Our client asked us: How can we simplify the building process for buyers and our business?

Building a home can be a complex and stressful process for any homebuyer. From the large choices like home style to the minutiae of finishes and everything in between, the choices and decision points can become almost limitless.

Our home building client has built hundreds of thousands of homes. Through a process of continuous improvement, they know what steps need to happen and when and how to optimize each point along the journey. The problem it was encountering was that the buyer wasn’t always along for the ride. This lack of transparency contributed to lower satisfaction rates and sometimes even order cancellation.

With more than 140,000 homes built in the past 40 years, every day is a new opportunity for our client to help homebuyers find their dream home.

The process of building that home, however, can be cumbersome at best and confusing and frustrating at worst. There are hundreds of steps that go into building a home, and to complete those steps, the buyer is traditionally handed off between project managers, foremen, title agents, loan officers and many more experts and partners along the way. This often leaves the homebuyer confused and out of touch with what’s happening in their home, leading to questions and calls that take up valuable homebuilding time.

Additionally, if a buyer misses a decision deadline point, it delays the entire process, which leaves everyone involved in a state of frustration. This is where G2O stepped in to figure out how to make the homebuyer’s experience more fluid while expediting the client’s internal processes at the same time.

The client already had a lot of data about their buyers and their builders, but we were looking for specific information about the customer journey, so we knew we needed to know more. We worked with each division and internal group to get an understanding of how the process progressed on their end, and then worked with buyers to get an idea of how their journey was matching up. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.

We needed to create a place that not only guided every step, but kept the buyers up-to-date in real time on where they were in their journey and when their next deadline was expected.

Using the Sitecore platform, we designed and developed a custom portal experience that buyers could access on any device. Once logged in, we used a tab system to show the buyer where they were in their journey. Additionally we gave them information they needed to know about each step (for example, if you walk through your house and you see the bathtub filled with water, that’s intentional and helps with accurate framing).

The MyHomes Portal gives buyers:

• Personal view into the construction process & notifications of tasks complete.
• Access to real-time construction photos.
• Ability to sign legal documents right in the portal.
• Warranty claim submission.

The team also prioritized what the client needed from the new portal as well, integrating back-office systems like the Home Design Center, Financing, ERP, CRM and marketing content CMS.

Something a lot of people don’t know is the laws and process for building a home change by state. Sometimes even by city. Therefore building a portal that walked the buyer through each step needed to be customized to the steps they would experience in their market. After a successful rollout of the first iteration of the portal, we got to work creating versions for each market.

Within six months, we had done the research and designed and built the first version of the portal. After a few more releases to add features and market-specific content, we now have a full experience live in all 17 markets. The award winning portal is directly addressing the original challenge of creating higher customer satisfaction scores and has reduced cancellation rates over 4x beyond what was originally expected.