An intranet is a password-protected website that distributes business information to the entire company. It serves as the digital office for your business. The most extreme version of an intranet in real estate is the virtual world of EXP where agents walk around a virtual office as avatars. It's a pretty futuristic game-like experience that is awesome for some, and creepy for others. What agents really want is a place where they can quickly access information that is vital to their business, access resources, collaborate, and get back to working with clients.
The most important component of driving adoption of the intranet is to integrate your email service. Every professional starts their day with email. If you want them to first log on to your intranet each day, then you must absolutely have email. More than that, they need to be able to set action plans with email - respond, put it in a client folder, add it to a transaction, send it to a colleague, and so on. Your email which is integrated into the CRM allows for quick actions and collaboration - these features are not supported by agents who keep their email siloed in a Gmail account.
Beyond email, the company needs to develop internal operations where employees, agents, and their core services partners can collaborate, share information, access application resources, and operate their business via CRM and marketing tools; this is where culture carriers happen. In an ideal organization, there is a live person on staff that is on the intranet at all times as a resource to agents. Large companies may have multiple people or a network of people - like office managers, transaction coordinators, marketing staff or front desk staff that are as available online, as they are in person.
For enterprise firms, the intranet needs to be a dynamic ecosystem that meets the needs of the company’s people. A key element of the intranet is that it is a permission based system. A user management architecture enables CEOs/Owners of a brokerage to view different communications than managers, employees, and agents can view. This is how you configure who the culture carrier is for each agent.
This is accomplished through a process called Role-based Access Control (RBAC) that not only considers the role of the person accessing the intranet, but also their geography and their authorization to access the information. If you imagine that the intranet is built to provide a one-on-one experience with each person and group in your company, you will have the critical eye to make sure that your intranet is great and an important part of your company communication strategy.
Chat and News are critical components of organizing and publishing the right information to the right people. An office event should go to the office people impacted - not spammed out to everyone. Chat requires channels for the company as a whole, regions, offices, teams, and agent to agent.
Some chats can be mandatory for all agents, others can be subscribed/unsubscribed by the agent. One brokerage we work with has a channel for members of a particular Realtor association, another has a prayer group. Remember, it's yours! It’s theirs! Let it breathe. The other benefit of chat is that it does not contaminate the agent’s inbox with spammy content. Moreover, it creates FOMO – fear of missing out. If you put high quality notifications in your intranet, then people will log in so that they don’t miss out. Chat also extends to your mobile strategy.
In addition to email, integration with the calendar is also vital. Agents can subscribe to different calendars much in the same way that they subscribe to chats - and it integrates with the calendar on their phone using the tools provided by Google Calendar or Office 365 that are tied to your intranet.
And last but not least - the intranet is a place to communicate upcoming listings with a listing management tool and an off-market listing management tool. For existing listings that we pull from the MLS, agents can enhance the listing with things like seller concessions, additional photos, additional links to community pages, virtual tours (branded if not in the MLS), drone footage, agent walkthrough videos, floor plans (if not in the MLS) and more.
Your intranet should be a special place for each person in your company. I know that we talked a lot about agents here, but staff, office managers, company trainers, and even you as the leader of the firm all play a role in delivering on the promise of a great work culture. Culture is the #1 reason why agents choose a firm. Make yours the best. Make it your first priority to communicate with your tribe and leave social media to communicate with customers.
If you would like to learn more about building and implementing a robust integrated intranet at your company, please fill out the form below and we will contact you to set up a time to meet. We look forward to connecting with you.
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