Transparency in real estate sector

By reinvigorating steam into IT with the help of digital transformation, Khushru Bacha is transforming the real estate sector

KHUSHRU BACHA

LEADING REAL ESTATE CORPORATION

To achieve this, we have implemented Salesforce (SFDC) to automate the entire customer lifecycle process which involves generating and tracking leads, campaign management, closing sales and then ensuring higher levels of post-sales service to our customers.

Real estate companies often focus more on customer acquisition without thinking much about transparency every customer is looking for today. However, a few real estate companies are taking a more customer-centric approach to run their businesses. A leading real estate developer in Mumbai is extremely focussed on achieving elevated levels of customer satisfaction. It is, therefore, essential for them to have robust IT systems and processes to cater to the most important aspect of the company’s business: Customer Lifecycle Management.

The real estate major has integrated Salesforce seamlessly with its call centre and the application tracks every potential lead from the time he/ she calls or visits the company’s project site and maintains a history of the lead through the entire pre-sales process of meetings, follow-ups, quotations and conclusion of sale.

“It provides excellent visibility to the management of the sales pipeline for all our projects, the profile of customers interested in our projects, the number of cold, warm and hot leads progressing at each stage and gives a fair indication of the leads which are drawing towards closure. It helps us gauge the performance of our call centre executives, sales team, channel partners and the effectiveness of various campaigns. It gives us an idea of the profile of people who express interest in our projects, enabling us to target our future campaigns more precisely,” explains Khushru.

Salesforce application is helping the company provide higher levels of service to their customers. The company management has a zero-tolerance policy towards any slippage in customer service. “It was, therefore, essential for us to have IT systems which will make the customer complaint handling process transparent and trackable till closure. Salesforce, along with CTI telephony interface, helps us ensure a registered customer who calls our CRM helpline would land on the desk of the same relationship manager who has been assigned to him/ her. As soon as the call is picked up, Salesforce automatically pops up the customer details and the complaint gets logged,” says Bacha.

This prevents leakage of complaints, it gets tracked at each stage and is auto-escalated, based on a defined escalation matrix and there is a turnaround time defined for each escalation level. The ageing complaints can be tracked at each stage of escalation for each relationship manager which provides complete transparency to the management.

The company has created a self-help portal where customers can log in and view details of their project, its completion status, financial transactions and other such information.

“They can provide their feedback, log in complaints or queries and track the progress of the complaint or query on the portal. The system has helped us achieve automation and transparency of the complete lifecycle of customer acquisition process and post-sales relationship management process,” says Khushru.