Interview with Girish Shah, VP Sales & Marketing of Godrej Properties.
PW: How important is technology for the success of the modern marketer?
GS: We understand the importance of technology and leverage the technological enablers to achieve the following:
- Service active seekers on a real time basis
- Create technological enabled platforms to make communication and interaction more engaging & interesting
- Tap global customers and segments to nullify the constraints of distance and time zones
- Make our marketing campaigns ROI driven and effective through lead trackers and analytics
- Real estate as you would know is a micro-market driven business , technology has helped us to understand our consumer profiles and micro-markets & where the demand comes from
- To help us create a seamless flow of information and a rich central repository of data for the cross functional team synergies.
PW: What are your current marketing priorities & how does that translate to technology?
GS: Currently we are focused on the following core areas:
– Customer Data Management & Analytics
– Social Media & Digital Communications
– Customer Care Portal
– New product development
– Revamping the website
PW: In your organization how has technology played a role in customer acquisition or retention?
GS: Customers find our new SEO-friendly, platform agnostic, meta-tagged corporate website much more interesting and usage statistics indicate a 50% increase in the time they spend on our site.
Our new campaigns are geo-tagged every lead generated from all touch-points makes its way directly into our cloud-based CRM system, from which useful data like response rate and ROI is generated. In the past year alone we have doubled the number of leads captured in the system.
To reduce TAT our new call centre gets leads assigned to them via the CRM system. Executives are trained to provide relevant information and assign a rating that is then used as an indicator of intention to purchase, so managers can prioritize their responses and our conversion rate is kept high.
If customers visit and book a property, the lead is then converted and transmitted to our ERP system. A visual representation of a ‘funnel’ representing deal flow is generated periodically in our dashboards, which brings our efforts to convert opportunities into sharp focus. Payment schedules, collections, etc are monitored from there so intimation/reminders can be sent out and cross-selling can also take place.
SFDC software has helped us to maintain a central repository of rich data of active seekers across 12 cities with whom we continually communicate through Emailers , festive greetings etc , ergo build sustaining relationships which is not only transactional.
PW: How has technology played a role in new product development, market expansion or other areas?
GS: We collect over 200 data points of information about our customers. This information is then analyzed to generate detailed customer segmentation profiles for each and every project. This in turn influences our media buying and product design strategies.
As real estate is a high involvement product, we are investing heavily in interactive technologies ranging from video walkthroughs to 360 degree virtual tours. Mobile and handheld applications are an especially effective means for us to provide the latest content-rich information to people around the world on the go.
In an age where most consumers are active Internet users depending on content provided online as a primary source of information, positive online reputation management is vital. Through the use of social medial listening tools, we are able to patch on to discussion forums, groups and consumer complaint redressal sites to resolve queries or complaints and generate buzz.
PW: Would you say the level of collaboration between the CMO and CIO in your organization was:
GS: Excellent.. Senior Management has been involved with customizing ‘Business Objective’ and ‘Business Intelligence’ dashboards used to monitor key matrix and highlights areas that need development.
