Streamlined approvals in Real Estate

Challenges faced

• Managing manual requests. As the marketing team grew, they found it extremely difficult to handle large volumes of creative requests manually using spreadsheets.

• Inability to track requests. Team members could put in a request but could not track the status of their requests. And there was no way to close out a request and mark it as complete.

• Decreased productivity. The marketing team became overwhelmed with the time-consuming manual process of tracking the requests, and this impacted the quality of the marketing collaterals produced. 

 Solution

Rachael Jay, the Associate Vice President of Marketing & Creative Services at Landmark Properties, takes us through how Landmark Properties moved away from manually managing creative and marketing requests and leveraged Kissflow’s workflow platform to streamline operations.

The marketing team is often responsible for the first impression the customers have about a brand. A marketing team functioning at full capacity often entails consistently churning out content and seamlessly communicating value to customers through every single touch point. Quality and efficiency are key.

As Landmark continues to grow, its marketing team is expected to grow with it and function at a faster pace. This means creating content like brochures, flyers, and other graphic collateral for swift distribution and promotion in order to maximize brand awareness and capture the market.

When creative requests come in, manually managing them can be quite challenging, considering how little visibility requestors have in terms of tracking the status of their requests. Not having a fixed workflow from initiation to completion can also compound the issue.

6 years ago, Landmark Properties was much smaller and managed a portfolio of about 12 properties. The Marketing Team used Google Forms to keep track of requests that came in. Over the last few years, the portfolio has grown exponentially, and this method simply did not offer enough flexibility or transparency to manage such requests. As Rachael says, “Team members could put in a request but could not track the status of their requests. And there was no way to close out a request and mark it as complete.”

Landmark Properties started using Kissflow in 2015 to track marketing requests as they came in. Kissflow offered a way to streamline requests and made it easy to track all communication within the platform. After the success of their first process, they used Kissflow in other departments within the company, creating and automating more of their process functions. Their current processes include marketing graphics requests, customer service communication approvals, bonus approval requests, write-off authorization requests, and concession approval requests.

Results

Rachael says the most significant benefit of using Kissflow is the reporting feature. “Once we set up the workflows, it did not take us long to understand the system and get everyone on board. Kissflow made it easy to focus on being more efficient while completing as many requests as possible. Each month our team revisits metrics such as the time taken to close requests and the number of requests that went past SLAs. They then use this data to finetune the processes.”

Today, Landmark Properties manage 74 properties within Kissflow. Rachael says Kissflow has become a crucial part of their success in managing approval processes.