“Everything is thoroughly connected, creating an ecosystem that conveys valuable customer insight to agents while showcasing relevant agent knowledge for highly interested consumers,” says Jamie Wilson, ZipRealty’s senior vice president of technology. “There’s no development that we do on the consumer mobile or Web experience that is not being thought about and incorporated by our data acquisition team, our CRM team, our broker tools team, and vice versa.”
Zap Predicts
Most importantly, Zap predicts. The ZapScore is the key component to the entire system, a predictive numerical rating for each consumer in the database scored by an algorithm 1 to 99 that rates how likely potential clients are to buy or sell a home in the next 60 to 120 days.
“Zap tracks consumer activity and each night, every single consumer in the database gets a new score,” Wilson says. “Based on 15 years of consumer behavior data, consumers are ranked against every other consumer in the database. Effectively, what it does is sort everybody according to our highly accurate prediction, from who’s the most likely person to buy a house to who’s the least likely to do so at a given point of time.”
This is a huge win for the agents, according to Perriello, because it takes the guesswork out of customer follow-up.
“Now the agent knows more about each lead, what their preferences are, what homes they have been looking at, how likely they are to transact business, and, most importantly, it gives them a systemized way to respond to those potential customers,” says Perriello. “Having a highly sophisticated CRM component integrated with the consumer-facing Zap experience is the genius behind the whole platform. Without that kind of connectivity, leads are just leads—and we’re not in the lead business. We’re in the business of helping our franchisees and their affiliated agents sell more houses.”
Zap Informs
Zap informs by capturing important details about the consumer interactions on the website and mobile app, as well as those between consumer and agent, and makes all of that accessible to the consumer, the agent and the broker. As Wilson explains, this improves productivity for the agent who can focus their personal attention on the clients most likely to buy or sell. And the broker can easily review which agents are bringing in the most business and best utilizing the Zap tools to build business opportunities.
John Fox, broker, Century 21 Unlimited Real Estate in Tannersville, Pa., notes the strength of Zap’s customer relationship tool.
“Managing customer relationships is the cornerstone of our business,” he says. “Efficiently managing those relationships is the goal. Integrate a great CRM with features for the consumer and throw in state-of-the-art lead scoring and you have a game changer. The Zap program does all that and more.”
Zap Connects
Lastly, the system connects the entire business…the consumer to the agent, the agent to the consumer and the broker to both consumers and agents. A broker may go to an industry event and pick different technologies they like, but when they get back home and try to run them all together, few, if any, will connect in an easy or seamless fashion.
“With Zap, we have a product that meets each of those different wants and needs, and they’re all built to work together,” says Wilson. “Once we solve a broker’s technology issue, they can go back to the business of being visibly present experts in their community, marketing locally and recruiting agents.”
Zap Rollout
So far, the Zap rollout is exceeding expectations for Realogy. Launched to Realogy franchise affiliates in 2015, the initial goal was to implement the system in 300 companies in the first year, but that goal was well surpassed by year-end.
The introduction to brokers began at brand conferences and events in the beginning of the year, and the response to the product has been overwhelmingly positive, according to Perriello.
“I had a lead that I had not spoken to in over a year,” says Ben Burnside of ERA Cornerstone Realty in Denton, Texas. “When we implemented Zap, the lead was ported over. Zap sent my lead an email, which I would not have done on my own. It turns out she had the highest ZapScore in my queue of leads, so I connected with her and we are looking at houses. That’s how powerful Zap and the lead scoring tool can be for your business.”
In addition to promoting more sales, Zap has proven to be a compelling recruiting draw for agents, according to Perriello. “We felt that Zap would be a material enhancement to our brand value propositions by helping our brokers attract agents who were looking for a technology solution as part of affiliating with a leading brand,” he explains.
Greg Armstrong, broker/owner of Coldwell Banker F.I. Grey & Son Residential, Inc., in New Port Richie, Fla., has seen an influx of new agents due to Zap.
“Since we launched Zap in 2015, our recruiting has gone wild,” says Armstrong. “We have grown our company by more than 30 percent in six months. Zap shows agents that we are unquestionably the leaders of our industry today and in the future. This is the best recruiting weapon that we have ever had.”
According to Perriello, brokers using Zap say that the agents they recruit “come for the leads, but stay for the technology.”
