Frasers Property Limited is a multi-national company that develops, owns and manages a diverse portfolio of properties across five asset classes, with $38.7 billion in assets around the globe. In Australia, the company’s legacy as a leading multi-sector developer spans over 95 years, and employs over 600 staff nationally across two platforms: Frasers Property Australia and Frasers Property Industrial.
“The issues were always there in the past. But now we have a system to identify them all, and more importantly, everyone is working from the same source of truth.”
Sumeer Shoree General manager IT and digital , Frasers Property
Over the last five years, Frasers Property in Australia has embarked upon a series of customer experience projects using its existing on-premise SAP CRM technology — combined with SAP’s new generation of mobile-enabled cloud solutions — to deliver industryleading customer service across the Frasers Property Australia and Frasers Property Industrial platforms.
Sumeer Shoree, general manager IT and Digital at Frasers Property, says there is an inherent desire within the business to do right by the customer. “We set ourselves the objective of delivering the best customer experience to our customers.”
Building trust
Shoree says customer trust is Frasers Property’s number one asset. “At all stages in the customer lifecycle, be it pre-purchase information, building completion inspection or signing a tenancy, we have to maintain customer trust. The period from initial interest to finally shaking hands on the deal can be long and arduous for a customer, as there are many milestones to tick off along the way. We aim to build trust with the customer and ensure it is maintained through to deal completion and beyond.”
To achieve that, Frasers Property sought to simplify the number of touchpoints a customer has to encounter and ensure that its processes accurately registered customer queries and dealt with them comprehensively and logically.
“We get good information about sales and customer interactions at the management level, and that allows us to improve how our representatives go about dealing with customers. We can amplify positive interactions and guide staff on how to improve customer service outcomes further.”
Sumeer Shoree General manager IT and digital, Frasers Property
Empowering customers
One key area identified for improvement was allowing customers to identify build defects before settlement. “We try to keep defects to an absolute minimum,” says Shoree, “but when identified, we wanted to ensure we had a simple system for customers to log them. We then revisited our internal processes so we could address the defects properly and in a timely fashion.”
Frasers Property has around forty milestones to tick off during the construction phase of a house. Once completed, the customer inspects their property at the pre-settlement stage. With DXC Technology, Frasers Property developed a web-based system, called Construction e-Tracker, to not only track defects customers identify but to ensure the issues are visible internally and dealt with systematically.
Developed using its on-premise SAP CRM system, e-Tracker has a digital portal that allows customers to log and track any defects.
As a result of introducing the portal, Frasers Property saw an uptake in the number of defects identified. “But that was a good thing,” says Shoree. “The issues were always there in the past. But now we have a system to identify them all, and more importantly, everyone is working from the same source of truth.”
Before the Construction e-Tracker solution, different lists of defects would circulate the business, and no-one had total visibility of all the issues. “Now, thanks to the new customer experience solution, more issues are identified, and the customer has full transparency as to what the remedy is,” says Shoree. “Internally, we know who is dealing with the issues and where they are on their journey to being resolved.”
Frasers Property uses SAP’s Customer Experience applications to serve its industrial, commercial and shopping centre customers similarly. “Our tenants log issues and interact with us seamlessly through the portal. Every issue raised intersects with other areas of the business — be it financial or insurance, but we handle that complexity, so they don’t have to deal with multiple touchpoints.”
“Now, thanks to the new customer experience solution, more issues are identified, and the customer has full transparency as to what the remedy is. Internally, we know who is dealing with the issues and where they are on their journey to being resolved.”
Sumeer Shoree General manager IT and digital, Frasers Property
Real-time information
Mobile apps that leverage SAP information also play a vital role in ensuring that Frasers’ customers and sales agents have up-to-date information during the pre-sales process.
“When people want to buy a property, the most powerful sales tool we have is making sure all our stock is transparently available to the customer. We need to ensure that pricing and other vital decision-making information is at our sales agents’ fingertips,” says Sumeer Shoree, general manager IT and Digital at Frasers Property.
Pre-sales information is now available in real-time through an app on their mobile device. Agents can see the stock allocated to them, be confident they are showing customers everything available for purchase and have the most up-todate pricing.
“Prior to the app, agents would be unsure if they had the latest version of the price list,” says Shoree. “Different versions would circulate, and they were difficult to maintain consistently. Now there is only one version of the truth available; just as with the defects lists, everything is transparent to the customer.”
“We set ourselves the objective of delivering the best customer experience to our customers.”
Sumeer Shoree General manager IT and digital, Frasers Property
The digital advantage
Shoree says it is the real-time access that is the actual value-add of digital. “An agent can hold a property for a buyer for twenty-four hours to give them time to think about the purchase without fear of being gazumped by another buyer. It allows the sales agents to manage customer expectations better because all the information about a property or tenancy is readily at hand.”
The digital apps helped Frasers Property conduct sales during the COVID-19 disruptions. Shoree says: “We became contactless during COVID-19, but thanks to the digital tools, we could still conduct much of our business via digital channels.”
The customer experience solutions also allow Frasers Property to make better decisions. “We get good information about sales and customer interactions at the management level, and that allows us to improve how our representatives go about dealing with customers. We can amplify positive interactions and guide staff on how to improve customer service outcomes further.”