How might we im­prove re­sponse rates for real es­tate en­quiries?

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.

Capture, con­sol­i­date, en­able

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.

Web socket in­te­gra­tion for real time chat

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%.