Raise has more time to focus on clients with Front

Imagine all the work that goes into buying or renting a house, then magnify that by 100. That’s what goes into every office real estate transaction.

Raise Commercial Real Estate (Raise) is a technology-enabled real estate brokerage company that makes the real estate process seamless and helps companies find amazing spaces that are an extension of their identity. To do that, they follow an integrated approach to provide the most efficient and elevated process for their clients.

Raise’s mission is to help companies find, build, and manage workplaces that they love. For them, the workplace is a physical manifestation of a company’s culture. From their brokerage team that helps companies find their new office space to their project management team that builds out an authentic and functional office to their workplace team that helps develop and put in place strategy for a successful work environment, Raise helps companies find and create the perfect workspace.

Challenge

Raise started using Front early on in its journey. Like a lot of companies growing fast, Raise’s founders realized they needed a way to operationalize responding to an ever-increasing number of customer messages, and so they turned to Front. But just because a business software works at the growth-phase of a young company, doesn’t mean it will work for a mature company with more complex requirements.

There were three main questions to answer as interactions became more complex:

1. Business development: How could Raise reach out to prospective clients at scale and match them with a curated list of available commercial spaces? How would they maintain continuity throughout the customer journey across teams and coordinate with multiple stakeholders to coordinate everything from site visits to contracts?

2. Workflow management: How could Raise intake massive amounts of information via email, then prioritize and surface it to brokers and clients at the right time? Could managing the data be automated to save time and effort?

3. Internal collaboration: How could brokers and other team members surface insights to the product team to prioritize product refinements? How could cross-functional teams work together better, with fewer messages, to solve problems faster?

Thankfully, Front was up to the challenge. These days, Raise uses Front throughout the company to foster a team approach to solving clients’ problems.

Solution

Easier and more effective business development

Front’s value for Raise starts at the top of the funnel. Brokers use templatized sequences in Front to reach out to prospective clients. Once a prospect is in the workflow, their experience browsing potential commercial spaces is managed in Raise’s software product. For the client, it’s a simple, delightful experience — where high touch meets high tech. Behind the scenes, Front is integrating with Raise’s product to make it simple for a broker to create a shortlist and share it back through email. Or to set up a site visit involving multiple stakeholders all at once, with one click.

Because Front works so seamlessly with existing workflows and Raise’s product, Front offers a more user-friendly approach to outbound prospecting. There’s no need to switch between a sequencing tool and email, and it’s just as easy to edit outbound messages before they go out. 

Simple, automated workflows

Raise maintains critical real estate market information in each geography they serve their clients. Raise needed an intake workflow that was flexible to manage incoming data and information on a market and client level. In Front, those lists are routed to the right shared inbox and prioritized automatically using rules. Those rules are based on headlines, key tags and phrases — even market location. Brokers can also manually flag data to the data team with a quick @-mention or a tag. 

Raise makes use of Front’s Slack integration to help refine their product as well. When a product adjustment is tagged, it goes into a priority queue in Slack for the data team. All that qualitative information collected automatically through contextual clues in the messages plus manual tagging becomes part of the prioritization framework that helps the data team deliver accurate and helpful information to their clients.

Effortless cross-functional collaboration

Part of what helps Raise differentiate in a crowded marketplace is their team approach to solving clients’ problems. They have several specialties within their organization that come together to offer an amazing experience. But that takes a lot of internal coordination. Front helps bring together people from different departments and focuses into a single communication flow with the client. That cuts way down on email volume and keeps the focus on the customer with all the necessary context.

For example, let’s say a client is expanding to multiple new markets. There will be people working on the same client account representing each market. Plus there are all the different specialties that are working on it too. Front keeps all that context in the thread, so no individual loses track of the bigger conversation — and the bigger picture.

Front is even helping Raise from a recruiting standpoint. When a candidate is interviewing with multiple department heads, they can often have simultaneous threads going with each one. Front enables each one to have a view of the others’ conversations and consolidate information and effort.

Results

There’s a lot of brokerage firms in the world and all of them offer variations on the same thing: helping clients find space. But Raise differentiates on their user-friendly technology, their fast and efficient processes, and the strength of their relationships with clients. Front is an integral part of that equation.

They’ve achieved 99% adoption of Front on their brokerage team alone, and they’re using comments and tags to cut down significantly on email volume. But the most pivotal functionality for the data team is automation.

“With the amount of information our team is getting on any given day,” said Moore, “it’d be impossible to prioritize it without Front’s automation. That’s the bulk of the product team’s job, and our whole company is dependent on their success.”