Rightmove analyses website improvements

Rightmove has just announced it using customer experience management (CEM) software to help enhance the online experience of visitors to its website.

As the largest online UK property website, with 90 per cent of all UK estate agents advertising their properties through it, the new software is enabling it to capture in more detail the journey of every customer journey, allowing it to proactively seeking out and resolving any obstacles that impede the customer experience.

Hannes Buhrmann, Rightmove public website manager told IT PRO that before investing in the Tealeaf CX software suite last summer the business was reliant on internet log files to track customer web activity and focus groups and user interviews for feedback. "Customer have tended to ring agents about properties and tell them about problems they may have experienced with the website at the same time," he said.

As well as relying on agent feedback, he added there hadn't been a pressing need for such technology before: "In the first four years of our existence Rightmove had no competition really. The market has become a lot more competitive recently," Buhrmann said.

Having used Tealeaf CX full-scale since December, Rightmove is using the more detailed information about web activity to improve the site and increase consumer conversions, as well as deliver more leads to the 14,000-plus estate agent branches and new homes developers who list their properties on the site.

In return, the estate agencies and developers can target more than 4 million visitors who generate 550 million page views in 27 million visits per month.

Buhrmann said that the company now has real-time visibility into what is happening at every stage of the customer journey from the images they view to the enquiries they send to agents. This view has enabled it to resolve website issues more quickly and provide better online service for consumers, to ultimately increase the number of leads that the site delivers to their customers.

"The web is by far the most important part of business," he said. "For example we were able to identify abandonment rates of 70 per cent on one form that was key to creating agent leads. Since re-designing it, the abandonment rate has dropped by 35 per cent. And we have some significant architectural changes we are planning to implement that Tealeaf will definitely help us with."

Buhrmann stressed: "Don't underestimate the effort needed to use these kinds of tools fully. They are very broad and need significant effort to configure properly."

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