When Bob and I sat down for this conversation, there was one word that kept coming up: trust.
Bob’s path into the industry wasn’t traditional. He started as a psychologist before moving into business consulting, eventually applying behavioral research to home building. That work became Eliant, now part of Zonda. For 40 years, his team has studied what it actually takes to turn a satisfied buyer into something more useful—a passionate advocate who brings their friends in without being asked.
Today, his team tracks homebuyer feedback at scale, with a single focus: what actually drives a customer to refer a builder without being asked.
In this conversation, we cover how that idea has evolved over time, what the data says about referrals, where builders tend to get it right—and where they don’t.
Bob, you have a fascinating background that led you into home building and the customer experience. Let’s start from the beginning. How did you get here?
I started off as a psychologist—that was my entire undergrad and graduate career. I spent a few years working in mental hospitals and clinics in Michigan, loved it, but eventually realized I wasn’t well suited for the clinical setting. I took too much of my work home with me. A colleague pushed me toward the business sector, and I ended up at General Mills for seven years, running motivational programs for their thousand-person sales team. That work led me into survey research—evaluating sales teams for Kroger, Safeway, Albertsons. I left in 1984, moved from Minneapolis to Southern California, and started National Survey Systems. Then I got a call from Dana Kovac at Shea Homes, who invited me to meet with John Shea Jr. That’s where everything started with home builders.
And that evolved into Eliant, which has now joined Zonda. I’ve heard you use the term “passionate advocate.” Can you walk us through what that means?
Eliant in its basic form was a research company. But over the last 20 to 25 years, we’ve really evolved into a consulting company. It’s not what you find out from these surveys, it’s how you use it. That’s been the reason why we’ve been around for 40 years—our guideline is to help builders improve the customer experience to the level that customers are willing to go out and refer their friends, their colleagues, their relatives back to that builder.
The original concept was to turn homebuyers into advocates for the builder. But when we started doing focus groups with those advocates, we realized there’s a big difference between a buyer who says “yes, I’d refer you if asked” and one who goes out proactively and brings their friends in without being asked. A passionate advocate doesn’t wait to be asked. They drag their friends in.
Stay on referrals for a moment, because you talk a lot about their actual value. Explore that with us.
Our clients average about 24% of sales from referrals. The NAHB estimated the national average at around 8% to 10%. But the value goes beyond the sale itself. People who are referred are more likely to buy, more likely to make a purchase decision sooner, less likely to cancel, and more likely to refer friends once they become clients. We just redid this research about a month ago—the scores completed by referred buyers are significantly higher than the ones sent back by non-referred buyers. There’s a real longevity to the value of referred buyers.
I’ve heard you say that customer satisfaction is not the goal. How can that be?
Satisfied customers are better than dissatisfied customers—no one’s going to argue that point. But the end game is not to just generate happy customers. We want customers who are absolutely delighted. That’s the difference between an advocate and a passionate advocate. That passionate advocate will go out there and drag their friends in proactively. And to do that, our research is very clear. The most important behavior is communication—keeping buyers informed about the status of their home and of their loan. I don’t care how much experience you have as a buyer. There is always anxiety somewhere in this process. The number one driver of referral likelihood is keeping your buyer informed.
Trust through communication. Tell us more about that.
An anxious customer will never refer a friend. Why would they want to bring someone they care about into a situation with stress and anxiety? The bottom line on reducing anxiety is to be transparent and proactive in your communication. Not waiting for the customer to ask questions, but proactively communicating the status of both construction and loan. If we can reduce that anxiety through communication, we’re going to gain referrals to an extent that was heretofore unreachable.
Let me take you into three pillars—performance, the promise, and customer service. Start with performance.
We’ve done regression studies with USC’s Marshall School of Business—taking every question on our move-in survey and identifying which ones have the biggest impact on willingness to refer. What we found is that there are seven behaviors that affect performance and referral likelihood, narrowed down by department. That’s what operational improvement looks like in our world.
The second pillar is the promise. And the word I always take away from your thinking on this is realism.
The biggest promise of all is the first question every buyer asks at contract: when will I be able to move my family into my new home? Trust is based on the differential between what you say you’re going to do and what you actually do. If you do less than what you promised, you’re not developing trust. You have to always beat the promise—not just meet it, because that’s just satisfaction. We don’t need no satisfaction. What we need is delight. You never make a promise that you don’t intend to beat. It’s a structured process.
You intend to beat—not to keep. Key takeaway. Now take us home with customer service.
Most referrals come from homeowners, not from homebuyers. You don’t get referrals because you have great quality—you qualify for earning the referral because you have great quality. Where you earn it is in the way you provide service after the sale. It’s not the quality of the home, it’s the manner in which you deliver it.
Customer service is a profit center. It’s not a necessity—it’s a profit center. You’re going to earn referrals by providing an over-the-top customer experience, by being proactive, by only making promises you can beat, by showing up on time, by holding your trades accountable. Did your guy come in on time? Did they have a drop cloth? Did they clean up after themselves? Those are the key behaviors—and that’s how you earn referrals during the customer service process.
Give us the lesson learned. The most important thing you take away from every interaction with builders.
Three things. Never make a promise without planning to beat it. Be proactive in your communication—buyers don’t expect that, so when you do it, you’re exceeding their expectations immediately and reducing their anxiety. And pay attention to customer service as if it’s your lifeline to generating a reputation in your marketplace. You have to bring your customers into your sales team—they should become unpaid members of your sales team. You can narrow it down to those three things, and it makes a huge difference.
Eliant is now part of Zonda. What does that evolution look like?
We came in in November, and since then we’ve been in continuous conversations about how to improve on 40 years of work. One of the most exciting frontiers is using AI to interpret and summarize the data, so builders can get pointed at exactly what they need to do without having to read through data for two weeks to figure it out. We’re also expanding Zonda’s TrustBuilder program—broadening the question set, improving how results are presented, and growing the comparison database. By the end of the year, what’s available to Zonda clients is going to be absolutely extraordinary.
