The ethos of transparency surrounding your aftercare and sales journey at Pocket for your new home owners is very refreshing, did clixifix help to facilitate this ethos with your stakeholders?
Pocket provides affordable homes for ‘city makers’, in other words those who don’t earn a huge salary but contribute a huge amount socially, economically and culturally to London. Our website attracts almost all of our sales enquiries so it made sense for us to continue an IT-centred approach to care after purchasing. Our buyers are fairly (but not always!) young and tech-savvy, so we’ve long known that we needed to go down the self-service route for after sales and we were confident our customers would engage with it. The clixifix platform was a natural fit for this requirement and when I discovered it we had a real ‘eureka’ moment.
How have your city makers responded to the ability to report their defects and queries directly to Pockets customer care team via their secure portal?
Our city makers have really taken to clixifix and they were impressed with the transparency and level of control the system offers. As all of our owners are first-time buyers, clixifix is very useful in that it reassures them that their issues are organised appropriately, being dealt with and they are kept in the loop throughout. Users have raised very few queries on operating the system, which is a testament to how intuitive the system is and how comprehensive the user guides are. They have also used the photo upload facility extensively, which has assisted our assessment and handling of defects greatly.
Has communication between the Pocket team and your sub-contractors improved since using clixifix? Do you feel this has improved on your service levels Key Performance Indicators ?
clixifix has enabled us to take a much more structured approach to defects and the comments section is really useful in that it is an open forum to update the several parties involved. The strong referencing of each defect leaves no room for ambiguity as to what stage each issue is at which has definitely reduced the amount of calls from owners. The reporting function of the system also allows us to recognise trends which relate to design, developments, contractors and subcontractors and enables us to reduce and hopefully eliminate these in future.
Compared to other software you have used in your career in Housing, was clixifix relatively easy to pick up and deploy in your organisation.
Absolutely, the team (as well as owners) took to the system straight away with very little training required; clearly a logical brain has designed the structure! The interface is simple and easy to navigate and the balance between clarity and detail seems just right. We are so pleased with the usability of clixifix that we are looking to build an integration with our sales & marketing CRM.
Do you feel clixifix is value for money as opposed to products you may have explored on the market?
Competitive products didn’t seem to offer anywhere near as good a fit with Pocket and our owner’s requirements. For example, some came with unwanted add-ons such as mandatory out of hours telephone support or others were geared up for ticketing in a call-centre environment without being tailored for property.
Would you recommend clixifix to other house-builders?
I’d wholeheartedly recommend clixifix to other property developers and housebuilders. As a Manager, being able to log into the system and quickly and easily see the position with regards to defects, spot patterns and measure contractor responsiveness is a huge improvement on our previous methods. Even more importantly, it has drastically reduced the resources my Sales team are deploying on non-sales activities!
Andrew Brader. Head of Sales.
Pocket
14 Floral Street
London
WC2E 9DH