Conga, a global leader in commercial operations transformation, has announced that Zoopla, one of the UK’s leading property portals, transformed its commercial operations at the onset of the first COVID-19 lockdown with Conga. Continuing a seven-year relationship, Zoopla leveraged Conga Composer, Conga Sign and Conga Batch to facilitate the communication and implementation of Zoopla’s support packages and streamline its business review process.
As lockdown restrictions were announced and the uncertainty surrounding the property market grew, Zoopla helped its customers by offering support packages of up to nine months’ free use of its portal. Recognising the difficulties lockdown posed for the property market, it needed to quickly communicate this offer to its entire customer base, generate new contracts and secure electronic signatures. However, since agents were all working remotely, this proved a challenge.
Zoopla used Conga’s Commercial Operations Suite to sign its agents up to the support packages quickly and securely. After these packages ended, Zoopla’s account managers and customer success managers conducted business reviews with agents before renewing their contracts. They began using Conga Composer to collate the required data for these reviews into a single document at the click of a button. What used to take up to 45 minutes per document, now takes approximately three seconds. When conducting eight business reviews per week, the overall time saved whilst maintaining high quality radically boosted team productivity.
The speed at which Zoopla could compile these business reviews allowed managers to check in with agents more frequently to gauge market sentiment and continue providing support to agents, improving customer relationships as a result. Zoopla then started utilising Conga Composer to update its business plan in real time with the objectives that arose from these business reviews, to ensure the company was responding well to the market and the continuing challenges of the pandemic.
Zoopla also implemented Conga Batch after the support packages ended to negotiate new contracts in batches, which saved account managers’ time when it came to producing and distributing documents on such a large scale. Generating and sending direct debit forms individually to just 1,000 agents would have taken more than eight hours. However, with Conga, this process took approximately 45 minutes.
“Since implementing Conga’s product suite, automating our processes accurately and reliably has saved our account managers so much time, meaning more time can now be devoted to servicing existing customers and generating new business,” said Stephanie Mackay, project delivery manager at Zoopla. “These automated processes were particularly critical for us during the pandemic, where there was so much disruption. The partnership and trust we had already built with Conga made a huge difference in responding to the crisis and supporting agents. When we needed to install Batch, Conga made this possible in just a few days – we simply couldn’t have done it without their support.”
Conga’s Commercial Operations Suite not only aided the communication with agents and continuing business operations at a challenging time, but it also provided longer-term results for Zoopla by streamlining its revenue processes and improving the customer journey. As a result, Zoopla’s teams can now spend more time and energy on customer acquisition, rather than retention.
“Documents are the lifeblood of everyday business, and an effective commercial operations strategy is critical, especially given the current volatile landscape and today’s digital world,” said Jason Janicke, senior vice president at Conga. “Zoopla recognised the need for an end-to-end document management process and has seen excellent results from progressing in its digital transformation journey. We are delighted that the team can now focus on improving the customer experience even further and achieving more commercial growth.”
Zoopla started working with Conga in 2014 when the company took steps to re-organise and integrate its teams. To collate the data needed for its sales league, the property portal used Composer, which brings together multiple data sources in a visual, easily structured way. After significantly improving its revenue operations processes with Composer, Zoopla implemented Conga Sign in 2019, and the pandemic drove Zoopla to implement Conga Batch in August 2020 as well as implementing Composer for other purposes.