Why Property Portals Are Using Call Tracking: A Case Study

Call tracking is a technology that property portals are using more and more to add value for their customers. To find out more about why a property portal would implement call tracking, leading provider IOVOX interviewed one of their clients for us to explore how call tracking has worked for them.

Alessio Cantoro, CMO, Immobiliare.it

Q. Tell us about Immobiliare.

Today, Immobiliare.it is the leading property portal in Italy, with more than 55M visits per month, website and apps. We work with approx. 22,000 real estate agencies which represent more than 90% of all professionals in Italy. More than 1.2M listings are published on the portal both by agencies and private users.

Immobiliare.it's network includes Trovacasa.net (4th largest player in Italian market for traffic), MioAffitto.it (rentals) and Nuovecostuzioni.it (new buildings). Agencies that work with Immobiliare.it can publish on every portal of the network.

The company was founded in 2005 with the brand Eurekasa.it - which later became Immobiliare.it. With more than 300 professionals and offices in Milan and Rome, Immobiliare.it has become the market leader thanks to huge marketing and technology investments.

Q. What challenges were you facing that led you to explore call tracking and what were your goals from such a program?

Our main goal was to help real estate agents (our customers) in their daily work but also for them to see the value of our business in helping them with sales.

Before call tracking, we could only collect in our systems the emails users sent to agents, giving them the opportunity to analyze and manage the communications. This was only one part of the value Immobiliare.it provided to professionals since a user could contact them through the portal sending emails or by calling.

We decided to implement a call tracking system with the aim of providing a better service to the agencies and to show them all requests, without paying so much attention to the type of contact, whether it was a call or an email.

Q. What led you to choose iovox?

At Immobiliare.it we usually prefer an “internal development” and we love creating solutions by ourselves. In this case, as a call tracking system is very complex and touches dynamics totally new for us, we decided to externalize the job and find a top partner.

More than 3 years ago, after a quick scouting, we understood iovox was one of the biggest companies in Europe providing the service we needed. The relationship between our companies was immediately focused on our needs, with an excellent commercial (in the first phase) and technical (in the following project phases) approach. This convinced us to choose iovox.

Q. How did the implementation go?

We started slowly with just a few phone numbers activated at the beginning to prove it was viable. As time passed, we expanded the service and our needs as consequence, and iovox supported us finding the best solutions year after year.

From a technical point of view, we decided to use the iovox API to integrate the service in our normal workflow. Honestly, the integration was easy, documentation was complete. The support team has demonstrated from the beginning a commitment which always allows us to work faster and to complete the integration in less time than expected.

Q. What are some of the benefits you have gained from implementing the iovox solution?

I will address two different topics: one in general and another one more specific for iovox.

As I mentioned, one of our goals was to create more awareness among our customers about the value we bring them every day. The iovox system allows Immobiliare.it to make our value fully evident to the agents.

With iovox, when a user calls from our portal, a recorded voice announces that the call comes from Immobiliare.it. All call statistics are available for the agents, and this provides better customer management for them and a high quality of service for us.

Implementing this solution with iovox meant we had to integrate into our complex IT structure, and work with a team which is always focused on our needs.

We have worked hard to build a great reputation and we expect a high level of service and support from our partners which iovox has delivered.

Once example is that iovox recently developed an internal tool to allow us to proactively identify and address if a line has a problem. This was the result of some support tickets we opened but they saw a better way to address the problem.

In my opinion, this shows how the company is focused on our needs. Just as our team is a strong group of passionate and motivated people who walk every day in the same direction in pursuit of our goals, we see iovox being very similar in their support of our company.