Barry Plant partners with Rebot to deliver data cleansing and prospecting tools for offices and agents
- Written by Barry Plant Real Estate
Barry Plant Head Office has always understood the value of data. How those little pieces of information on customers – past, and present – can help ensure that a Barry Plant agent gets called in to every possible future listing but we have also come to understand how difficult it is for offices and agents to keep those databases current and up to date whilst running a business.
Our Chief Operating Officer, Doug Hutchinson joined Barry Plant to drive our database strategy more than seven years ago. He quickly realised that offices and agents had different requirements, preferences and working styles. He also came to the conclusion that there was no single CRM system that could do everything required to operate a successful agency. That lead to a decision to adopt a CRM agnostic approach and a focus on ensuring that all CRM systems that offices and agents wanted to use could communicate with the other marketing platforms used by the group. It was the start of a foray into PropTech that has seen Barry Plant partner with key innovators in the industry – the latest, and most exciting being Rebot.
Rebot delivers data intelligence. A clever suite of data cleaning and prospecting tools that harnesses artificial intelligence to detect and correct gaps, errors or outdated data in office databases. One ingenious capability is Rebot’s ability to detect and update a customer record whenever someone on the database buys or sells a property (not just through Barry Plant). This ensures agents communications can more targeted and relevant to the customers they are communicating with.
Barry Plant is now rolling out the benefits of the software to their franchisees and agents and they are doing it at no charge now or in the future. Doug Hutchinson explains: “We believe the benefits that the Rebot program will deliver to our offices will significantly build their share of listings and when our franchisees succeed, so do we.”
Darren McCoy, CEO and Founder of Rebot is thrilled with the rollout. “Barry Plant have played a proactive role in the development of Rebot over the last couple of years. Their grasp of technology and their understanding of the value of a high quality database for agents has helped us take our innovative product to a new level. We are all looking forward to seeing the results of its implementation.”
Rebot has been developed for use in conjunction with industry CRM systems, working in perfectly with Barry Plant’s CRM agnostic approach.
“The genesis of the development of Rebot was to assist our offices when they were moving from one industry CRM to another,” Doug explains. “A critical part of the migration process involves cleaning, de-duplicating, merging and connecting customer contacts and property records. We needed software tools to do this. It used to be a difficult, time consuming and expensive process. Now the process is quick and easy and we can offer it to our franchisees for free.”
The confidence Barry Plant now has in its data has allowed it to create a data lake that can be used in conjunction with the omni-channel marketing systems used by its offices and agents.
Moving forward, Rebot and Barry Plant are partnering on the development of a suite of agent and consumer apps that will provide a more personalised, but automated, experience for Barry Plant customers.
“Data science is moving at lightning speed,” Doug concludes. “And by partnering with Rebot, Barry Plant aims to be the leading innovator and implementer in the PropTech space – delivering its benefits to all our offices and their clients. If data is king, I want to make sure Barry Plant rules the throne.”
