Challenge
Castle Green is a homebuilder with a 35-year heritage and a forward-thinking vision. They provide a multi-faceted digital home buying experience to convert prospective homebuyers into satisfied Castle Green homeowners.
Castle Green tasked us with designing and building a bespoke customer portal that positions Castle Green Homes as a competitor of larger new home builders.
This would build on their bespoke new website to offer a digital homebuying service from initial enquiries, to online reservation, property customisation and finally property completion and snag reporting.
We wanted to showcase their stunning new build homes and explore the current online space for potential customers embarking on their homebuying journey
Our solution – Willow
Our industry leading bespoke CRM allows for a seamless journey from prospective buyer to homeowner, bridging the gap between enquiring and buying. The CRM, aptly named Willow, is made up of four distinct customer phases: experience centre, pre-reservation, post-reservation and post-completion.
Our experience centre offers pre-populated interactive signage per housing development, enabling us to set up 55 inch experience screens in each showhome as new developments arise. Within this experience, customers can inspect the site plan for their desired home as well as walking through their prospective new neighbourhood and chosen housetype before it’s even built. State of the art CGI allows potential buyers to customise their home alongside a sales assistant before sending their custom home to their account within Willow for future use.
These are currently set up in two locations: Bridgewater View in Daresbury and Maes Yr Haul in St Asaph.
In the pre-reservation phase, customers can shortlist their preferred properties and customise various elements in the home such as the flooring, kitchen units, fitted wardrobes and bathroom tiles. Their selections can then be sent to Castle Green as part of their enquiry. Castle Green will provide the customer with a reservation form to start the homebuying process and they can complete and pay their reservation fee online without having to go into the sales office.
In the post reservation phase, customers can customise and pay for any additional property features based on their specific requirements. They can also purchase upgrades for their home, see realtime photo and video build updates showing the current progress of their home and arrange appointments with their sales representative.
Post completion, customers can use the portal to raise snags regarding any fittings or fixtures they are dissatisfied with. They can upload photos and videos and mark the location for repair on a digital floor plan of their home, allowing Castle Green to ensure the appropriate actions are taken efficiently. Castle Green’s customer service agents can use the portal to chat to the customer in real time and arrange appointments to have issues fixed.
Results
So far, this project for Castle Green has won three awards:
Digital Transformation of the Year by Marketing Week Awards 2022 (Here we were joined in the shortlist by Curry’s and IBM, to name a few)
Customer Satisfaction Initiative of the Year by Housebuilder Awards 2022
Best Application of Marketing Technology by Construction Awards 2022
The digital experience has encouraged Castle Green’s overseas homebuyers as they can now reserve properties digitally with real-time build updates, customise their home and purchase upgrades.
In addition, the development of the bespoke CRM has allowed Castle Green to drop at least three other providers, resulting in significant cost savings.
Getting Down to the Detail
This project is the perfect example of ambition turning a project into a product. As we developed the fixed scope of the main project, it became clear there was opportunity to expand the project teams into an AGILE product team and work in sprints to continually develop and expand on the Willow product.
What started as a customisation portal has expanded into a customer service tool, supporting customers throughout the full home buying journey and beyond, with aims to provide a full bespoke CMS as we continue.
Let’s discuss your requirements…
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