesn’t practice or play together. It’s the team that makes the difference between a mediocre organization and a great one.
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