CRM Case Analysis for Shenzhen OCT Real Estate project 

I. Overview

Shenzhen OTC Real Estate Co.,Ltd., a holding company affiliated to Shenzhen Oversea Chinese Town Group, is a real estate company authorized by Shenzhen Municipal Government in September, 1986. Now the company has become one of the three pillar groups in the economic growth of Oversea Chinese Town with its total assets amounting to 3.158 billion yuan RBM and net assets to 1.273 billion yuan RMB. Under its title are 18 sole-invested and joint-invested companies with property development as its major business sector and architecture design, constructive installation, project supervision and property management and hotels as its supplementary sector. The company is the biggest real estate business in Shenzhen, ranking among the first 50 giant property companies in Guangdong and the first 100 businesses of its kind in China when its comprehensive efficiency is concerned.

II. Motives and Goals

Along with the enhancement of their core competitive edges and the more intensive competition in the market, real estate companies are consistently pushing forward their internal informationization construction. Mr. Chen Jian, vice president of the Group, found that CRM ( Costumer Relationship Management) is very vital to a real estate business. Mr. Chen realized that the implementation of CRM would upgrade the overall service level and make its brand renounced nationwide and that CRM would optimize their decision making in business by fully using costumer information, helping narrow down the gap between the company and their costumers, further classify them and study their performance with a view to heightening their loyalty. CRM would play a vital role in enabling a business to face competition more powerfully, capture a bigger market share and increase investment return. Accordingly, Oversea Chinese Town set clear and correct goals for the implementation of CRM. Mr. Chen pointed out that the guideline of this project was ‘practical’. The word ‘practical’ does not only mean a good combination of the implementation with work and the achievement of our goals, but also mean a close cooperation with Powerise and the application of the system in a very successful manner. Mr. Yuan Jing Ping, a project manager and the director of the company’s marketing center, forwarded general directions for the implementation of CRM. They would include the establishment of a complete costumer data platform so as to guide property development process with the aid of statistic analysis and the application of the system in an easy and convenient way. And Mr. Dai Lian Qi, the company official in charge of overall technical affairs, put forward the following specific requirements for CRM system:

A Enforcement of statistic analytic work in order to guide property development activity

1.      Analyze costumer information at multi levels (i.e. income, age, interest etc.);

2.      Comprehensively classify costumers according to their purchase intents so as to pinpoint sales activity in the market;

3.      Quantify statistic analytic results and make them direct-viewing;

B. Safety policy of the system

1.      Every salesperson can only manage the information of his/her own costumers;

2.      The manager at the selling site can manage the information of all costumers at the spot;

3.      Information sharing or its use beyond specified scope should be prevented because it may lead to confusion and information leak.

C. Management policy with a united sales group having its own salespersons and sales representatives

1.      Make the criteria of staff management and evaluation consistent;

2.      Take over and control our own database which once was in the hands of others;

D. System extension

Itshould be under consideration that the structure of the system should sooner or later be connected to the following systems:

1.      Financial system;

2.      Apartment-selling system ( replacing it with CRM and introducing the original data into the latter);

3.      The system of Oversea Chinese Town Club member management, partner firms and chamber of commerce;

4.      Three-class marketing system(secondhand market);

5.      The system of property management and

6.      The system of human resources.

E. Others

1.      Hopefully, the feedback from the front-line market can be used by all divisions;

2.      The competitive property market and current situation must be managed;

3.      The system can directly reflect the daily work records of staff members;

4.      The Email marketing should also be managed;

5.      The system will provide interactive concerns for costumers (web-based message leaving and surveys)

6.      It should be easy to run the system.

III. Implementation

Overall Planning

As the contractor of the project, Powersie realized that a complete overall design and planning should be given top priority because the implementation of this project was a rather complicated systematic project which might be concerned with the business administration of the Oversea Chinese Town, organization structure and informationization construction. The principle of “Viewing wide and far but Doing  specifically” should be followed in its overall design. Based on an overall CRM planning which should go first, we should set a short-term and a medium-term goals with the former including the complete analysis and overall planning of the project so as to solve the problems urgent for the enterprise at the present.

Through the Oversea Chinese Town CRM, some important resources like costumer information, market situation information and work flow could be integrated and shared. As shown below, the red circles mean the CRM rental system of the Town while the blue circles CRM online sales system and CRM property management system yet to be planned in the future.

apartment-selling system                  

rental system 

properties management

PowerCRM integration architecture

costumer database

one-to-one & face-to-face contact

apartment-selling site          

hotline

costumer center

internet                              

marketing     

finance & accounting

human resources                

decoration design        

goods supply       

engineering supervision

market planning

integrated architecture of EAI systems

A. The present situation of the Oversea Chinese Town informationization construction

In comparison with other property companies, the Oversea Chinese Town has proceeded rather ahead in its real estate informationization growing. Currently, the operation of its divisions like rental, service, the Oversea Chinese Town Club and marketing is basically following the concepts of costumer relationship management, just leaving such problems unsolved as the separate and unbalanced development in informationization construction as well as lack of coordinative and harmonious operation under a unified information architecture.

Today, by means of CRM, the Oversea Chinese Town Group has possessed the following informaionized approaches:

A. SalesCRM: the rental CRM packaged in Powerise comprehensive real estate solutions can perform the costumer relationship management of currently potential costumers and already-signing-in costumers.

B. RentalCRM: basically co-developed, its database servers are mainly located in the headquarters above the hardware platform of Compaq PC server. All apartment-selling sites receive data from servers via ISDN dial connection and in the way of C/S and B/S is adopted anywhere in the local web of the headquarters. Currently, the system chiefly records the information of costumers with who a transaction has been done and contract data, yet lacking of the function to collect information from potential costumers. The IT Information Department of the Town possesses all the developing source codes, leaving open the possibility of system redevelopment.

C. Oversea Chinese Town Club Membership Management CRM: ‘the Oversea Chinese Club’ is an organization for daily life servces, advocated by the Shenzhen Oversea Chinese Town Real Estate Co., Ltd., and offers services for the company’s property owners and other rich and middle-class people. The organization serves its members almost in every aspect concerning discount shopping, culture club, tourism, fitness and real estate purchase advice etc., fully utilizing the Group’s various inside resources in life, entertainment, education and tourism on one hand and linking some outside clubs and organizations on the other. The system, mainly on the web platform, is working for the information management, maintenance and extension, and partner information management, all related to club members. Currently, the members of the organization number about 2,000, consisting mainly of the town’s property owners, original members and distinguished guests from all kinds of walks and resource sharing has been realized among the club, the Town and its partners.

D. Hotline: it mainly offers services for costumer complaints and counseling. The system, equipped with 3-4 direct-dial telephones, is working completely manually. It lacks necessary costumer data support and responds rather slowly to complaints from costumers.

E. Property information management: the system mainly takes charge of after-sales services of properties and the treatment of complaints about housing development. Presently, the system is comparatively independent from other systems of the company.F. Other information management systems: they mainly include information systems regarding residential properties for sale, advertisement planning, advertisement issuing, etc. with all of them separate from each other.

G. Window of the World, Huanle Valley, Splendid Chinese Miniature Scenic Spot, Chinese Folk Culture Village, etc. under the title of the Group: They all posses certain resources of potential costumers.

The Oversea Chinese Town Real Estate Co., Ltd. has three branches located in Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai with almost similar informationization construction situation in the three cities.

Shown below is a picture of the present-day topological web in Oversea Chinese Town.

headquarters    

work stations of functional departments

servers                   

work station

exchanger

apartment-selling sites

Note: All the apartment-selling sites are connected with the headquarters via ADSL

A. Hardware & Software Platforms

B. Applications 

1.      Completion of software development

14 modules, 100 plus functional points and 60 plus multi-function reports made

2.      Completion of training

all related staff members responsible for sales, planning, accounting and system operators already trained

3.      Completion of data inducts

Data of 9,300 costumers from apartment-selling sites and the club input in the system database

4.      Completion of trial operation

Trials carried out in Phase III of Splendid Chinese Miniature Scenic Spot site, and Chunshuian/Swan Castle; information about new costumers 1,000 plus, newly-sold flats 200 plus

IV. Self-evaluation and Summary

Up to June, 2003, the project now started running online after a 9 months’ construction in the first phase and it is working well at all apartment-selling sites. The results were highly spoken of and approved by the related officials of Oversea Chinese Town Real Estate Co.,Ltd.. Now, the second-phase construction is just under consideration.

 clients.