Streamlining their tech stack
eXp Realty is the largest independent real estate company in the world, with more than 90,000 agents across 24 global real estate markets and in all 50 U.S. states. eXp Realty is strategically aligning and consolidating its technology stack to enhance operational efficiency and streamline processes across the organization.
Business Operations and global team members working in their market locations used whatever solution they found most convenient, such as location-specific Zoho, Constant Contact accounts, and even spreadsheets. Nothing was connected, which made it difficult to see and understand the agent lifecycle as a whole.
Teams also lacked a comprehensive solution to track KPIs and gain insights into agent performance, as Marketing Automation Specialist Nicolette Kleinhampl recalls:
“Our teams were using whatever was at their disposal,” Nicolette says. “It was expensive, and we couldn’t track performance of marketing efforts. We really wanted to simplify our tech stack and consolidate everything onto one platform. That way, it would be more effective for us to manage it as a company.”
Inconsistent branding
This complicated tech stack made it difficult to ensure consistent branding globally. “We want to create a cohesive brand image, and agencies in different countries want to be relevant to their audience, so they would create their own materials. Something that looks American is not going to work for a Colombian audience, for example,” Nicolette says. “But that made it very difficult to maintain a cohesive brand image. It was really important for us to be able to make sure that everybody was following their particular set of brand guidelines while also not being too removed from eXp Realty’s brand as well.”
To keep branding consistent, agents in different market locations were asked to request designs from the global design team, which often caused inconvenient delays. “Our global marketing teams were spending hours trying to design and get approval for different marketing assets,” Nicolette says. “Our agents don’t want to wait two or three days for our design team to create something for them.”
Consolidating contacts
Finally, using different customer platforms without proper oversight posed liability and compliance risks for the company as a whole, especially when it came to data protection legislation like the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPR).
“Being able to consolidate all of our contacts and people that we're reaching out to into one system was a struggle,” Nicolette says.
Internal customer service communication was also difficult, and the customer service teams were using hundreds of different Google Group email addresses to receive inbound messages from over 90,000 real estate agents. “It was difficult for them to know if anyone had responded yet. An email that required follow-up after a day or two could easily get buried,” according to Seth Siegler, eXp Realty’s VP of Technology Innovation and Real Estate Services.
A connected system
eXp Realty chose HubSpot to connect their internal teams around the world onto a single unified platform. HubSpot allowed them to seamlessly transfer all of their contacts and systems over into a single platform. With a fully connected system in Marketing Hub, they can market to both potential and current agents in a single system.
Marketing Hub’s tracking codes allow them to gather data from websites, landing pages, and events, so they can track the full lifecycle of agents, from initial interest to becoming a full-fledged member of their brokerage. “With HubSpot, we can see which marketing pieces are causing engagement and which ones aren’t working,” Nicolette adds.
Efficient customer communication
eXp Realty uses Service Hub and the ticketing inbox to organize inbound customer service messages. Now teams can automatically create tickets and assign them to the right person on the service team. They can handle communications efficiently, making sure no queries fall through the cracks. “The best part is that it allows for us to have trackable SLAs and robust reporting so we can measure and adapt our processes on an ongoing basis,” Seth says.
Partitioning
With HubSpot’s asset partitioning, the global marketing team can separate all of their marketing assets so that each individual country and team sees only what’s relevant for them — while super admin privileges allow the global team to retain a bird’s eye view of the entire company. “It's easy for us to set permissions based upon the needs of each team, and then show them just the particular items they need within the system,” Nicolette says.
Each team can use HubSpot to communicate with their audience effectively within a single system, without overlap or duplicates, while also helping them comply with data protection regulations like the GDPR.
Streamlined design process
Now that all marketing communications are consolidated in HubSpot, eXp Realty can set clear design parameters for the company’s internal and external marketing communications to maintain brand consistency while also satisfying regional requirements. They’ve uploaded templates with their color schemes and logos to HubSpot, so that anyone can “grab them and go,” Nicolette says.
“Prior to us adding design templates to HubSpot, our internal teams would spend hours trying to design and get approval for different marketing assets. We have been able to cut that time down significantly. International teams now have access to all of the forms, templates, landing pages, etc. they need without needing to wait for approval from another team in a different time zone.”
A single view of tickets and SLAs
Nicolette says, “HubSpot automations and pipelines have allowed us to consolidate all channels of inflow for a team to route to a particular inbox to be managed and reported on a team basis.”
This translates to time savings and efficiency increases for ops teams in all 23+ countries. The ticketing pipelines give these teams everything they need to work, including a single view of all communication channels and SLAs. Individual teams also have customized saved views to gain visibility into the tickets that are relevant to them, which improves their ability to act quickly and self-diagnose and fix bottlenecks when they occur.
“Using HubSpot’s automations has allowed us to take manual processes and turn them into automated processes at a larger scale, saving our teams a lot of time. It has also given us cleaner reporting, which also results in time saved from creating manual reports.”
Most importantly, eXp Realty is now able to track their improving results over time. They’ve recently implemented ticket pipelines for all countries of operation, which help each team track inflow and visualize their sales process more effectively and makes it much easier to track performance on a global scale. “In the past, nobody was keeping track,” Nicolette says. “With HubSpot, we’ll be able to streamline our processes and analytics so that we can start to compare data over time.”
