With Zendesk Support, LJ Hooker earns a 99% satisfaction rating

ate

LJ Hooker is Australia’s best-known and most trusted real estate brand. With a franchise network of 700 offices across Australasia, the group sells more than 40,000 properties each year, worth over AUD15 billion. The company places great emphasis on the customer through ongoing investment in its brand, innovative initiatives, superior training and education, and exceptional customer service.

LJ Hooker is at the forefront of real estate technology and digital solutions to meet the needs of today’s savvy vendors and buyers. With a large and growing network of franchise owners and real-estate agents to support, being able to share knowledge, deploy new tools, and provide technical and operational support is more than essential—it’s crucial to LJ Hooker’s ongoing success.

According to Ian Iglesia, manager of LJ Hooker’s support centre, “LJ Hooker doesn’t just want to be the number one brand in real estate, we want to be the best in the technology and digital space as well.”

That’s why LJ Hooker selected Zendesk Support in January 2011 as its cloud-based customer support system. Support met the company’s need for a system that put customers at the centre and provided the innovation, collaboration, and scalability that supported its strategic objective to take a best practices approach to technology.

Based in Sydney, LJ Hooker’s support centre services its vast network of franchise offices across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia. A dedicated team of eight handle around 3,300 support queries a month, 83 percent of which get solved in less than 2 hours, and 91 percent within 24 hours.

This is a vast improvement to its pre-Zendesk Support days when LJ Hooker’s support team handled queries via Outlook, which was both time-consuming and offered limited reporting and tracking capabilities. LJ Hooker’s support team is now much more productive, solving over 20 percent more queries per month with the same number of staff while putting a lot more self-service resources in front of its clients.

“When I joined the team in late 2014, everything was running smoothly,” said Iglesia. “After four years of using Support, our staff was experienced with the system and we were happy with the results and the number of queries we were solving each month. Features like self-service, forums, and macros were saving us time and Support-generated KPIs kept the team motivated and productive.”

LJ Hooker, however, is not a company that rests on its laurels. “We want to find new and better ways of doing things,” explained Iglesia, “so we’ve started to use Support’s help desk triage feature to take a more proactive approach to managing issues, solving problems, and understanding the data.”

Support reports give LJ Hooker more insight into what issues the company is dealing with, in which regions, and monitor trends in order to solve problems quickly and reduce the number of ongoing incidents.

Thanks to Support, Iglesia recently noticed that a much higher rate of incidents were occurring in one office than was normal so he decided to look into it, rather than wait for more tickets to come through. It turned out the office server was overloaded so a lot of people were experiencing the same computer problems and data corruption issues. Once the server was fixed, all the other issues were resolved.
“Our support team doesn’t usually get involved in the individual technical needs of each office but in this case we thought it was justified,” said Iglesia. “The franchise owner was so happy with the result and grateful that we went above and beyond to solve his IT problem that he sent my team a gift basket of chocolates and wine! Despite the extra hours we spent on it, this was a big win for our team and showed us that we are on the right track to providing excellent customer service.”

“Our offices are not just given the digital tools and then forgotten about,” concluded Iglesia. “LJ Hooker offers ongoing IT support and solves problems as they occur so our offices can deliver the best results for their clients and we maintain our position as the No. 1 real estate agent in Australia.”