57% decrease in support tickets, 45% decrease in operational costs

About the organization 

​​Gordon James Realty (GJR) was founded by two brothers, Thomas Carcone and Matthew Carcone in 2010, focusing on property management for commercial, homeowners associations, and residential management space. Thomas oversees the operational side of the business and Matthew heads up revenue generation.

Thomas and Matthew started purchasing properties in 2008 and renting them out to individuals. Working with various property management companies, they quickly discovered that most of these companies didn't utilize technology, which made property management inefficient and created an environment where poor client experiences were inevitable.

To improve this, they founded an organization with a client-first mentality that utilizes technology to create better client experiences. 

Challenges & Discovery of Magentrix

Upon initial adoption of Salesforce as their CRM, it was soon realized they still needed a way to enable clients to: 

• Pay their rent 
• Submit work orders 
• Be able to access information about their properties 

Their need for transparency when dealing with clients was another factor that reinforced their decision to select Magentrix, “We have a financials tab in the portal which is directly pulling information from Salesforce, and it allows board members to have full access to every piece of financial data they would want – and in near real-time – and I think that is absolutely crucial. It provides the client with that level of full transparency that’s really important to us. Other products out there just didn’t allow us to provide this transparency.” – Matthew Carcone, Director of Revenue, GJR

Eventually, as they grew tired of managing the information in Salesforce CRM separately and having to manually update their external portal (Propertyware), they realized they ultimately required the ability to share information from Salesforce with their clients and that's when they came across Magentrix.

This ability to alleviate their biggest challenge – the syncing of data, as well as the customization capabilities (due to Magentrix’s nature being a platform as a service aka: a PaaS) was what really drove Gordon James Realty to choose a Magentrix customer portal over other solutions, 

“We wanted everything to be integrated in one consolidated platform. So that was another challenge that we were able to resolve using Magentrix. And that's just been a massive, massive value-add.” – Matthew Carcone, Director of Revenue, GJR

Other options considered were:

Salesforce Communities: required too many resources, development hurdles, high cost, and paying per login.

Custom solution: They also explored the possibility of creating a custom solution by working with a developer, but it was time-intensive, cost-prohibitive and would have been restrictive should they require updates in the future.

“Magentrix has exceeded our expectations (and that’s actually why we reached out to you guys to do this case study). We knew there would be an increase in efficiency and customer satisfaction. But we were quite shocked at the actual results of the increases we’ve experienced.”  – Matthew Carcone, Director of Revenue, GJR

Results with Magentrix

After implementing their Magentrix Customer Portal, the company experienced: 

• An immeasurable increase in efficiency
• 57% overall reduction in customer support tickets in the first 3 - 6 months (which is how long it took clients to actively use the portal)
  • In customer support tickets related to their accounts receivable process alone, they saw a 72% reduction
• Eight months after going live with the portal, they saw a 49% increase in customer satisfaction (based on their survey results) due to the many self-serve and collaboration options the Magentrix portal provided that their old system just didn’t offer 
• The implementation of Magentrix also led to a reduction in both support staff and administrative costs  
• 45% decrease in operational costs:
  • The biggest difference in their operations was having one central database to update rather than multiple databases. 
  • 8-in-1: Prior to using Magentrix, the company had to use eight different platforms for different purposes. Magentrix became the sole replacement for all 8 as it was one consolidated platform to serve all their needs. 
• Customer engagement with the portal skyrocketed by 217%: Usage of the portal by their clients (active users) skyrocketed to 85% versus the 39% experienced with their old portal
  • Previously, everyone who wasn't using the portal was reaching out through either email or analog mediums: telephone, or via post mail. 

How Gordon James Realty is using their Magentrix Customer Portal

1.  Payment processing - more efficient now: 
Being able to use Magentrix allowed Gordon James Realty to be able to pick the best-in-class applications they needed to integrate within Salesforce, and to expose that to the client within the customer portal.

2.  Enabling clients to easily update or access information and decreasing the need for customer support: A big part of the reason for the reduction in customer support tickets is that they were able to share the information from Salesforce and not only present it to the client but to do so in a way that made more sense to the client (personalizing the customer experience).

Also, customers could now:

•  Add their payment information
•  Update the payment information
•  View transactions
•  View invoices related to the transaction
•  View client statements

Another contributing factor was being able to now honor requests from owners. If they wanted to see the status of support tickets that were submitted by residents in the building. Owners could now access any case submitted from any resident in the building.

3.  Customized customer onboarding process: Previously, support staff would have to reach out to the clients directly and ask them to send information which was a significantly more manual process. Now, everything is displayed in the portal and clients can click through the “Getting started” steps – this significantly improved efficiency.

4.  Sending notices and alerts: A big part of the business relies on communication with their clients. For example, when managing a building that has 215 units, and the need arises to reach out to existing residents within the building to notify them about something.

“We created a custom object within Magentrix that allows internal users on our side to be able to create a notice. And we can choose, if we want to send it to everyone, or if we want to send it to just the owners or the residents in the building and we also have the ability for board members, to create notices on their own – we previously didn’t have this ability, and we were doing mail merges to accomplish this instead. This was a huge value-add.”  – Matthew Carcone, Director of Revenue, GJR

5.  Forums module: Developing a collaborative customer community  

• Clients have said: “We would love to be able to create some sort of community forum to have discussions with other members and with other owners in this building.”
  
  

6.  Idea Exchange module: Offering a place to submit feedback: Prior to using Magentrix, Gordon James Realty did not have a unified approach to handling client feedback and suggestions. 

• Idea Exchange has now empowered them to effectively organize and execute on their customers’ ideas
• “Clients love being able to kind of provide that feedback and to feel like they have sort of a say in the direction of the portal. We didn’t have this capability in prior products we used.” – Matthew Carcone, Director of Revenue, GJR
  
  

7.  Owners can self-serve and view real-time balances: 
If owners wanted to see real-time balances or if there were any amounts outstanding that were due for any of the properties in the building, they were now enabled to do this very quickly (whereas, previously, they would email or call the team to obtain this information and wait for a response back)

Download the Case Study here