A Digital Transformation Strategy for Estate Agents.

Digital transformation brings opportunities to use technology to drive efficiencies for your customer interactions and managing those interactions as a business. Both are crucial aspects for any estate agency wanting to survive (and crucially) thrive in the digital age.

The problem, in our experience, is that the scope of this "Digital Transformation" is often too narrowly focused on technology alone.

Although a crucial aspect, technology is only a tool to deliver or better deliver customer interactions and support processes. Selecting the right CRM is fundamental to any digital transformation, but if your team lack the right mindset to learn or change and current business practices are flawed, digital transformation will only magnify those flaws.

If correctly applied to all aspects of your Estate Agency, digital transformation will create new and modify existing business processes, culture, and customer experiences - meeting the changing customer expectations.

This reimagining of your business in the digital age is what we call "Digital Transformation". It begins and ends with how you think about, and engage with, your customers.

What Are the Main Areas of Digital Transformation?

That depends on who you ask!

Many thought leaders and experts advocate models that focus on four core areas, while others can emphasise anywhere from three to nine - depending on the industry and goals you are trying to achieve.

Given the industry and current economic climate, we have set a goal of; More efficient operations and delivering better value to your customers.

The 4 Key Areas of your Digital Transformation Strategy.

1) Empowering Employees.

Critical for organisational transformation, including digital transformation, Business Owners, Directors, and Managers must maintain employee motivation and skills development for your continued success.

To fulfil this, prioritise self-development, and make sure you and your team receive ongoing training. Even better - coaching. Mentoring - a bonus :)

2) Engaging Customers.

Customer engagement matters just as much as employee engagement - which means businesses must meet the evolving expectations of today's customers.

You can achieve this through personal interactions across all customer touchpoints, developing customer journeys, sharing helpful and unique content, providing free benefits, and taking a social approach. (By this, we mean Social Media Marketing).

3) Optimise Operations.

IT infrastructure modernisation. Traditionally the only aspect, and today the quickest way for digital transformation to help improve your agencies effectiveness and efficiency.

Go with caution and choose wisely. Most Estate Agency software provider APIs and Integrations only have one-way communication. If you update someone's details, it may not update across all the systems you have integrated.

A CRM should do more than lucidly store and share your data. Centralised data systems and the ability to turn data into information are the way forward.

4) Products and Services.

Innovation is one of the best ways to fuel success in the digital age. It will help you improve market share, capture more revenue, and stay relevant to your community.

For example: Allow your community to register directly into your CRM and automatically receive property alerts.

Remember, with innovation comes change, and like any change, it requires effort and introduces resistance, so it needs a clear vision and leadership from you.

Final notes.

Watching webinars and listening to podcasts are great, and we highly recommend it and self-development as part of your digital strategy or not. However, if you cannot apply it to your business or tech immediately, it won't help you.

Adapting your business to become more digitally mature and developing the skills and competencies to fulfil your digital business model are needed. So, look for software providers offering ongoing training and coaching to help you and your team better adopt change throughout the business.