MadeComfy increases productivity and returns for property investors
Find out how MadeComfy is driving automation in a manually intensive industry and maximising customers’ rental returns.
MadeComfy is a short-term rental management company which provides property investors with services ranging from property styling and advertising to cleaning and guest services. The Australian company is on a mission to become a global leader and relies on data and automation to scale and provide customers with competitive returns on their investments.
Connecting its operations on Salesforce has helped the company to accelerate growth and deliver seamless experiences to every customer and guest.
“Short-term rental management is a really hard business to scale without the right systems, which is why many traditional hospitality companies only manage around one hundred properties,” said Ben Willis, Chief Technology Officer, MadeComfy. “Our approach is different. Operating as a technology company first, we can manage 1,000 properties and are growing astronomically.”
Streamlining guest communication
When Willis joined MadeComfy, he was tasked to consolidate the systems the company had brought on as a fast-moving start-up. He started by focusing on the company’s biggest challenge: guest communication.
MadeComfy receives around 15,000 messages from guests each month and, in the past, its team had to switch between a number of systems to read and respond to these. These included the company’s ticketing system, CRM, and booking platforms like Airbnb or Booking.com.
To maximise efficiency, MadeComfy brought all the information it had about each property into Salesforce—including answers to frequently asked questions like whether properties have a pool or hair dryer. It then equipped team members to manage all communication and cases using Service Cloud and Service Cloud Voice.
“There is no way that we could handle the level of guest communication we have now without having brought it all into Salesforce and using features like omnichannel routing,” said Willis
The company has turned on Einstein Bots to further increase efficiency. The AI-powered chatbot uses the information already in Salesforce to automatically respond to questions such as where guests should park.
“We’ve surpassed our initial goal with Einstein Bots and are now resolving an average of 41% of chat requests daily using AI. That represents a successful start for us when it comes to AI and frees up our team to help guests with their most important needs,” said Willis.
Accelerating sales and onboarding
MadeComfy is now using Salesforce to accelerate its growth and bring more properties under its management. Insights from Marketing Cloud Intelligence have helped the company reduce its advertising spend while continuing to generate a high number of leads. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement nurtures customers throughout the sales cycle and beyond with automated and personalised journeys based on customer personas and preferences.
Sales reps use Sales Engagement to keep pace with the high volume of leads. They can track lead engagement and reach out with the right information at the right time to move deals forward.
Reps can also quickly create high-impact proposals using Tableau. They simply type in the property address for an accurate prediction of its short-term rental returns. Predictions are generated using rental data from CoreLogic and applying MadeComfy’s own predictive model. They are then visualised in Tableau with charts illustrating anticipated performance for the high season and low season as well as the entire year.
With just a few clicks, these charts are inserted into a proposal which can be quickly shared or emailed to prospective customers.
On top of all this, MadeComfy has a team of two that onboards hundreds of properties at a time with the help of Salesforce workflows and automation.
“We have removed all of the manual steps surrounding sales so that the team can focus on making calls. Our sales team can also handle more leads than ever before with a good rate of conversion,” said Willis.
Empowering partners
MadeComfy has extended its services to real estate partners through a new offering called MadeComfy Pro. As part of this offering, it has launched a partner community where real estate firms can access MadeComfy’s sales and service tools, including its Tableau-powered proposals.
Using Experience Cloud, the community was built in a matter of weeks as opposed to the four to six months it may have taken to develop a proprietary solution. Launched as a minimum viable product, the community allowed MadeComfy to test the viability of this partnership business model without a massive investment in development costs.
The community makes it easy for MadeComfy and its partners to collaborate on the management of properties. For example, MadeComfy creates tasks within Salesforce to hand off maintenance requests and other guest enquiries to the right real estate partners.
The company also communicates with real estate firms and partners like cleaners via Slack. The intelligent productivity platform allows MadeComfy to connect with partners anytime, anywhere to quickly resolve issues like missing keys.
Willis shared that the company has tested the market with a 12-month trial phase and now plans to roll out MadeComfy Pro more broadly. “We have a couple of partners already with portfolios of more than one hundred properties and believe this is a great option for them. It reduces the time spent on guest management and allows them to focus on customer relationships.”
MadeComfy has built a suite of custom training materials on Sales Enablement to quickly onboard future partners and set them up for success.
Tracking and optimising results
MadeComfy not only uses Tableau to predict rental returns, but to ensure those returns are met. “We constantly monitor how properties are performing as well as the market, so we can quickly adjust things like pricing to achieve predicted returns,” said Willis.
Tableau also provides visibility of metrics like occupancy rates and review averages and allows MadeComfy to drill down into its data to investigate any dips in performance and take action right away.
“With all of the performance insights in Tableau, we can see if we’re on track to meet our targets and make fairly accurate predictions about the months ahead,” said Willis. “The next step for us is to share Tableau dashboards with our customers and partners so they can have that same visibility into the performance of their properties.”
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