Is a visit to your website as good as the first visit to the sales center? If not you may be at a competitive disadvantage.

In that first contact you have an opportunity to create interest, assist with selection, pre-qualify, and create the first appointment. The visitor locates a community, selects an elevation, and chooses a plan(s), floorplan(s), and explores available option(s). The Visitor then pre-qualifies to buy and requests an appointment with the sales office and loan officer on-line at the point of highest interest. This happens via phone, email, or through the website.

Customer Relationship Management - CRM

Customer relationship management builds customer loyalty through better customized support. Examples include: enhanced registration, live operator interfaces, chat functions, and personalized websites. Further customization involves the use of story boards and scripts that lead the prospect/customer/user through a rules engine and decision tree. The end result gets you closer to the customer and closer to the sale. The premise is that we can increase the conversion rate of prospects to buyers through strategic use of customized interfaces and an automated buying cycle.

Another CRM solution involves follow-up to prospects via HTML e-mail. Floorplans, walkthroughs, exteriors and brochures can be delivered as follow ups to the first website visit. Suggestions are made regarding alternative plans, floorplans, or even communities. If the buyer refers the e-mail to someone else in the buying cycle, that person is added to a database for future follow up.

Mortgage is designed to pre-qualify and then qualify buyers. Loan calculators can include current available loan rates and interface with multiple loan sources. These resources can be customized to "find" the best possible loan rate for each individual buyer. Buyers submit qualification information on-line.

A call center makes the appointment with the sales office from the website resulting in a one on one conversation at a the time of highest interest. The option can be extended to warranty, mortgage, and other areas. Homebuilders who employ this process have the advantage of creating that first appointment easily with little effort on the part of the buyer. After making the appointment, static and dynamic maps provide customized directions to get the visitor to the chosen community and sales office. These maps can be enabled for mobile devices or GPS systems.

Forester Research indicates that "Sixty percent of those website visitors who start an order form never complete it". Having a call center on the website can help you close sales. This also allows you to save the costs of a toll free number.

A call center helps to increase buying, answers questions about products or services, reduces concern about credit card use, gives customers "the personal touch", helps customers navigate web sites easily, directs customer calls to specific people or departments, and provides access to customers worldwide.

Videos and presentations you use in your sales office or Kiosk can be streamed inexpensively on the Web. Because this information is story boarded and scripted it can show your communities, models, and options exactly as you want them.

Videos can convey a feeling of the surrounding community, its amenities, and lifestyle. Schools, parks, and recreation areas help sell. Video streaming provides a rich, controlled, and scripted experience for the web visitor.

A streaming video needs to adjust to the different ways that your visitors view the site. The bandwidth must adjust to connection speeds from dial up to broadband to large company network connectivity. The higher the bandwidth the better the video and audio quality. Quality and audience issues are at the crux of the choice of technology. Solutions can be provided in Real Media, Windows Media, Quicktime, or Flash streaming.

Virtual Tours

Virtual Tours are meant to immerse the web visitor and resemble a home tour. The visitor may zoom in or out and rotate 360 degrees. The tour can be seamed from room to room and connected from floorplans. A static alternative should be provided for those on low bandwidth connections. Static interiors can be seemed from room to room or linked directly from floorplans.

Walkthrough Enhancements
Once interested in a model, the visitor should be invited to register and receive an incentive to visit the sales office. Follow up occurs automatically, is customized, and tracked. Custom mailers are sent for the community of choice, reminding the visitor to return to the website or make an appointment at the sales office. The mailer in itself is interactive and can include a virtual tour, interactive floorplan options, and place calls directly to the sales office for appointments. If sent to a friend, the mailer becomes part of a viral marketing program.

Rendering technology and Hot Media can allow the visitor to change options in much the same way as they can in the home customization center. The sales office experience is closely emulated and leads to the possibility that some buyers may place bids for homes on-line.

Customized coupon incentives are offered as an incentive for the first appointment. On presentation, this coupon links the virtual and real world.

Appointments from the Call Center can be tracked to a special number and the acquisition cost per sale can be compared with that of other media.

Rendering technology allows the builder to model a home without building the model. The visitor can customize options, appliances, walls, flooring, and surfaces. A configurator provides the capability to customize and save colors, materials, fixtures, textures, and views to share with others. The buyer can spend as much time as is required to optimize their choices.

Rendered communities and interiors can help custom builders and those that build predominantly on pre-sales.

Databases serve many purposes for a homebuilder.

In the example to the right, new prospective buyers enter their data into a priority list for upcoming communities. Buyers are invited to the sales center for each phase of the build process and included in pre-sale dinners, special events, or special offers. Tracking occurs via coupons.

Databases are automatically maintained once set up and register requests for information in both HTML and text formats.

Database Enhancements:
Database can provide support to sales, build, and community processes. Offers can be made to bring new visitors to a particular sales office, a cyclic process can be defined that tracks and scripts the steps necessary for a prospective buyer to become an actual buyer. A customized greeting welcomes the return buyer, remembers their previous choices, and customizes the information chosen. Rules or heuristic based predictive behavior can suggest alternative communities, plans, elevations, or features that may be of interest to the buyer. Home customization offers alternatives based on previous selections, preferences, and choices.

After sale customer surveys suggest options and styles that are most popular, feeding those choices back into the build process. Past sales information can then be used as a predictive device for what options are most popular and increasing the desirability of future homes. An Intranet and Extranet to bring vendors and suppliers closer to the build process can result in stabilizing and standardizing costs.

Dynamic Mapping

Dynamic mapping allows the visitor to see a local map and receive customized directions from a mapping service. Since one of the objectives identified early on is usually to get the visitor to the sales office, mapping is done with both a fixed local map and a dynamic one for each sales office and community throughout the site. Directions and Maps can be read on-line, or printed.

Mapping Enhancements:
Maps and directions can be downloaded or displayed on demand to mobile devices.

Mobile Device Access

Experts estimate that there will be more than 1 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide in 2003. Forecasters predict up to 70% of these devices will have Internet access.

700 million users should be using the Internet from wireless devices this year. Most of these users are bound to be upscale. To position for an advantage with this lucrative demographic, directions, prices, size, and floorplans for new communities can be delivered to these devices. This allows new communities to be located from Palm Pilots, Windows CE devices, GPS systems, and automobile locator systems.

Vendors, Suppliers, and Business Partners
It used to be about conducting basic transactions with customers online, now it's about the way suppliers, partners and customers transact. An in-depth process needs to be followed to learn where the e-business opportunities exist for you. You may benefit from support for financing, RFPs, quotes, Purchase Orders, and service acquisitions. An Intranet or Extranet may need to be a part of your business implementation. Our assessment process is meant to determine these needs (additional information in patterns for e-business).