Best-in-class real estate customer experiences need Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Successful CRM implementations don’t start with software, though. The process is equally, if not more, important than the solution you choose.

CRM starts with a deep understanding of who your customers are and what they want. Each brokerage (or agent) must also understand what their value proposition is and tailor a CRM solution that leverages this value proposition AND meets customer expectations.

This is the story about how my brokerage, CondoDomain.com, investigated CRM, made decisions and then implemented a successful solution. We started the process by addressing our 5 golden rules for great customer experiences, and worked hard to identify how each specifically fit into the real estate industry, our model, our agents and our customers. These rules, and how they fit us, were the foundation for our CRM requirements:

Immediate response to inquiries – when leads come in, they have to be routed to our agents so that we can respond to them within 1 minute.

If at first you don’t succeed with contact, try again and again (but not too much) – it is important to regularly reach out to leads where we have not made contact, but equally important not to harass them. We need a system where we schedule a strategic follow up plan and keep track of all contact attempts.

Never, ever miss an appointment – it doesn’t matter if it is email, a phone call or in person meeting. If we make a commitment to a customer we can NEVER miss or even be a minute late for it.

Match up client profiles with the correct agent and/or strategy – we want to use any and all information we have about a lead to match each customer up with an agent who can best help them. Our agents and processes need to match our clients’ needs.

Analyze and optimize – data is king. Our CRM system needs to keep track of everything. Subjective guesses and sales expertise can provide valuable insight, but data doesn’t lie. Data will tell use what customers are responding to (or not) and will illuminate the path to improved customer experiences and a more optimized business.

With these rules in mind, we then developed a detailed business specification. This document (and process) identified all of the functional requirements we needed in a CRM solution. From this business document, we then developed a technical specification. This document and process basically interprets business rules and puts them into a language that coders (IT developers) understand.

With a ton of homework done, and our project scope well developed, we set about identifying a technology solution. Again, we wanted to find a CRM solution that allowed us to meet our golden rules and live up to our best-in-class service promise. We were currently using a leading out-of-the-box SaaS CRM solution, but it was not tailored for real estate. We investigated some other general solutions, as well as several that were developed specifically for real estate agents. After an extensive search we basically threw out the generic CRM software. We dug in deep to one of the industry-specific solutions, but in the end determined that it wasn’t the correct fit. We wanted a solution that was extremely streamlined – one that addressed each of our important customer touch points but without any extra features on top of this. Our philosophy was that we had to make our solution extremely easy and relevant in order for our agents to use it. A fancy and fully loaded CRM solution doesn’t do any good if none of your sales people use it (or use it correctly).

We finally determined that we had to build our own customer and agent centric solution. We set out to leverage best practices from the big solutions but also make sure our solution fit our unique style. Additionally, agents needed to buy in – and use the software – so we made sure they were a part of the planning and implementation process. Finally, all management needs to feel like they have visibility, control and ownership of the solution. We had everyone in management sign off at each step during the development and implementation. This is truly our team’s solution.

What is our final result? We have a dynamic CRM solution that incorporates key functionality and best practices like the big providers offer. We have one that doesn’t have erroneous bells and whistles that are not relevant to our agents’ process or our business goals. We have a solution that our agents and management uses. And… We have CRM that helps us optimize our business and create happy and loyal customers.

[graphic by Virtual Assistant Chick]