Challenge
Embracing Digital Transformation
While digital transformation leverages technology to advance global economies, it also challenges the way organizations operate and deliver business value. This is true for many industries, including real estate that has been traditionally slower to adopt new trends. Today, many experts agree that the housing market will only continue to grow and how we buy, sell, and interact with properties will evolve in the upcoming years. In an effort to increase business efficiency and stay ahead of the competition, real estate executives must embrace new digital technologies to help boost productivity and surpass revenue goals.
Our customer is a top-rated real estate firm from Ontario, Canada. It prides itself on selling properties at the maximum price with the shortest time to close. In addition to buying and selling, the company offers superior marketing and interactive services such as home staging, professional photography, state-of-the-art video tours, and drone videography. These additional services tremendously benefit both buyers and sellers while helping agents sell homes faster.
Solution
Demand-Driven Challenges
With buyers driving up prices and leading homes to sell quickly, our customer recently faced an unprecedented increase in business volume that challenged its ability to coordinate showings based on a preferred property type and square footage. Agents often had a hard time finding appropriate time slots and organizing disjointed calendars in an effort to efficiently accommodate new requests and schedule showings based on clients’ needs.
The staff has also found it very difficult to prepare properties for prospective buyers as they were required to schedule appointments with staging companies, photographers, and interior designers before each showing. Without these additional services, showcasing the property’s strengths and minimizing its weak points to attract potential buyers became hard to achieve. As a result, the company saw an increase in lost deals and unsatisfied buyers.
Additionally, the management team has often found it challenging to make sense of the growing client database and properly map contact details from native Salesforce to the appointment calendar. The need for change became clear and they began to look for an automated solution to streamline the appointment scheduling process and eliminate manual effort.
Results
Steering Business in The New Direction
SUMO Scheduler was recommended by one of the company’s longtime clients. In the matter of just a few short weeks, technological challenges that stood in the way of the progress and prevented them from successfully closing deals were eliminated for the most part.
The sales team was impressed by the simplicity of the software where advanced configurable features matched prospective buyers with the right properties and agents via an easily accessible website link. SUMO’s Assignment Agent successfully mapped contact, service, and listings objects stored in Salesforce to the correct appointment type for making timely and error-free appointments. Mapping was accomplished with the help of SUMO’s “Schedule Now” feature that was easily accessible straight from the company’s website.
Additionally, “Email and Invite” functionality was configured to allow the inside sales team to seamlessly book an appointment while speaking with a customer on the phone. Email notifications were scheduled to go out automatically to decrease the risk of no-shows and improve client engagement. For virtual showings, web conference details were automatically inserted into calendar invitations so buyers who preferred remote interactions were able to visit individual properties from the comfort of their own homes.
Finally, the entire scheduling process was redesigned with the company logo, colors, and custom templates that were easily recognizable and accurately represented the brand. Without any help from graphic designers or coders, the sales team can now design emails and create a unified user experience that offers consistency and makes a positive impression.
While they love the technology, our customer is also looking forward to continuing to grow and expand their market reach. The management team knows they’ve only scratched the surface with SUMO. They plan on adding more unique features to their customer interactions. In the future, they will employ advanced strategies to help generate sales appointments directly from mass emails via custom calls to action and forms synced directly with the master calendar view. They also plan on extending the platform with additional applications such as automated forms, survey apps, and dynamic flows to produce even better results.
