SmartMLS Creates Best Real Estate Experience In Connecticut

About SmartMLS

SmartMLS was born in 2017 when two Connecticut MLSs came together to forge a new kind of MLS. Today they serve over 20,000 subscribers and have built a diverse and agile organization. Their mission is to make the MLS more valuable while remaining committed to the needs of local markets. They do this by delivering exceptional customer service and striving for continuous innovation.

They make the market work and keep everyone In the Know by empowering real estate professionals with more local information, more business intelligence and a more integrated MLS experience.

 Testimonial

Kathy Elson, CEO SmartMLS

We are very pleased with our experience working with the entire Roca crew. From the outset, they carefully listened to our overall goal, including our current struggle points, and developed a course of action that was tailored specifically to our most urgent needs. They provided workable solutions and took the time to walk us through their processes so we have a better understanding of the intricacies of Zendesk. With their help, we now have many of the tools we need to manage our environment more effectively in the future. Roca has wonderful team members all over the globe that made themselves available to us at all hours of the day (and night). Each specialist was exceedingly pleasant and professional, and completely vested in delivering the best solution for our unique needs. Everyone we have worked with has helped us move closer to our goals. We are encouraged by the results we have seen thus far and are excited about continuing our collaboration.

SmartMLS

Number of Agents

30+

Headquarters

Milford CT, United States

Active Subscribers

25K+

40K/mo

Increased Help Center visits

95%

CSAT

3K/mo

Tickets solved with self-service

In 2022 we have been contacted by Kathy Elson, CEO of SmartMLS to help them in the journey of offering the best customer experience possible to their 20K+ subscriber list in the real estate market of Connecticut, United States.

We agreed to a 6 months engagement with 30h/month. During this time we applied our Zendesk optimization methodology so the team could get the most out of the customer service platform, maximize agent efficiency, encourage self service, deflect tickets and increase Customer Satisfaction.

We started out of a wopping 90% CSAT so the challenge was high on our end.

The process employed had the following structure:

  1. Understand business needs and customer base.

  2. Understand Zendesk setup by performing an audit of current setup.

  3. Shadowing team members and team leaders.

  4. Translate business needs to Zendesk features.

  5. Collaborative configuration to transfer Zendesk knowledge to team.

  6. Apply best practices based on business needs and customer niche.

Services Offered

Account audit to understand the team and maximize zendesk

SmartMLS clients were reaching out with inquiries related to platform best practices. They were quite active, averaging 10K tickets per month. Most of their inquiries were repetitive and a great deal of them could have been automated or encouraged to self serve.

By understanding the Zendesk setup, we were able to see where the team’s level was and the struggles of team leads and regular agents. This valuable information helped us design a solution to quickly address inefficiencies to boost productivity. We also created a mid term and long term plan to be able to help the team scale and grow according to business needs for the next 2 years.

Zendesk Optimization to make the team efficient

The team was using Zendesk only partially and a bit ineffective. Luckily, under Kathy Elson’s brilliant leadership, the business understood the need to use the system to its maximum capacity.

Our team started out by having deep discovery meetings to understand the business and the real estate niche in Connecticut. The next step was to collect business needs and business flows. After this phase, we got down to cleaning up what was irrelevant, and laid out the 6 months plan to address each.

  1. Knowledge Base optimization for Guide for laying the ground work for self service

  2. Self service - Answer Bot and Flow Builder to have less agent touches and save agent time

  3. System optimization for routing and automation to help increase CSAT

  4. System optimization for agent efficienty to decrease human error and solve tickets faster

  5. Reports for better business decisions

  6. System integration for 360 view of customer data

We have successfully implemented the above and we still work together. We went from 90% CSAT to 95%. We are very proud of our achievement. SmartMLS has increased from 20K memebers to 25K since our engagement.

Kathy Elson even recommended us to a partner company with which we are in talks to Onboard their Zendesk.

Guide Customization to encourage self service

SmartMLS had a very large Knowledge Base in their Zendesk Guide. Over 1000+ articles. The problem was that being so vast, the Knowledge base was hard to navigate by its users. We performed testing based on the most frequent incoming tickets vs visited articles to see how we can encourage users to self serve. We have created a custom navigation to maximize the user experience to find articles based on the search queries.

However, the customer experience was imperative to remain high for the user based. We had to be careful to not deflect users to read too many articles as that would have caused frustration. We went a step deeper to understand the types of users that accessed the Zendesk Guide based on what they were most interested in reading about.

Bot design to automate repetitive tasks and free up time

Our Zendesk Chatbots and AI services helped the businesses automate their customer support workflows, increase efficiency, and provide personalized experiences to customers. Our team of experts worked with SmartMLS to design, develop, and implement chatbots that cater to the business needs.

Our team of Zendesk Chatbot and AI experts has extensive experience in designing and implementing custom chatbot solutions for businesses across various industries. We work closely with you to understand your business needs and provide tailored solutions that help you achieve your support goals.

There is no magic solution, there is however, effort and consistency in building a durable solution that people will like to use.