Recent development plans in the GCC such as Saudi’s vision 2030, the upcoming Dubai Expo and Dubai’s vision 2040 have clearly boosted the region’s economy and spiked the interest of investors for Middle-Eastern Real Estate. Although COVID19 impacted the sector, many companies have taken this as an opportunity to re-boost their business by conducting the full digital transformation of their organisation.
Those of you in the sector know it better than me: real estate has often been synonymous with inefficient processes, piles of paperwork, extensive back and fourths with clients, delays, fragmented collaborations between stakeholders and lots of manual office work. This is why many Real Estate actors are deciding to invest in CRM and CX platforms that span across all of their departments from design, sales, marketing and operations to contracts, handovers, quality control and snagging to customer service call centres, community management and facility management. Property Tech impacts and facilitates all aspects of real estate development, sales and maintenance.
Because local brokers are driving sales like never before (roughly 80% broker and 20% direct in dubai and 60% broker driven to 40% direct in other regions), we’ve seen an exponential rise in demand from developers in the region to migrate to self-service platforms, for their Broker channel and direct sales team. And because more sales also means more clients, there’s been a similar rise in demand for customer portals and apps that act as a one-stop solution for homeowners, giving them the ability to manage their property and simultaneously providing clients with a community and luxury experience.
When talking about property tech, we are looking at platforms that allow you to fully own the customer experience from start to finish. When the technology is rightly implemented, the seven major phases that a customer goes through are:
Awareness
Engagement starts by using your different marketing channels to make sure you spread awareness amongst your target audience. In return, these channels will provide a steady stream of leads that will be qualified and nurtured through your marketing and sales automation set-up.
Lead / Opportunity
Property Purchase
Property Ownership & Details
Once the purchase has been completed, the customer is handed over to the post-sales department. Customer360 provides the ultimate post-sales experience for customers, granting them access to a range of information and services. Your post sales team should be able to access 360 details of customers relating to the property they own, including invoices, payments, contracts, KYC documents, service requests, work orders, customer satisfaction survey scores, service charges, community requests, access card registration information etc.
Additionally, with unit360 the sales, sales operations and pos- sales teams can set up an inventory catalog that gives them the ability to manage dynamic pricing for each unit and have an overview of all unit details (pricing, payment plans, location maps, floor plans, opportunities, invoices, payments, service requests, DLP requests, contracts, resale information, PDCs etc.)
Construction updates & payments
Handover and DLP
The unit completion platform should send invitations for final snaggings and for handover closure. Once the handover has been done, the defect liability period (DLP) is kicked off. To ensure efficient management of the DLP, the digital platform provides a Gantt chart based on a company-specific DLP tracking setup. Field agents and contractors can easily share updates of the DLP jobs with the internal teams using the field agent app. The platform also has the capacity to generate signed contracts and reports on DLP job completions, which helps take the post-sales customer experience to the next level.
Community Living
Customer support teams are able to quickly resolve customer enquiries in a timely manner through the use of multiple channels: call center, WhatsApp, emails, live chat, app and portal. In order to ensure high customer satisfaction, elevate the experience, and save service costs, support teams have access to a virtual and remote assistant that enables them to start a video call with their customers right from the CRM.
As you can see, property technology ultimately drives property management success and resident satisfaction. Our clients have seen a significant difference since their digital transformation. They speak up :
Dar Wa Emaar
Cloudworks were invaluable in supporting us in delivering Salesforce as a customer engagement platform. We now have a complete 360 degree view of all our customers and units. We were able to drive efficiency across the organisation, by streamlining and automating many previously manual processes.
Cloudworks have a detailed knowledge of the Salesforce Platform and in Delivering complex Digital transformation projects which ensured that the project was delivered successfully and on time. Their extensive experience in working with many leading real estate companies meant that we benefited from their knowledge regarding best practices in our industry.
Manish and his team showed great attention to detail and flexibility throughout the delivery and I would have no concern whatsoever in endorsing them as a partner.
Jubail Island
Working with Cloudworks has been an outstanding experience! We are grateful for the enthusiasm Manish and his team have shown while handling the project, and we are extremely pleased with the final outcome of our collaboration. Not only did they show great flexibility and care during the process, but we truly appreciated their knowledge exchange when it came to teaching us best practices and helping us shape our new system.
This marks a milestone in the digital roadmap we’ve set out for our company, and the results are already very obvious to us. For example, transitioning from manual documentation to one-click document generation of all our units has helped us save heaps of time, and allows us to be consistent in terms of brand image. We’ve also witnessed the fact that automating our sales processes has allowed us to gain visibility of the inventory status and ongoing sales activities, helping managers forecast and plan activities, launches and prices accordingly.
Manish and his team did a fantastic job and their extensive knowledge of the Salesforce Platform has been instrumental in leading the project to the finish line. We would definitely recommend them as a partner!
IMKAN
At IMKAN, we don’t sell real estate. We’re selling a dream. Salesforce helps us get closer to customers so we can keep that dream alive throughout the sales lifecycle and beyond. Salesforce has a big footprint in the real estate industry, which made it a really good base on which to build our own customised platform. Implementation could have been really challenging, but everyone rallied together to make it a success. In fact, the timing worked out well because working from home would’ve been a lot more difficult without Salesforce. We were able to digitalise a lot of manual processes to make them more efficient. We wanted to make sure work was distributed evenly to ensure no one was overloaded with leads and every customer gets the best level of service. With Salesforce, we’ve still got the flexibility to go in manually if a customer has a preference for a specific sales rep based on language needs, for example. Salesforce helps us to make the most of every opportunity, and sales have increased exponentially as a result. Having a central platform for sales and marketing works really well – we can make the whole customer lifecycle seamless, even with a distributed operation. The next step is to use Salesforce to support cross-selling. Service Cloud will help us to continue earning trust with customers through greater transparency. For example, if a customer spots a defect at their property, they can take a photo that will be uploaded straight into Salesforce for us to address, building trust in us as a developer.In our industry, time is money. Salesforce helps us stay ahead of the game and gives us the agility to adapt to changes quickly. We’ve always set out to be a people-centered company, and with Salesforce we can turn our relationships into partnerships that work better for everybody.