Kindred Engagement Portal

Understanding the problem

Currently, more than 60% of real estate enquiries go unanswered. Traditionally, your query goes to the listed rental or sales agent, not a customer service team. This leaves a considerable margin for human error and relies on the agent's motivation to respond. Suppose the agent has just contracted the property, they won't be interested in your enquiry; they're interested in their next listing. To address this problem, we completed a two-week scope, with four weeks of development required to solve the initial problem.

Ideation & research

The project was estimated to take four weeks to scope. However, the team quickly identified an assumption that would invalidate further investment. To overcome this, we stopped scoping and moved into development.

The resulting development goal was to validate if user's enquiring would open SMS and email follow-ups to their enquiry. The test system later named Customer Property Portal (CPP) was built in three weeks.

The solution

The CPP captured enquiries from all property platforms, recorded them in Kindred's CRM and sent each customer an email/SMS response within 25 seconds with a unique link on the status of their enquiry. Kindred could control the status of the query via a separate user group and send back a response.

Overwhelmingly 87% of users engaged with their CPP link to see the status of their enquiry and its details. This validated the initial assumption and unlocked the team to continue further scoping of the system.

The most prominent benefit was the integration of WebSockets that allows the Kindred team to respond with realtime chat, document upload and other features like timed reminders. From March 2020 to August 2020, over 15,000 responses to enquiries have now been sent with a reply rate of 100%.