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How to organize your customer care more efficiently as a growing residential developer
Are you growing steadily as a developer and homebuilder? Do you have more and more projects coming up? That’s great! We bet you’re having a lot of fun creating warm homes and cool workspaces. But you’ve probably been wondering how you’re going to manage that growing pipeline, too. Is your customer care team ready for this extra workload? Let’s take a look at how you can increase the number of projects without undermining your customer service or employee satisfaction.
This is what we often see happening in real estate: when a company starts to develop more projects simultaneously, managers start to wonder how they can organize their customer care team so that everyone can handle the extra workload. Spend less time per homebuyer? Add some extra people to the team? But nothing really changes; there’s still too little time in the day to get everything done. It’s not particularly fun for the homebuyer when the notice their customer advisor doesn’t have more time to answer their questions. It’s also not fun for the customer advisor, who no doubt feels rushed and stressed to help customers in only a limited amount of time. Result? Unhappy customer, unhappy team.
Adding value where it matters
You get it: scaling back your customer service is not an option. Instead of limiting time on service, let’s focus on spending this time better. More specifically: let’s let people spend time on what they’re good at and where they add value for the homebuyer. In the case of the customer advisor or project manager? That’s not updating Excel sheets, looking for information in a gazillion emails, or answering the same question over and over again. Nope, their job should be all about advising customers about their interior design, making sure the construction site can run smoothly, and last but not least: managing customer satisfaction.
How can you make sure they get to do the job they’re meant to do? Start by automating repetitive tasks or tasks that don’t add value. Getting the same question time after time? Give your homebuyers access to a list of FAQs. When a deadline looms – to choose that kitchen or floor tile we mentioned earlier, for example -, you can send out an automatic reminder to all homebuyers. Have they decided on a fabulous bathroom? With a smart platform, you can make sure the contractor and showroom get the signed plans automatically. No muss, no fuss.
“We can put more emphasis on customer experience thanks to our Ziggu platform”
Stefanie Vanden BrouckeCEO CAAAP
Creating stories
With the right tools, you can not only keep up with every project, but you can also free time to focus on improving your customer care. This is how CAAAP’s former CEO Stefanie Vanden Broucke said it once: “We had been struggling with the abundance of information shared between customer and developer. Sometimes it was like looking for a needle in a haystack to find a document for a client, for example. Other times it was a puzzle to map all the information about a particular project when a customer support employee left the team. Our customer support was often busy with various administrative tasks.”
But centralizing all communication with homebuyers and every single document about a project has opened up more time for CAAAP’s support team to focus on what matters: creating stories. “For us, it’s not just about customer satisfaction; it’s also about customer experience. Updates about the building location, ‘get to know the team’ posts or fun places near the site: these are all small elements that create a bigger story around the project. Our customers respond really well to that sort of thing. Some people become great ambassadors.”
Making ambassadors out of your homebuyers? How great is that? Allow your customer care team to shine, and your customers will notice!
