Powering the UKs most innovative estate agent with smarter, faster communications

Purple Bricks is the UK’s largest estate agent, and it’s probably the UK’s most innovative too. having disrupted the market as the first online estate agent that gives sellers the opportunity to list their property for free!

They even have their own in-house developed app for users to manage their accounts, and the business also includes a large legal services arm as well as an FCA-regulated financial service house that provides mortgage services.

Furthermore, some of the team’s more highly regulated legal and financial-focused roles were limited to ‘office only’ due to personal data concerns and Cirrus’ inability to securely access information remotely.

Finally, and most importantly, Purple Bricks wanted to dramatically cut the amount of time callers would wait on hold while being transferred from team-to-team as they navigated the IVR system, but the administration and customisa-tion potential of the system was incredibly limited.

Thanks to Future Voice’s status as a “NICE CXOne Core Certified Delivery Partner” – being the first UK partner to acquire its engineering accreditations across multiple employees – the team saw an opportunity to leverage its expertise to develop a highly specialised form of intelligent routing and dialling to transform Purple Bricks’ client interactions.
RingCentral would act as the foundational platform for the massive 400+seat deployment, before creating designing a bespoke intelligent routing system, combined with an inbound/outbound dialler, that integrated RingCentral’s platform with Strike’s in-house CRM, B21, as well as its ServiceNow (SNOW) data management system.

The system’s key innovation was how it leveraged call data and
CRM data to automatically direct calls to agents that callers had previously spoken to. If that employee was unavailable, the system would initiate a hunt call across the wider team, failing-over to the general IVR as a last resort, but placing the customer in the most likely team’s (e.g. property sales/letting/mortgage/legal services) queue.

The dialler would benefit the outbound team, too. Enquiries from partners (e.g. Rightmove or Zoopla) directly imported into B21, could be segmented depending on their enquiry (e.g. sales/letting/mortgage/legal), and auto-adding to the appropriate team’s call list.

This required creating multiple integrations via APIs between RingCentral and Strike’s in-house CRM platform, B21, its SNOW data management platform, as well as Surfly to incorporate video calls into the customer experience for video tours. Each one had to be custom-written and pressure tested in a wide range of scenarios to ensure 100% reliability for the new streamlined customer experience.

Just as the platform was going through final testing, ready to be deployed, Future Voice was informed that Strike had acquired Purple Bricks, and that as part of the acquisition, Strike’s new telephony platform would be pitted against Purple Bricks’ existing Genesis and BT-based solution to decide which would be adopted by the larger operation.

After stringent testing and cost analysis, Future Voice’s RingCentral solution was chosen – the only back-of-house system that was kept from Strike in the acquisition – proving the quality of the platform and integrations produced by Future Voice’s team.

Throughout the transition and for months afterwards, the platform had to segment calls between the two businesses, ensuring callers in the middle of their customer journey experienced a consistent service with the business they had originally engaged with.

This required Future Voice to integrate Purple Bricks’ periphery platforms into RingCentral, including Salesforce and an outbound dialler among others, until the business could completely transition to its post-acquisition operation.

As the merger was massive national news, and customer communications was such a pivotal area to ensure the newly formed business would be successful, getting the new platform right was essential.

With such a disruptive proposition in the market, Purple Bricks had found that potential customers that waited too long would quickly revert to more traditional estate agents if the customer experience was anything less than perfect.

Thankfully, the CLI-based auto-routing was a level of automation and call optimisation that dramatically optimised call-wait-times, significantly reducing the chances of customers getting frustrated on hold and disengaging, a key metric for the business.

RingCentral’s single pane of glass portal also provided managers, admins and stakeholders with seamless visibility into individual and team productivity. Agents also could leverage seamless access to customer data, regardless of a lead’s origin.

This visibility was pivotal during Strike’s acquisition of Purple Bricks, surfacing customers that originally engaged with Strike or PB, only to engage with the other as a new lead. By creating automated workflows to identify these customers and alert staff, Purple Bricks delivered a consistent customer experience with ‘the first’ business to keep leads engaged.

With the business being FCA-regulated, stringent regulations around encryption, anonymisation and data protection had to be adhered to, especially as the business wanted to ensure every role could be remote-work-enabled.

Purple Bricks is now safely assured that no matter where its team members are working from, RingCentral’s TLS encryption, Multi-Factor Authentication, End-to-End call encryption, Single-Sign-on and more, all provide rock-solid data security, while admins have full control over tools to control access and user privileges.

“Working with Future Voice has been nothing short of perfect. The RingCentral system that has been developed for us has been instrumental in reducing wait times and evolving our customer experience, helping us further differentiate our business from brick & mortar estate agents and truly set ourselves apart in the market. At very stage, even when our merger threw up challenges, the team has been eager to excel. We can’t thank them enough for their constant diligence, vast expertise and amazing customer service”
– Dan Rafferty, CTO, Purple Bricks

Plus, Future Voice’s impact on the business didn’t stop post-deployment. Weekly cadence calls with Future Voice engineers ensure Purple Bricks can continue to hone the platform and find even more efficiencies to optimise the customer experience even further.
All said, Purple Bricks now has the communications foundations and ongoing support for growth and success. Custom-ers enjoy a highly streamlined interactions, agents have all their customer data available to them wherever they’re working, and Purple Bricks has a scalable, reliable system that delivers an exceptional customer experience, which is continuously optimised with weekly cadence calls to find further efficiencies.