Elevating Estate Agency Operations: The Impact of Migrating to Street.co.uk for Henry Adams
Transcript
Hi, I'm Gareth Overton. I am Head of Sales at Henry Adams based in West Sussex. We are a multidisciplinary, estate agency business. We cover pretty much every sector of the industry. We've got about 13 offices and employ about 170 people.
We basically took the decision that we wanted a modern CRM, that did lots of stuff that our current CRM didn't do and I took the view that going with a progressive business like Street Group was the right thing to do. Lots of the other CMS that we trialed and tested, were kind of quite old fashioned still, they looked like the same systems that I've used previously in, you know, 10-15 years ago. But Street.co.uk was completely different.
I also really like the fact that Heather came and sort of as a business owner, spent some time with us and got to understand us as a business and also demonstrated exactly what the system does and doesn't do, and was completely candid with us about the roadmap ahead.
The street support team are amazing, lots of our team use the chat function, and actually the fact that it's a real human being really, really helps. Everybody in the Street.co.uk and Spectre support team have been really, really good. I never have to chase for things to be answered or emails to be replied to so it's fantastic.
So Street's changed the way we operate. It's given us better diary management, it's given us better communication with our customers, both buyers and sellers. The automation has been really, really useful, so I'm now confident that things don't get missed, like an offer letter being sent out or viewing feedback being given and it's just made us a slicker, better run business.
Using Street is like the difference between using an old fashioned Nokia phone and a brand new iPhone in terms of the difference between our old CRM and the new CRM, so it does absolutely everything that we wanted it to.
So, in our migration using Bridge we found the first part of it was actually quite simple. We put together a group of super users and we got those guys trained up and ready to use the system quite early on.
As I said, the initial part was fairly simple, it didn't take us too long. We felt like we rattled through that work quite quickly. The second part gave us a few challenges, we had about 40,000 lines of data to check which was nothing to do with Street, it was more to do with our old CRM and how they sent the data across. But we got there and the end product was well worth it.
I think if we moved CRM and didn't have access to Bridge, it would've been really, really problematic. The data that we brought in was clean, the single source of truth really helped us to have a better system for the future. If we would've just moved the old data into a new, different CRM, we would've caused ourselves issues further down the line and that was quite a big part of our decision making process, that we wanted to make sure that our data was good going forwards.
On the first day that we went live, I went and put myself in a branch where I knew I would have people that would be quite critical of a new system and all I heard was “wow, this is really good. Oh, it's really clever. I love this. This is amazing. It's much better than what we had before.” And since going live, which was a few months ago, I haven't had a single bit of bad feedback. I've had constructive criticism, I've had people ask questions, but every single thing that we've had in terms of feedback from our team has all been really, really positive.
