Vijay Raja Homes targets 50,000 happy customers by 2025 with Salesforce

Chennai-based Vijay Raja Group, which began in 1949, has a seven-decade legacy. Today, the company is a business behemoth with nine companies across construction, healthcare, pharma, and hospitality. Vijay Raja’s distinguishing factor is a focus on customer satisfaction, powered by trust, timely delivery, quality and transparency.

The group’s flagship company, Vijay Raja Homes Private Limited has developed and sold over 8,73,3780 square feet of property to more than 5,732 happy customers. Its objective is to make luxury lifestyle living affordable.

“Our homes offer customers luxury amenities at affordable budgets, and a great lifestyle experience in a modern community,” says Ashwin Chendilnathan, Joint Managing Director, Vijay Raja Group. “We are one among the first backward integrated construction companies in South India. Since we manufacture all the construction material through our own Group companies, we’re able to pass the cost savings on to customers, while also ensuring quality.”

Today, Vijay Raja Homes has multiple construction projects in Chennai. The plan is to expand across Tamil Nadu and eventually, the whole of India in the near future. But to achieve that kind of scale, the company’s sales and services processes need to be highly robust.

“We want customers to experience a sense of luxury not just through our homes, but at every touchpoint of the customer journey—from enquiry, to sales, to handover, and maintenance service,” explains Chendilnathan. “We also want to offer customers a smooth, automated and intelligent self-service and online home booking experience through our VRX mobile application. Salesforce has helped on both counts.”

Vijay Raja Homes started looking for a more flexible CRM solution when it came up against certain limitations in its existing system, which couldn’t be customised to some unique business processes.

Also, the CRM solution did not integrate with all other data sources. With sales performance and property inventory data scattered across spreadsheets, teams lacked a consolidated view, hampering decision-making. Meanwhile, customer communication had to be managed manually. This wasn’t sustainable, especially as the number of customers increased. 

“We wanted a CRM system that would differentiate our customer experience while also integrating all processes on one platform, enabling our teams to perform better,” explains, Gunasekaran R, Head - Digital Marketing, Vijay Raja Homes. “We chose Salesforce because it is the world’s No. 1 CRM platform.”

Salesforce Sales Cloud has streamlined and automated Vijay Raja Homes’ entire enquiry-to-sales process. Leads from social media, property portals, and other channels are consolidated on the platform, making it easy for the pre-sales team to follow up on leads, and schedule site visits.

All property inventory is consolidated on Salesforce. “At a glance, our teams can see which homes have been booked and which ones are still available across various categories,” says Mohamad Ajarudeen, Manager - System Implementation, Vijay Raja Homes.“This helps us guide customers to the right purchase.”

The solution also supports property booking, maintenance of payment schedules, tracking of payment receipts, and more. With all customer data and interactions monitored on a single platform, Vijay Raja Homes can ensure that the entire customer journey is seamless.

Each team—be it pre-sales, sales, post-sales, or CRM—has access to the same source of truth on the customer journey. So, even when a new sales agent takes over from a previous one, there are no gaps in customer engagement.

“Thanks to Salesforce, all our teams are now speaking the same language with customers, using a seamless omnichannel communication model driven by artificial intelligence and process automation,” says Chendilnathan. “This is driving a high level of transparency and improved customer satisfaction.”

Sales Cloud also integrates with the telephony system, giving agents the information they need to personalise customer conversations. Through a web and mobile app, Sales Cloud pushes updates to customers regarding site visits, bookings, payments due, registration dates, handovers, and no-objection certificates.

“Customers don’t have to call our agents to resolve simple queries,” says Gunasekaran. “Most of the information they need is on the mobile app. This helps them save time, while also freeing up our agents to process more leads.” Sales Cloud has also helped the CRM team set up automatic email and WhatsApp notifications, informing customers whenever a construction project milestone is achieved.

All these capabilities are enabling Vijay Raja Homes to fulfil its vision of delivering a differentiated customer experience at every touchpoint. 

The company also uses the complaints management module of Sales Cloud to manage customer queries. With a 360-degree view of the customer, the CRM team is able to provide smarter service and respond swiftly to queries.

With Salesforce unifying data from across teams into one system, managers have greater visibility into performance metrics. With a single click, they can track the number of units sold per construction project, as well as the number remaining, the cost per unit, payments received, and other data points.

“Since all the information we need is instantly available on Salesforce, we spend less time on internal meetings,” notes Ajarudeen. “As a result, our productivity as managers has increased 50%-60%.”

The company also saw a 30% increase in the productivity of its sales and services teams within three months of implementing Salesforce, and an increase in overall team productivity by 25%.

In an industry that has been slow to adopt technology, Vijay Raja Homes is a Trailblazer. The company is now confidently driving up its sales volumes. “We anticipate an increase in sales to around 150-200 unit sales in our next project,” says Thelak Mukesh, Vice President- Sales, Vijay Raja Homes. “But instead of increasing our headcount to meet this demand, we’re choosing to scale up our technology.”

The company is also implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud to streamline and personalise marketing campaigns. Social Studio will help unify the company’s social media presence, monitor conversations around the brand, and enable more seamless communication. Meanwhile, implementation of the AI-powered Salesforce Advertising Studio will help the company reach audiences at large scale, and target them on their preferred channels through various campaigns.

Driving these digital initiatives is a much larger vision. “By 2025, we want to sell 25 million square feet, have 50,000 happy customers, and expand our operations to four states,” says Chendilnathan. “We’re confident that Salesforce will help us get there.”