Helping an icon reinvent itself for the 21st century

As a general rule, customer experience innovations tend to be focussed outwards, which is perfectly understandable. After all, we’re the first to expound on how the customer should be at the heart of your organisation’s decision-making processes.

However, internal innovation can be just as significant, realigning your company around doing the right thing for the right reason and allowing you to do more with less.

Innovation has been part of our Client’s Real Estate Agents DNA since they were founded in 1988 and helped to revolutionise the Australian real estate market.

They came to us so we could work together to continue that history of innovation by developing a systemised approach to make it easier for Real Estate Agents to prospect, list and sell by creating a consistent, collaborative process that is efficient, supportive and fosters a positive team culture.

Our ethos is to connect with our customers as deeply as possible, working hand in hand with them thought the design process. We work with you, not on you.

We build trust by making sure you are at the centre of every decision we make and validate our design-led services within your environment to make sure they work for you.

To really understand what made our Client tick, we combined shareholder interviews that helped us define the problem and understand the current experience from their perspective with in-depth agent interviews and workshops to create alignment on project outcomes.

Alongside connecting with stakeholders and agents, we conducted online client surveys with over 500 clients, followed by in-depth interviews. The verbatims we uncovered from these interviews were translated into four need states that were directly connected to pain points in the customer journey.

Our research highlighted that, while sellers were exceptionally happy with their service, there was an opportunity to innovate how Agents interacted with their buyers and deliver new and unrealised value across the end-to-end journey.

In order to create an innovative new value proposition that would shift agent behaviours towards a more customer-centric culture, we first needed to understand their needs.

Our research provided the insights we required to create four need states for agents which would inform the content and functionality of the future vision.

These need states provided the clarity and transparency on what was working and what wasn’t, providing our Client with an investment path based on data, allowing them to maximise their ROI.

By understanding which areas agents required additional support, alignment, and empowerment, we built the basis of adaptive programs of work that fulfil multiple employee and client needs.

Synergising with our Client allowed us to uncover the areas in which innovation would lead to growth and let their agents express their own moment of truth that we translate into their needs states.

We worked with the company-owned sales leadership along with the key Franchisees to achieve an overwhelming agreement for the key challenges and the critical programs of work to solve them.

Using our deep understanding of their agent’s needs and requirements, we co-created eight programs of work to we could use to address them. Since we know our Clients work in complex environments, we validated these programmes of work with some of their premier agents.

Building this level of internal alignment allowed us to prioritise those actions that agents and clients valued most and downgrade activities that don’t drive satisfaction. This reduced overall wastage and established new ways to engage agents to improve satisfaction, drive retention and create additional revenue streams.

We focused on delivering a world-class experience to their 1500 agents to make them more productive, loyal, efficient, effective and empowering them to deliver a consistently excellent client experience.