Using IT to Change Housing Sales Administration
Industry Leader in Contactless Customer Service
Nowadays, it is normal to use your PC or smartphone to search for and gather information on a product, and then buy it without even directly seeing the actual item. In the same way, more and more customers, when considering building a home, will gather information by themselves and diligently engage in study and research on the topic before coming in for a face-to-face negotiation. As more and more people refrain from going outside during the coronavirus pandemic, Sekisui House, too, has had to consider a completely new sales style at our exhibition halls. We are creating tools and features so that our sales staff can talk with customers using our online meeting system. On April 2, 2020, a few days before the State of Emergency was issued on April 7, we launched the At-home Housebuilding service, which allows customers to discuss building their Sekisui House home using the online meeting system from the comfort and safety of their own home. Under this At-home Housebuilding service, not only design, floor plan, and planning, but also problems of land-surveying, financial planning, and so on can all be solved online from the customer’s own home, and the service is now used by a great many of our customers.
Strengthening Our Contact with Our Customers While Enhancing Content with a Focus on Social Media
By keeping a fully up-to-date awareness of customer trends in the coronavirus pandemic, Sekisui House has built an environment where our customers can think about building houses without putting themselves in danger by going outside. In addition to the At-home Housebuilding we introduced above, other examples include our use of Instagram for not only distribution of housing information from our company but also sharing a great many photos and videos taken by our homeowners and their families. Using the hashtag “SekisuiHouseFamily,” current homeowners and those who are still looking have formed a community space, and it seems to have become a particularly useful information-sharing venue for potential future customers.
Opening of the “Housebuilding School” to Allow Viewing of Various Houses
With the Housebuilding School that we opened online in November 2020, we’ve uploaded a number of videos in the “Introduction to Employees’ Homes,” which showcases the homes where our employees live, and in the “Online House Tour,” which allows you—online, from the comfort of your own home—to tour around a number of real examples of homes that we’ve built. This system allows our customers to search for the right house for them while accommodating various lifestyles. We have prepared a wide range of contents: from the Home-building Course that summarizes the key points of building a home in an easy-to-understand manner, to the Virtual Structure Tour that allows potential homeowners to see the structural parts of the building that disappear from view once the building is complete, our videos always make things easy to understand! In this way, more and more things are moving online, such as with negotiations and meetings not requiring the participants to be there in person. Consequently, our business has become more efficient and we’ve achieved workstyle innovations.
