Housebuilders and Housing Associations are Losing Out on the Digital Opportunity – This is How You Can Fix It
The way we interact with our homes is becoming increasingly digital. We use apps to search and buy new homes, we manage our mortgages and utilities through digital platforms, and we even control our heating and lighting with our smartphones.
Yet the customer journey for most housebuilders drops offline immediately after the initial search. As the digital expectations of consumers across all demographics converge, housebuilders and housing associations need to make sure they are providing a seamless digital experience for their teams that delivers an amazing new home handover experience for their customers.
If they don’t, they risk losing out and damaging their reputation.
The importance of digital experience for new home handover
In today’s digital world, consumers expect a great digital experience from the companies they do business with. This is especially true when it comes to buying a new home. A recent survey found that 75% of consumers would be less likely to do business with a company that had a poor digital experience.
There are a number of reasons why digital experience is so important to homeowners when buying a new home.
- First, the home buying process can be complex and confusing. A clear and easy-to-use digital platform can help homeowners to understand the process, provide much needed transparency and make informed decisions
- Second, homeowners want to be able to interact with the housebuilder or housing association in a way that is convenient for them. This means being able to access information and services online 24/7, at their own pace.
- Thirdly, homeowners want to feel confident that they are making a good decision. A digital platform that provides clear information and digital records across the journey. Making key information readily accessible about the sales process, the home, including the user guides, specifications and key documents; defects, and repairs across the warranty period all helps consumers to make informed decisions and feel safe.
- Finally, homeowners are increasingly aware of their rights and protections in place with the prominence of consumer codes such as the New Homes Quality Code (NHQC). This places great pressure on housebuilders and housing associations to deliver consistent, compliant and high-quality experience – even when they are under pressure and understaffed.
What NHQC Registered Developers Should Do
Embrace the guidelines set out by the New Homes Quality Board (NHQB) by weaving them into the customer journey from the outset.
Transparency sits at the heart of the code. Allowing customers to have all decision making information at their fingertips in a clear, concise and digital format within the Guided Home platform, not only ensures that you remain compliant but allows customers to make an informed decision from the outset and provides the ideal opportunity for you to enhance their satisfaction levels.
Make It Easy To Find Information.
The home buying process can be complex, so it’s important to make it easy for homeowners to find the information they need, when they need it (at the touch of a button). This includes providing clear, concise and accurate information about their home, the home buying process from start to finish, along with the housebuilder’s policies & procedures, all in an accessible, useful digital format.
Use Technology To Streamline Processes
Technology can be used to streamline the customer journey and make information sharing more efficient for your teams and homeowners. Use digital tools to help customers with tasks such as home information, reporting defects and communicating with you.
Guided Home’s connected solution helps developers operating at scale to seamlessly pull information from existing strategic systems minimising data-entry and operational risk. Guided Home already integrates with various data services and global systems based on client demand such as Procore, Trimble Viewpoint for Projects and Trimble Viewpoint Field View to name a few.
Personalise The Experience.
Your customers want to feel like they’re more than just a number. Guided Home’s smart Home User Guides and templating allows you to quickly tailor content to a development location, house type and an individual owner in seconds for an accurate, relevant and bespoke experience
Embrace Digital.
A digital approach should not be feared. Housebuilders that adopt a customer-centric, digital approach can benefit from proactively engaging customers with minimal effort to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. A digital channel significantly improves record keeping and communication across the customer journey for a superior experience. With the right solution.
How Guided Home Can Help
Guided Home is a cloud-based platform that helps housebuilders and housing associations to manage the home buying and defect remediation process. The platform provides a single source of truth for all information related to a new home across the customer journey from reservation to home handover and user guides, aftercare, inspections and defect reporting across the liability period.
Guided Home’s fully managed onboarding and connected solution eliminates the adoption effort delivering material benefits straightaway, without impacting your teams.
It’s time to discover how good your customer experience and business processes could be using Guided Home.
Benefits of using Guided Home
- Improved compliance: Guided Home is the handover compliance solution by providing a clear and transparent process with automated checks and balances across the customer journey to give you confidence that everything has been done for a compliant handover, every time. This can help to reduce the risk of fines or compensation. Similarly, it establishes a clear audit trail from build to buy to rent to re-sale.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Guided Home quickly boosts customer satisfaction by providing a clear and transparent process across the customer journey to the end of the defect liability period. This can lead to fewer complaints and a more positive customer experience. It also reduces the time taken to remediate issues and gives a clear audit trail. More than that – using Guided puts customers at the centre of your business processes, helping them feel looked after, safe and content in their new home.
- Reduced costs: Guided Home reduces costs by streamlining processes, maximising staff productivity and simplifying technology needs related to the home buying and aftercare journey. This frees up staff time to focus on other tasks, such as sales and marketing or launching the next development.
- Increased efficiency: Guided Home can help to increase efficiency by providing a single source of truth for all information related to new home handover and customer journey. This ensures that data is only entered once improving accuracy and efficiency. Our Asset library and smart templating means you can tag assets to different properties across the portfolio in seconds. Guided Home makes operating at scale a breeze.
