As a residential home builder, delivering an exceptional customer experience is crucial for success in today’s competitive market. With the right software, you can streamline processes, enhance communication, and keep clients happy throughout their home-building journey. Let’s explore how a comprehensive platform like Constructive can transform your customer experience with its suite of integrated products.
Choosing the right Customer Experience (CX)-focused software for your residential home building operations can create process efficiencies and result in educated, informed and happy clients.
Look for a comprehensive platform that combines a Customer Portal, Online and interactive 3D Selections, Maintenance and warranty management — all with data analytics capabilities. You’ll be well-equipped to deliver an exceptional, personalised experience that delights your clients while they journey through their new home build.
Customer Portal: The foundation of seamless, integrated communication
A robust Customer Portal is essential for keeping clients informed and engaged. Make sure your software contains these must-have features:
Custom-branding and contacts
Consistently branded communication touchpoints are fundamental in creating a sense of trust.
Your Customer Portal — and any digital communications that come out of it — should be branded with your logo and brand colours, with emails signed off by the client’s point of contact at that specific phase of their build.
Real-time build updates
Automatically updated, up-to-the-minute progress information, directly integrated from your back-end system. This will be your clients’ window into the build process, keeping them informed every step of the way.
Check whether your Portal can send an email notification via automation when something important happens, for example, a milestone has been reached, or if a survey is available for them to take.
Educational content
Many clients will have never built a home before. Your client Portal should have the capacity to include easy-to-understand educational content to help them feel comfortable and confident about understanding each milestone that comes up.
Documents
Document storage is essential to keep important information, like contracts, quotes, insurance, warranty paperwork, and more, in one, 24-7 accessible place to prevent clients from emailing and calling you to send copies they may have misplaced.
Make sure your Customer Portal can pull documents over for you via integration and auto-email your clients when a new document is uploaded. This way, you can keep everyone organised and informed in a hands-off way.
Photo and video gallery
Visual updates via photos and videos from site will reassure clients of progress and can create a feeling of excitement. Ensure your Customer Portal allows instant media uploads that clients can share with friends and family.
Surveys
It’s important to establish a feedback loop with clients to confirm you’re delivering a great customer experience. Ask if your clients’ home build Portals can automatically trigger customised surveys at key milestones — and make sure it can integrate with the survey software you already use, like Survey Monkey, Zoho or Qualtrics.
Clients lead busy lives and will often need a gentle prompt — your Customer Portal should include integrated reminders to save you time chasing up survey responses.
To Do List
Building a home requires a significant amount of input and action from clients. You can avoid hold-ups and missed deadlines by including an actionable To Do List within your Customer Portal, so they know exactly what they need to do or provide.
You could use a To Do List to ask clients to complete surveys or product reviews, attend meetings or anything else you need. Clients love to feel empowered and will feel a satisfying sense of progress as they tick off tasks. You’ll build trust through transparency while you keep them focussed on their responsibilities, prioritised in the correct order.
As with other features, you’ll want these To Do tasks to automatically trigger email notifications and friendly reminders, while also being dynamic and customisable.
Messaging
Your Portal should facilitate tracked, and actionable, communication from clients that can be sent directly within the Portal. You’ll want the ability to auto-route these messages directly to a nominated point of contact, so you never miss a request or question.
Useful links and FAQs
A Customer Portal needs an area to educate and inform clients that’s flexible to use however you wish. For example, you might like to include a glossary of terms, instructions and incentives around how to refer a friend, links to your suppliers or answers to frequently asked questions.
Contact information
Make it easy for clients to contact the right person at the right time with a contact module that auto-displays relevant staff contacts at specified job stages. For example, you’ll want to show the Sales Consultant’s details before contract signing, but the Construction Supervisor or Client Liaison is more appropriate during the construction stage.
By implementing a comprehensive Customer Portal, you’ll save time on manual updates while keeping your clients engaged and informed.
Online Selections: Empowering clients, boosting upgrade revenue
At a minimum, an Online Selections platform should offer:
- 24/7 access, on any device, to your digital showroom
- Custom branding: your logo, your colour palette and your preferred terminology
- Visual selection of colours, fixtures, finishes and products
- Colour specification documentation
- Access to a comprehensive, maintained item library
Online Selections software should also incorporate observable progress to guide clients to complete all mandatory selections, as well as automated reminders to keep clients moving forward and prompt them to finalise decisions.
The option to include visible pricing — that tallies as clients make selections — is a feature that will help clients budget as they consider upgrades. They’ll appreciate your transparency and make decisions faster, and with confidence!
Clients can often feel overwhelmed with the number of choices they must make. You can remove this overwhelm by ensuring the Online Selections software you choose contains a ‘Packages’ feature, where you can curate groups of complementary colours and options, selectable with just one tap or click.
It’s a great way to reflect your showroom displays online to remind clients of what they’ve seen, or provide an alternative if they can’t make it into a physical colour studio showroom.
By allowing clients to explore options at their own pace online, you can reduce in-person meeting times while potentially increasing revenue as clients have more personal time and space to consider their budgets for items they’re happy to upgrade. This self-service approach boosts customer experience by giving clients a sense of control when personalising their new home.
3D Selections: Bringing visions to life
One of the biggest challenges in home building is helping clients visualise their choices.
3D Online Selections technology solves this by offering:
- Bespoke 3D models of each client’s home design
- Real-time interactive exploration of colour and material combinations
- Both internal and external 3D visualisation
Make sure you’re giving clients the ability to visualise their ideas instantly on a 3D model of their own, tailored home design — a static or generic model will not cut it. They should be able to tap or click an area to change colours and materials and instantly visualise their choices in context.
Creating and maintaining an item library across discontinuations, replacements, updates, images and new product ranges can take considerable time and effort. Your software provider should include a comprehensive item, material and texture library, with render textures for residential building industry items ready to use so your clients have the best possible experience when making decisions.
You’ll want to make sure the software you choose displays and records their choices in real time, without any rendering wait time. Documentation should be auto-generated to seamlessly make beautiful, visual reports — including standard-priced items as well as upgrades, creating one source of truth.
An immersive, 3D experience reduces indecision and confusion, leading to more happy, confident clients and fewer last-minute changes.
Maintenance: Streamlining the maintenance and warranty period
Even after handover, maintaining a positive customer experience is crucial. Make sure your dedicated Maintenance module provides:
- Efficient tracking and assignment of issues
- Centralised defect documentation
- Self-service options for clients
- Educational information about warranty eligibility baked into the defect lodging process
You should ensure your maintenance and warranty process is entirely digital, so no one on your team needs to decipher hand-written lists, track down lost scraps of paper or chase up missing details. A thorough, step-by-step and intuitively designed wizard style of lodgement for your clients is essential to capture and store all your required specifics in one go.
Your warranty and defect management software needs to automate communications and updates to boost your Customer Experience at scale. Auto-reminding clients to meet submission deadlines and auto-notifying them of comments or additional information means nothing will slip through the gaps and clients are always kept informed.
Examine whether your maintenance period software can generate customised, individual reports to quickly aggregate clients’ defects into an organised, printable list.
Streamlining warranty and maintenance processes by taking issues out of spreadsheets and emails and into one, unified cloud system will allow you to resolve issues faster and demonstrate your commitment to long-term customer satisfaction.
Intelligence Analytics: Make data-driven decisions
To continuously improve your customer experience, you need accurate insights from a tool like Intelligence Analytics. Make sure any software you implement for your company offers comprehensive data analytics, with a minimum reporting of:
- Trend analysis for client selections
- Thorough engagement and outreach tracking
- Revenue opportunity identification
- Quantitative staff performance data
- Net Promotor Score (NPS) thorough analysis
Deep-diving into your data will help you make informed decisions about product offerings, marketing strategies and customer experience improvements.
Choosing the best residential home builder CX platform
When selecting customer experience software for your residential home building business, look for a comprehensive solution that covers the full spectrum. A platform like Constructive offers:
- Seamless, automated integration across all customer touchpoints
- White-label customisation to match your brand
- Cloud-based, 24/7 access on any device for your team and clients
- A proven track record in the residential building industry
Investing in the best customer experience software for home builders will reduce administrative workload and increase client satisfaction and sentiment, resulting in more referrals and a better brand reputation.
Boost your upgrade revenue, reduce incoming calls and emails and create a scalable, customer-centric culture with Constructive.
Request your free, 30-day Demo.
