Colliers international

Salesforce cloud development, customisation, and implementation beyond platform limitations

About the project

Colliers International is one of the leading companies in the real estate industry and has a global footprint with over 15,000 employees worldwide. Colliers International has been struggling with inefficient processes across their customer acquisition and support workflows. Vasterra was hired to analyse these business processes, propose automation potentials, and implement the digital transformation without interruption of the daily business.

Google Maps

SalesForce

Php

JavaScript

Inefficiencies hindering growth

Colliers International is growing across the United Kingdom major metropolitan areas. Through this growth, the rental and sales requests increased disproportionately to a level where minor inefficiencies across the customer journey led to a significant, accumulated time constraint. To analyse and to mitigate the causes of these business process inefficiencies, Vasterra had been hired. The main objectives of the collaboration, therefore, were to:

analyse the internal standard operating procedures and identify the bottlenecks
propose innovative approaches to mitigate these challenges
adapt the way customers discover listed properties
implement the solution and prepare relevant training to onboard the employees;

Beyond these major objectives, Colliers International required sophisticated business analytics capabilities to track the entire system and further develop the process optimization in the future. With Vasterra’s comprehensive experience in DevOps and analytics, the project required all our core competencies to lead to a successful outcome.

Rental and sales requests

Mapping the internal processes

At the very beginning, our project team immersed itself into the corporate environment of Colliers International to reconstruct and to understand every relevant business process from the beginning to the end. Hereby, we recognized some repetitive processes with high optimization potential. While some of these were optimized by introducing new standard operating procedures, others required a re-development of existing systems. Eventually, our developers at Vasterra proposed major changes surrounding the preparation of sales materials and communication flows.

Circumventing platform limitations

Colliers International runs on Salesforce. While such a big SaaS player brings significant advantages to corporations like Colliers International, the limited customization potential constitutes a major drawback. During the discovery phase, our developers recognized the potential of radically changing the way properties are presented to Colliers International’s customers. To that end, we implement Google Maps into the Salesforce environment to offer customers a dynamic map view rather than the traditional grid view. While appearing as a minor issue, Salesforce does not support this feature in the extensiveness required by Colliers International.

Eventually, Vasterra set up an external server and implemented the custom-made solution via API onto the Salesforce platform. Through this step, we not only circumvented the problem with non-existing functionality but, furthermore, ensured the scalability of the solution as the external server handles the additional web load without slowing down the rest of the website.

Sales pitch decks as bottleneck

Colliers International brokers are required to create sales presentations on a frequent basis. This process had been extraordinarily cumbersome with the broker forced to collect the required information from various systems without interconnectivity. This led to sales presentations for prospective clients requiring more than 3 days until they were ready to be sent out. With a growing number of requests, brokers were unable to meet the demand and capture the available business opportunities.

Vasterra recognized the limiting factors of this process and created a custom solution running on an additional server and combining all required information sources into one single application. Instead of implementing an additional software program for the brokers to use, Vasterra connected the solution to the Salesforce CMS and enabled the sales presentation generation from within the already known CMS.

We were able to not overcomplicate the software environment for the end user any further and streamline the procedures

Speed in mind

We understood that everything we propose must be lightweight and fast to foster scalability and, ultimately, business growth across Colliers International. All our custom-made solutions were built on lightweight web components as well as APEX. Running these solutions separate from existing hardware environments enabled us to create a unique setting which was trimmed on handling a significant amount of traffic without any problems.

Reducing costs and facilitating growth

The overarching theme was to access yet untapped revenue opportunities and to create the capacity of handling expected growth easily. To that end, Vasterra was required to analyse all business processes and understand why brokers do certain tasks the way they do them. Only with understanding these reasons, our developers can propose solutions with a positive impact on the overall efficiency.

Ultimately, we implemented website functionality not available within the standard SaaS solution with the goal to guarantee the long-term competitive advantage of our client

Our developers integrated the solution seamlessly into the existing environment without any disruption to the daily business and prepared training materials to onboard the brokers as efficiently as possible.

Process optimization

Vasterra’s solutions reduced costs associated with inefficiencies by more than 75%. Not only Colliers International can save costs and facilitate growth through process optimization – your organization can do that as well. Get in touch with us and we’ll demonstrate to you the opportunities out there.

Hours

System lifetime years

Improved the system uptime