Editor's note: We’re counting down to next week’s Atmosphere Live with a series of interviews from speakers who will be featured at the interactive online event. Today, we hear from Jeff McConathy, VP of Engineering & Consumer Services for Trulia, who is speaking in our session on delighting customers in new ways — online, offline and on the go. Learn more and register for Atmosphere Live, which takes place on October 1st, here.
Buying a home is a stressful process. How do you make that experience more pleasant for your customers? How do you delight someone who’s making one of the biggest financial commitments of their lives?
Industry research tells us that the home buying process takes an average of 18 months, and as many already know, there’s a lot of anxiety, especially when the process is new. Trulia was founded to make that process easier, less stressful and more enjoyable, by providing information and insights to consumers and connecting them with real estate professionals to help them through the rest of the process.
Our goal is to delight consumers by making home search unexpectedly enjoyable by understanding what they want and giving it to them when and where they need it – which, in our case, often means on their phones, while they’re touring neighborhoods and open houses.
How has technology helped Trulia deliver on that vision and change the experience of the average prospective homebuyer?
The old way of buying a house revolved around talking to the neighbors, checking the newspaper on Sunday, driving around neighborhoods and chasing agents down on the phone. With Trulia, you provide the parameters for the home you want and, within seconds, get all the information you need, seamlessly integrated on a map, which includes school districts, parks and amenities nearby, as well as additional information.
We’ve learned that the combination of mobility and maps is especially suited for home seekers. That’s why we recently launched a feature that will alert you, via the Trulia mobile app, when you’re near a home that meets your search criteria and has recently been listed.
Home is also about safety, so if you’re concerned about natural hazards, such as floods, you can see historical data integrated into our maps. If you’re worried about overpaying, we can show you the average sales price per square foot in your area. And if you want to talk to someone from the neighborhood, we have millions of people in a social community who give unfiltered answers to all sorts of questions — everything from “How often do trains pass through?” to “Will I have to move my car when it snows?”
Finding the right broker or agent is also extremely important, so Trulia built an agent directory, with hundreds of thousands of agent profiles, which is helpful to consumers and agents who want to connect with potential new clients.
We get really excited about this stuff. It’s why I tell people that Trulia is really a technology company that happens to dabble in real estate.
What advice do you have for other businesses looking to improve the experience of their customers?
Never assume that other people have your expectations, and never stop learning and adapting to your customers’ feedback. One way we make sure to deliver on this promise is by running extensive user studies. Last year, our Consumer Research team ran surveys in eight different cities, for example, collecting information and insights about our customers. That’s how we learned that many of our customers keep a separate tab open in their browser just to check distances on Google Maps because they can’t find the feature on our site. By responding to these insights, we can significantly improve the customer experience — in this case, by
integrating Google Maps into our site. I often ask my team how we can make our searches that much more local, that much more precise and that much more delightful for our customers.
We also have a team of data scientists that develop insights from anonymized site searches to understand the most important things people want in a particular city or neighborhood. Then we use that data to tailor the results, accordingly. Say, for example, you’re looking to rent a two-bedroom house in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. When you get the first page of search results, even if you’re a first-time Trulia customer, it reflects what people just like you are seeking.