CLIENT SERVICE AWARDS: Appearance Matters — Site Selection Magazine, January 2006

Appearance Matters by MARK AREND

aking the client look good to his or her superiors — or more valuable as a manager of key company assets — is at the heart of client service in today’s corporate real estate world. It’s not that delivering results on time and under budget or saving the client’s company huge amounts of operating costs or going the extra mile aren’t important. They are, and these factors always have been central to the success of service providers who have won the Site Selection/William Dorsey Service Provider Awards for the past seven years.

     But the winning class of 2005 understands the importance of helping to elevate the stature of the corporate real estate executive client wherever possible. For years, the definition of excellence in client service has been the ability to “partner” with a client to deliver strategic and monetary value to the client corporation. The more “seamless” that partnership is, the more value gets attributed to the client-service provider relationship. (Award applicant evaluators would dismiss those service providers who could not deliver tangible, real-world examples of the benefits of those partnerships — or the clients to verify them.)

     But today, real estate clients are leaning on their service providers more and more for the insights and tools they need to help their organizations compete effectively in today’s marketplace, because that will make them more valuable to their companies. One area where this is particularly apparent is the real estate manager’s role in complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance legislation.

     As one winning service provider, Equis Corp., puts it: “The corporate environment increasingly views real estate as a treasury asset, with significant fiscal impact potential. With the added pressures of new governance legislation and rules like Sarbanes-Oxley, it is clear that clients need an unprecedented degree of rigor, process orientation and transparency. Real estate data and processes must be transparent to the CEO and CFO in order to be able to sign off on transactions.” And who better to impress than them?

     “At the same time,” Equis maintains, “most real estate departments are under increased pressure to deliver high value real estate solutions, globally, with limited resources. Most need a real estate services provider who can act as an extension of their own resources.”

     Another way most of this year’s award winners are ratcheting up their clients’ value to their organizations is through technology. Web-based customer support systems are a must, if the service provider is providing multiple services or if multiple property assets are involved in the arrangement. Several companies taking home an award this year have invested substantially in upgrading their technology platform offerings, providing not just transaction information and communications but intelligence and transparency to end users. And that makes those clients look very good, indeed.

©2006 Conway
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