How MC17 increased work efficiency by going online with Kommo

Interview with Vladimir Shok, Regional Sales Marketing Manager at MC17

Vladimir Shok is the Regional Sales Marketing Manager at MC17 — a real estate company that specializes in sales of investment properties in one of Thailand’s largest islands — Phuket.

Vladimir says that real estate work in Thailand can have many complications: “The first difficulty is the language barrier — all local names, areas and even the administrative structure of the country and provinces can hardly be understood by a foreigner,” he says and continues, “Also, it can be hard to find a location because many existing properties have similar names.”

Vladimir explains that in Phuket, searching for the property without the help of a real estate company can be challenging: “Looking for a property in Phuket by yourself is quite challenging even for us, the agents who have been working here for several years.”

Due to the pandemic, which continues to spread globally, the business model for MC17 has changed. Before these big changes, the company’s sales cycle was short, “We used to close sales quite fast,” Vladimir says. Plus, the team used to work with clients who were in Thailand at the time. It was much easier to get them on site, show them the property, and thus win a sale.

Vladimir says, “We didn’t even have the mindset to start working online with potential customers.” However, because of the current situation, MC17 had to close several of its sales offices and move all their work online.

It has become pretty clear that the only way companies can adapt to a sporadic change is obvious — going digital. Vladimir explains, “Before we had a completely different scenario, after the initial contact, our main goal was to take the customer on tour, to the property,” he says, “Why? Because you can’t sell real estate without showing it.”

Today MC17 has the same goal, but a different way of achieving it: taking the client on an online tour. “For online tours, we set up a conference in Zoom or a video call on WhatsApp — whatever is more convenient for customers. One of our agents goes to the property and shows it via video.”

The pandemic has left MC17 with no choice but to do, as he adds, online marketing and switch to online platforms. “Now, we do mostly online marketing and we use online platforms,” Vladimir says.

Having more and more customers coming from online sources, the information in different documents and spreadsheets started getting mixed up. Vladimir says, “It was so easy to get lost. It was so easy to forget something.”When joining the MC17 team, the first thing that Vladimir wanted to do was to organize everything. Having experience with Zoho CRM — a CRM for realtors in his previous job, he realized it was much easier to stay organized and work with Kommo instead. He gives two reasons for this:

1. Friendly interface
2. Intuitive mechanics

Although MC17 has only one pipeline — an illustration of different stages that the lead goes through before becoming a customer in Kommo, they are planning to add more to separate different customers. “Since we work online now, we’re working with more people than before,” he explains, adding, “Without a CRM for realtors, such as Kommo, we wouldn’t manage all our online inquiries. Everything would get lost pretty fast.”

Since MC17 now works almost exclusively online, more leads have started coming in from all over the world. For this reason, the company decided to place an engagement button on their website. The engagement button is one of the easiest ways for website visitors to connect with MC17 via chat.

The visitor clicks on the chat button and chooses a messenger to chat with the company. What’s even more convenient is the fact that the full conversation history gets stored in Kommo. MC17 connected the following messaging apps:

• Facebook Messenger
• Instagram
• Telegram
• Live chat

Another online tool that MC17 added via WordPress in Kommo is the webform. Webforms are lead capture sources. All leads coming from the webform go straight to the pipeline in Kommo. Without any coding skills, Vladimir created a form and inserted it on their website. “We created webforms and it made our life much easier,” he says.

According to Vladimir, after implementing Kommo — a CRM that perfectly suits realtors — the company has completely switched to the digital world. Not only have they managed to work with more people online, but the team also started following up leads on time, which has boosted effectiveness. “We can now work with more customers online, we don’t lose information anymore, we follow up leads on time and have increased our efficiency,” Vladimir says.

Set up isn’t hard, but if you’re feeling intimidated, reach out to one of our amazing Kommo's partners — they’re ready and willing to get your team using CRM for realtors today.