RiTA Case Study

DiJONES, a real estate firm with eight offices and a team of experienced agents across Sydney and the Southern Highlands, has successfully employed RiTA to improve its agents’ response time and prioritise their prospects. 

Rapid Response

“We wanted to improve the customer’s experience,” DiJONES systems manager Caitlin Ellis explains. “Last year, as an experiment, I sent out over a thousand property enquiries to real estate agencies in Sydney and the Southern Highlands and I gauged how long it took them to respond. What I found is that 11.98 per cent of the enquiries went unanswered, and the average response time was 42 hours. I tested our offices, as well — while the response time was better than the industry standard, it was still not acceptable, from our point of view.

“People in this day and age want everything right now. You can go and order an Uber or order food online and it’ll be there right away, and that’s what people have come to expect. They want an instant response. That’s why we engaged RiTA’s services.”

RiTA responds to portal and website enquiries from potential buyers of DiJONES’ listings. RiTA also provides scenario-specific responses that would normally have to be provided by human agents, freeing them up to spend more time chasing leads, getting listings and making sales.

“RiTA is our Digital Assistant,” Caitlin says. “She receives all the enquiries for properties for all of our offices, she reads them and then she responds to them intelligently in under five minutes. For example, if someone asks, ‘What’s the price?’, she knows what that question means, and she knows where to find the answer.

“We’ve assigned RiTA her own email address and email signature, and she has a unique voice, so people write back to her all day as if she were a real person. They’ll say, ‘Thanks for getting back to me so quickly’, or, ‘Thanks for that information, RiTA!’”

Pinpoint Prospecting

DiJONES also uses RiTA to locate customer relationship opportunities in the company’s CRM for pinpoint- accurate prospecting. RiTA prioritises the most logical prospects in their database, and tells agents what to say so every contact is hyper-personalised.

“It takes the guesswork out of prospecting,” Caitlin says. “It leads to more relevant conversations and warmer calls. Instead of ringing the same prospects every quarter at the same time and going through the motions — ‘How’s it going? How’s the dog? Did you get a new boat? Do you want an appraisal? No? Okay.’ — RiTA combines the information in our CRM with marketplace data, such as new listings, sales or rentals in the same street as the client, and gives the agents a reason to call.”

As well as identifying opportunities when they arise, RiTA identifies lost opportunities when clients from DiJONES’ CRM list their properties elsewhere.

“It’s always a good motivator when agents get those emails letting them know they missed out on an opportunity that’s been listed by somebody else,” Caitlin says.