Three things that would have improved our moving experience

I haven’t published an article here in a while. The main reason for this is that my wife and I have been swallowed up by moving house for the past few months.

However, we didn’t just move. We also moved city and country.

In particular, we moved from Brighton in England 500 miles (excuse the pun!) north to Edinburgh in Scotland, which operates among other things laws and regulations in the property market.

Now our move was successful and we were helped along the way by some really great legal professionals. But overall, the service we got from several other lawyers, banks, mortgage brokers and brokers we encountered along the way was very, very patchy.

I was amazed at how important and stressful moving is for many people, how competitive the market is and how many companies claim that customer service is very important to them.

However, after thinking about our entire experience, it seems to me that not much would have to change to turn a patchy service experience into one that was more enjoyable and memorable for all the right reasons.

Here’s a list of three simple things that, if the majority of the professional services companies we dealt with had done, would have made our experience that much better.

1. Manage our expectations

Set and manage our expectations from the start. Help us understand what to expect, what is expected of us and what we can expect from you.

That means we need to understand how long things take and we are warned that surprises, additional and new requests for information can happen because every transaction is different and things change.

Apply your experience and judgment here as much as possible as you are the expert in these matters, not us.

2. Keep us posted

Keep us updated on how it’s going, what we can expect to happen and when it’s likely to happen.

But make sure you do that proactively.

Don’t force us to come after you for information if we haven’t heard from you in a few days. You are the one who has direct access to systems and information.

Especially now that we are approaching the end of a working week. Understand that if we don’t hear from you by the end of the week, we might start to worry about what’s happening over the weekend. There’s nothing worse than going into a weekend without knowing what’s happening, especially if you’re moving house.

So, even if you need to message us when it’s necessary of the week that you don’t have any new information, but everything is on schedule and we should enjoy our weekend, please do. It will help. After all, ‘no new information’ is also information.

3. Lawyer for us

We know that unexpected requests for more or additional information can occur. However, if these conflict with what was previously requested, please be our advocate and push back the new request to find out why this happened as it was not initially requested. Don’t just be the messenger. Fight our corner and make us believe that you are on our side, not just a messenger or just for the commission or your fee.

These things on their own wouldn’t have made the process stress-free.

After all, moving is a big problem.

But they would have made things a little easier and would have helped us look back on our experience with more pleasure.