With razor-thin margins, labor challenges, and clients who expect to be instantly engaged on their channel of choice, the construction and real estate sector faces ever-growing pressures. Construction has seen productivity growth of just 1% annually over the last two decades, according to McKinsey, and the industry stands to lose 15 to 20% of its incumbent value if it can’t cut costs and improve productivity.
But while construction and real estate are ripe for technological disruption to improve these constraints, the sector is also typically slow to embrace change.
There are a number of reasons for this—and sometimes multiple factors at play: lagging awareness of the transformational value of workplace enablement tools such as cloud communications, concern over the cost of overhauling legacy systems, and mixed levels of technical aptitude and experience among workers.
Our findings from a RingCentral survey
But findings from the recent RingCentral customer success survey bust pervasive misperceptions that leave firms behind and demonstrate how embracing our solution impacts meaningful operational and customer-facing improvements.
51% increase in client satisfaction
A new home is the biggest purchase most people ever make, and the ability to provide personalized, timely service to buyers is an important differentiator in this sector. From the earliest stages in the buyer journey through to handing over the keys, close and proactive communication is critical for managing any problems that may arise, ensuring customer satisfaction, and driving positive word of mouth that can result in new and repeat business.
But the nature of the work also makes great communication an inherent challenge. Even customer-facing employees often work on-site or on the road, and important decisions—such as responding to an offer in progress or selecting a finish—sometimes have to be made in the moment. Communication mobility and flexibility are critical.
Available from any location and on any device, RingCentral provides a direct line to clients, enabling the 24/7 availability clients increasingly demand in this highly competitive sector, in turn driving a 51% increase in customer satisfaction.
30% decrease in telecommunication costs
Profitability in real estate and construction hinges upon the ability to deliver quality on budget. With the costs of many building supplies at an all-time high, it’s critical to find other efficiencies in order to maintain margins. But supporting multiple offices and locations—each with its own legacy on-premises communications systems—is an expensive, though necessary, proposition.
Switching to RingCentral takes a bite out of telecommunication costs. From our centrally managed administrative portal, which allows IT to fully monitor and manage communication tools from anywhere, to a reduction in hardware costs, RingCentral provides significant cost savings—freeing up more dollars to put towards meaningful action that can drive more revenue.
Our customers report a 30% reduction in such expenses on average—and 43% at the higher end—due to the improved ease and efficiency of deploying and managing our all-in-one cloud-based platform.
25% increase in employee productivity
Sales velocity is one of the most important metrics in real estate—the more deals a brokerage or firm can close in a shorter period of time, the stronger the bottom line. But the detail-oriented nature of the work means it’s important to optimize employee efficiency and productivity in order to maintain a healthy volume of sales—and to build a strong pipeline for the future.
RingCentral construction and real estate customers report overall productivity gains of 25% on average, as well as other significant improvements that make it easier to get the job done. For example, out-of-the-box integrations with leading tools such as DocuSign, Box, and Salesforce boost resource access for our users by 21%, making it easier for workers to support the real-time needs of clients, prospects, and partners. The resulting workflow improvements reduce unnecessary tasks, improve accuracy, and even help to drive job satisfaction, making it easier to recruit and retain top talent.
Matt Hasset, Director of SMB Integrated Marketing at RingCentral, says:
Mobility and access to resources on the go are two really important factors of success, across all the industries we studied. People in real estate and construction are especially mobile, given the nature of their job. Improving their connectivity and availability is a real game changer for productivity.
Building on better communication
The challenges faced by EAH Housing, which develops low-income housing and manages more than 100 properties in California and Hawaii, will be familiar to many construction and real estate firms: 475+ employees who require instant access to customer and property data from anywhere, legacy systems that don’t offer more than basic telephony, and so on.
“We missed a lot of business opportunities as well as customer service calls, simply due to a lack of voicemail,” said Jiano Ma, EAH’s Vice President of IT.
But with features such as internet faxing, call forwarding, voicemail, conferencing, and team collaboration that provide employees with more functionalities on the road than they used to have at their desks, Ma says:
RingCentral is definitely a game changer.
For ERA Grizzard Real Estate, a focus on implementing cutting-edge technologies has been a critical driver of its success. The franchise, which was the first in the nation to provide brokers and owners with fax machines and is now leading the charge on 3D home models and virtual tours, boasts a 98% customer satisfaction score. But delivering winning customer experiences is costly—and increasingly challenging for agents on the road.
Phillip Gagnon, ERA Grizzard’s COO, said, “Between the leasing charges for the PBX, the T1 lines connecting our seven offices, and the physical phones on every desk, it was a very expensive system. And most of the physical phones and landlines we were providing had become unnecessary as agents switched to using personal cell phones to always be accessible.”
He estimates the cost savings for phone alone after switching to RingCentral amount to $30,000 to $40,000 annually, while also significantly improving both the customer and employee experience.
A closer look at the RingCentral advantage
With results that encompass 16 key business metrics, there’s much more to unpack from our customer success survey. In this #CustomerSuccess blog series, we take a closer look at the RingCentral advantage as illustrated by the survey results and explore some of the specific improvements seen across key business segments and within industry vertical markets.
To learn more about 14 key improvements our customers in real estate and construction have seen after switching to RingCentral, download our datasheet specific to the construction and real estate sector now.
Originally published Jul 27, 2021, updated Dec 30, 2022
