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REA Group will shake up its customer group structure with the aim of better serving clients across the firm’s suite of products.
The change will see the customer group double in size, with the previously separate teams of customer product and services now joining up with sales, marketing and customer support under one banner. The new, combined team will be led by chief customer officer Kul Singh.
Significantly, it adds to his oversight the key services of CampaignAgent, Realtair, Agency Services and Agency Marketplace.
Explaining the move, Singh told REB that the move is intended to “bring together teams that are building software to make the lives of our customers easier, so they can focus on growing more profits driving more growth. This makes sense from a product point of view, from a sales and service point of view”.
To support the bigger, better customer team, REA has recruited Tim Bradley to serve as the executive general manager of customer platforms and services. Bradley spent five years at REA before moving to Xero, where he led the accounting software’s product, design and engineering team for roughly three years.
His experience working with small businesses on the accounting software service will reportedly be invaluable in his new role with REA, as the product expert noted that “many real estate agencies are essentially small businesses themself”, and thus challenged by the efficiency issues that come with smaller scale operations.
Bradley has hit the ground running in the role, having started back at REA this week. Alongside Singh, he’s looking forward to helping the new group coalesce, while drilling down on the most necessary product features for the team to focus their efforts on.
In the months ahead, he said the team is intending on speaking to “as many customers as possible to make sure that the solutions we're building are valuable, so we can drive as much value back into the business”.
“I'm sure there are different parts of agencies that have different pain points, so whether that be money management, adding new business, or listing and moving sales, we want to understand what the highest priority is and how we can focus the team to deliver that most amount of value,” he told REB.
This fact finding will take time, but Singh feels sure that even from the get-go, the structural change will help customers “interact with REA products and services in a better way”.
He also noted that this isn’t the only change coming to the customer offering. In the months ahead, REA is planning on expanding its support services across its many customer offerings.
“We’re going to be doubling down on customer service with an increase in our customer-facing teams, extended service hours, and more training on offer to ensure agents get
the most out of their REA subscription,” he promised.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
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