news Real-estate marketing specialist Domain Group has abandoned spreadsheets and integrated with Salesforce’s cloud platform in a bid to improve its customer relationship management process.
Domain said in a case study published by Salesforce said that the move was prompted by the need to be first to market and capitalise on the “massive opportunity” it saw for its new mobile app Homepass, which connects interested real-estate buyers with agents, and provides both with the information they need throughout the purchase process.
“The process for home buyers hasn’t really changed in over 20 years as far as the open-for-inspection process goes. You still see agents on the weekends with clipboards and pens, stopping home buyers at the front door to gather their details,” said Tony Blamey, Chief Commercial Officer at Domain Group.
“You have one or two chances if you’re lucky in rolling out something like this quickly. It needs to be easy, it needs to be simple, and it needs to make sense,” said Damian Medhurst, Sales Operations Director, Fairfax Media (the parent company of Domain Group).
Domain Group made the decision to integrate Homepass with the Salesforce platform and in “just two weeks”, it said, the team had developed a two-step process to allow agents to activate the app.
The process uses Conga for the automatic creation and delivery of the contract, while DocuSign is used for signature management.
However, the two weeks required to plan and deliver the rollout was insufficient time to provide the team with in-depth training, Domain Group said. Instead, it used Chatter as a “collaborative support community”, where account managers could find answers to frequently asked questions or add their own.
Salesforce Service Cloud is also a part of Domain Group’s multi-channel support system, allowing the call centre to respond quickly to agent inquiries. This integrates back into Sales Cloud, giving the Group a “single view” of its many agents and customers.
Domain Group is also using Salesforce to track app adoption in real-time dashboards, meaning account managers can see which agents have activated Homepass. Further, leader boards reveal which account managers and states top the list in activations.
“Homepass is really evolving that open-for-inspection experience and giving agents back their Mondays. We wouldn’t have been able to take that into the market, the way we did, without Salesforce,” said Blamey.
Salesforce’s CRM platform provides companies with interfaces for case and task management, and a system for automatically routing and escalating important events. A customer portal allows customers to track their own cases, and includes a social networking plug-in.
Image credit: Clive Darra, Creative Commons