How automation helps this real estate company level up their customer experience

Everybody wants to find their dream home. But when it comes to finding and buying it, you need a real estate company focused on putting your needs first. That's where Orchard comes in. 

Orchard is looking to take the stress out of selling and buying homes by providing a smooth customer experience—and that requires personalized customer profiles that are up-to-date across multiple platforms. 

Corey Egan, Director of CRM at Orchard, recognized that to grow the company while still providing great services to their customers, they needed to streamline their lead management processes across their different apps. 

"Being a startup in a highly competitive sector, we wanted to grow rapidly but also have a focus on acquisition channels that are low cost, like a referral program," says Corey. "One trouble with scaling rapidly, though, is creating efficient processes that not only save time but also help our company in the long run."

Corey began looking to automation to level up their referral program and referred customer profiles so they could provide a better customer experience.

The challenge: Cultivating leads and targeting new customers

Orchard was struggling with quickly updating customer info in their email marketing system collected from their referral program web forms. To ensure potential, new, and past customers were getting the right emails, they spent hours each week making sure they updated customer data across their platforms.

They wanted to improve their lead lifecycle with targeted emails, but there just wasn't enough time in the week to compile data and manually send email campaigns.

"Before Zapier, in order to launch new programs and marketing email campaigns, we would have to rely on the engineering team," says Corey. "Since we are a smaller company, our engineering team is constantly strapped for time and resources."

Another challenge Orchard faced was getting new leads to the sales team. Having to manually notify the sales team was repetitive work that got in the way of letting Orchard focus on the important stuff—like ensuring their customers were getting tailored content based on their stage of the buying or selling process.

The solution: Using automation to streamline their lead funnel

Orchard wanted to spend less time compiling data and more time communicating with their customers. So, they turned to automation. With Zapier, Orchard automatically collects new leads, sends cultivation emails, and hands new leads to the sales team. 

"Zapier has allowed us to maintain a robust customer profile that allows us to personalize customer communication, diagnose customer experience issues, and helps us share learnings across the company."

To streamline their lead management, Orchard created the following Zap:  

1. When a lead submits a referral form on a Webflow landing page, a new user is automatically created in Iterable. 

2. Based on the form submission details: 

• A custom event is added to the user in Iterable that includes relevant metadata to personalize the referral email experience. 

• The referral offer and the friend's name that referred them are added to the customer profile. 

3. If a referral offer or friend's name is added in Iterable, it also gets added to a corresponding Google Sheet for tracking. 

4. If the lead is new, an email with the lead's information is sent to the Sales team so they can proactively reach out. 

"This automation allows us to add data to our newly referred lead profile pages within our CRM. From here, we can trigger appropriate communications that are personalized to the new lead," Corey shares.

"Additionally, we're able to track the overall volume of our referral program easily by logging data automatically in a spreadsheet and help improve conversion by engaging with our Sales department in an automated fashion. Relevant team managers can then use this information to troubleshoot customer experiences in real time and improve the customer experience immediately."

Zaps like these are great starting points for lead management and tracking with Webflow and Iterable: 

The result: Less time entering data, more time spent with customers

This one Zap saves the Orchard team two to three hours a week. By automating their lead management, Orchard keeps their customer data enriched—in less time—allowing them to provide a customized, intentional customer experience. 

Orchard has also leveraged Zapier to manage processes such as circulating survey feedback to relevant teams across the organization. This has allowed them to scale while keeping the customer top of mind.

"Since we have grown to almost 600 employees, it's imperative that people across departments have the ability to see what our customers love and want to be improved about our services," says Corey. "This allows not only the marketing team but also our sales team, home advisors, and investment team to impact change from the customer responses we receive."

Zapier allows Orchard to streamline their lead funnel and seamlessly distribute customer information to different teams. Now employees across the company can access customer data instantly—ensuring Orchard can provide a personalized customer experience at a moment's notice.