REA Group started out on its transformation with Salesforce three years ago. The company’s legacy systems were not shaped to the business that it was fast becoming. It needed a foundation to scale and to simplify its processes to provide more seamless experiences. Most importantly, it needed a better understanding of its customers and their end-to-end journey.

Salesforce Customer 360 provides REA Group with this comprehensive view of customers. This includes businesses and real estate agencies across various property markets who advertise on REA Group’s websites.

Smrithi Kamtikar, Senior Manager Product, at REA Group, said, “Salesforce helps us identify and treat each customer as an individual and supports our goal to drive deeper engagement. A great example is the engagement we now have with real estate agencies. We’re able to develop relationships with the whole of the office rather than one or two key decision makers.” 

One of the areas that has benefited the most from REA Group’s transformation is sales. In the past, the company’s sales teams were heavily reliant on spreadsheets and manual processes and there was a lack of consistency in the way they managed leads and opportunities.

Salesforce provided an opportunity to start over and streamline the entire sales process, from capturing leads to capturing payments. Salesforce CPQ is central. It automates quotes and invoices for faster turnaround times and provision of services.

“Salesforce CPQ has essentially brought our quoting processes into the 21st century. It has also improved the quality of our data by moving the information out of spreadsheets and into Salesforce,” said Kamtikar.

REA Group has rolled out CPQ across its businesses in Asia and within its Residential and Commercial sales teams in Australia.   Inbox has been rolled out too and adds to the productivity of the sales team by allowing them to create and manage opportunities in Salesforce right from their email box. REA Group has also optimised workflow so that when leads come in from a web form or referral they are automatically routed to the right person and can be easily managed in Salesforce.

"By syncing emails with Salesforce and optimising our processes for mobile, we’ve set the sales teams up to work more efficiently and be more productive on the road,” said Kamtikar.  “Adoption is continuing to increase as a result and the amount of contacts and data we have in Salesforce is growing.”

With greater insights on leads and customers, REA Group is able to use Marketing Cloud to personalise communications. It is also starting to automate customer journeys to streamline service and onboarding, and is using insights from Einstein to optimise the language and timing of communications.

Rodney House, Sales Adoption Lead, Customer Excellence at REA Group, said that the ability to personalise interactions had been valuable in getting the right messages out to customers during COVID-19. For example, as agents in each state faced different restrictions, REA Group was able to keep them informed of relevant news and updates. The company also ran a campaign to promote a new Digital Inspections feature on its website and app. These measures were well received by customers and many have since expressed appreciation for all of the communication sent at a time when it was needed the most.

“We had a large focus leading up to 2020 on improving the quality of our data and getting the segmentation right, not realising just how important that was going to be,” said House. “We’re now seeing the benefits as we use Marketing Cloud to send the right message to the right person at the right time. We’re also able to deliver a more consistent experience across sales and marketing.”