Real Estate Customer Experience Lives or Dies With the People You Train

When I think about my favourite brands, a huge part of what made me fall in love with them had nothing to do with the product itself.

It was the people, and how they behaved in moments that actually mattered.

Take Virgin Atlantic. It’s a genuinely cool airline that also seems to really understand the assignment when it comes to premium travel for millennials like yours truly. Getting a pedicure in the Heathrow First Class lounge, being gently ushered, at the last minute, into my seat in slippers, and then sleeping all the way to New York remains one of my fondest flying memories.

(You need to understand: I usually fly EasyJet and Ryanair.)

But the real reason Virgin won me over wasn’t the lounge or the seat.

It was the people.

Michelle Visage, a judge on RuPaul's Drag Race, appears with Virgin Atlantic Employees in a publicity photo announcing a new gender identity policy. CREDIT: Washington Post, Virgin Atlantic

The moment Virgin Atlantic's customer experience earned my loyalty for life

I was once flying back to the UK from Zimbabwe after my grandmother’s funeral. I was exhausted, grieving, and emotionally raw in that way that only loss can produce.

I’d been assigned an aisle seat next to a woman who was clearly struggling to fit, fasten her seatbelt, lower the divider, exist comfortably in the space she’d been given.

Before anyone could intervene, the passenger on her other side - a loud, angry man - began laying into her. I'm not exxagerating when I say he was actually shouting, and calling her fat over and over again, while refusing to sit down.

The entire cabin - I mean everyone - was shocked.

It was brutal. And deeply humiliating.

I normally avoid confrontations with strangers on public transport, even those who are clearly in the wrong, because I operate on the assumption that the world is full of people who might be unhinged.

Nevertheless, I tried telling him to relax, and calm down. Not because I was trying to convince him to fly from Johannesburg to London without a seat or a seatbelt, but because I knew something important: the cabin crew would deal with it properly when they reached our row.

And they did.

They didn’t escalate the situation, lecture or make a show of it. They quietly moved me to another seat without drawing attention to anyone involved. Later on they bumped me up to first class.

Ace.

What struck me most was that they understood the moment.

They could see that other passengers were watching, and recognised the humanity in what was unfolding. And crucially, they were empowered to act.

That single interaction cemented my loyalty to Virgin Atlantic.

To this day, when given the choice, I will always choose them.

Even when I heard they were launching a cruise business, despite having absolutely no desire to go on a cruise, I was like.

Well… maybe I’d give that a go. I mean, it's Virgin, so it's going to be dope.

That’s what trust does. It travels with the brand.

When culture fails, the damage is permanent

Compare this to a Reddit thread I came across last week - asking , “Is there a brand you refuse to work with no matter what?”

The most upvoted answer was another airline.

The reason? The forced examinations carried out on female passengers on a flight from Australia, including a seventy-year-old woman, after a baby was found abandoned in an airport bathroom. Not on the plane. In the airport. After landing.

You don’t arrive at an outcome like that by accident.

That requires a cascade of failures: poor judgement, lack of safeguards, broken accountability, and a culture where people either don’t feel empowered to question decisions, or don’t think they should.

Once trust is broken at that level, no amount of marketing can repair it.

Customer experience doesn’t “just happen”

Great customer experience, like strong corporate culture, is not accidental.

It is deliberately designed. It is communicated clearly. It is reinforced repeatedly through training, leadership behaviour, and accountability.

And yet, in real estate, I see something extraordinary happen again and again.

Building owners and landlords routinely outsource the single most important part of their business: the daily human interactions with the people who pay them, without clarifying their expectations or properly training the people representing them. They then assume everything is fine without checking.

The result is predictable. And expensive.

Why we focus on customer experience training at Real Service

At RealService, we work with real estate businesses that understand something fundamental: experience is shaped on the ground, in everyday interactions, not in boardrooms.

We’ve just completed an eight-day customer experience training programme with a large UK landlord, involving 106 managers, directors, and supply partners across their organisation. The feedback was strong, not because we delivered theory, but because people were given the tools and confidence to show up differently.

If you’re a real estate asset manager, operations manager, or another senior leader and planning your annual budget right now, here’s my honest advice: set something aside for a customer experience training.

Because in the moments that matter, your people are the brand.

To find out more about our approach to customer experience training - check out our website here.

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