Redrow was formed in 1974, and in 2017-18 built 5,913 new homes across England and Wales. With 15 individual regions, Redrow builds high-quality homes and thriving communities where people want to live, work and play.
Redrow and SoCrowd were awarded the highly coveted Social Media Customer Service Team of the Year title at the 2019 UKCCF Awards. The judges praised Redrow’s strategy to engage customers directly, improved response times, and also improved quality of responses. You can read more about the award win on the Redrow website, and continue reading below to find out how they achieved it.
“When I arrived, one of the first things I wanted to do was look at how we were dealing with all of our stakeholders on social media. We had a 48-hour response time and only a 38% response rate.”
“With all social media enquiries being handled manually by a central team, it was a real challenge to monitor, prioritise and then respond effectively.”
“It wasn’t just about the speed of response, but also about the quality of response. We wanted to really connect with customers and social media users. The challenge was to find a way to utilise the knowledge of colleagues based in relevant areas of the country or with specific technical expertise.”
“It was a Redrow cross-team, collaborative effort from the very start, which has been one of the main reasons for the strategy’s success.”
“We pulled together a working group of Heads of Customer Service and Sales Directors, and we looked at our current process – concentrating on the ideal customer experience we wanted Redrow home owners and stakeholders to receive.”
In the past, customers would receive very generic responses from a central team.
“Today, social media enquiries are routed to the relevant local teams via the SoCrowd system, allowing our Customer Service Coordinators to provide detailed and relevant responses, which are more meaningful.”
“We know in the working day we have an average one hour response time, compared to a response time that was previously around 48 hours. We’ve got an average response rate that is around 74%, compared with a 38% response rate previously. The reason we don’t have a 100% response rate is that a lot of messages can naturally be rhetorical in nature.”
“It also enables closer collaboration with Redrow’s partner PR agencies who can schedule content directly in SoCrowd for the team to validate and publish. It’s created so much additional capacity and facilitated the publication of additional quality content.”
Because of the high demand for new homes, it is vital that Redrow can respond quickly to new sales enquiries on social media, and the same goes for enquiries from existing customers. There is a big opportunity to create lifetime relationships with customers.
When it comes to reporting on social media activity and performance, the software provides Redrow with informative high-level reports and also detailed metrics for all connected accounts, messages and users.
“We now have a league table of all our regions with regards to response times, and we can take corrective action where response times don’t seem quite right. We can then look at the sort of enquiries they have had to deal with, and sometimes it can be absolutely right that the response times are longer because some queries can be quite complex.”
SoCrowd acts as a central social media dashboard providing live visibility of what customers are thinking and feeling, and how they are engaging with the business.
“I describe SoCrowd as the social media plumbing in our organisation. It’s the structure and pipework of how we connect all our regions to send out meaningful messages to our local communities in a way that makes sense. We can communicate in a really safe, effective and controlled way.”
“There are so many organisations that are still bolting social media on to a head office department. Social media is here, it is staying, and it is actually going to be more entrenched in people’s lives than ever before – how they want to communicate with organisations, how they want to pay for goods and services, how they watch content going forward as well.”
Using the SoCrowd social media platform, Redrow Homes have significantly improved their social media customer service. Local colleagues have the ability to respond quickly and with high quality to inbound enquiries received.
Additionally, Redrow now have much greater control over their brand reputation and perception with a more transparent social media customer experience.
