Over the past 83 years, LJ Hooker has become Australia’s best known and most trusted real estate brand. With a franchise network 690 offices strong across Australasia, LJ Hooker sold properties worth over $AU 15.5 billion in the last financial year.

LJ Hooker provides a full suite of commercial services with national coverage in Australia and New Zealand including buying, selling, leasing properties for commercial or investment purposes.

Growing Franchise Network Drives Innovation

LJ Hooker’s innovative approach to real estate has seen it grow into the largest real estate franchise business in Australasia. The company supports its franchisees from its Sydney headquarters where a dedicated team of eight handle up to 3,000 support queries a month.

With such a large network of business owners and real-estate agents to support, being able to share knowledge, deploy new tools and provide technical and operational support, isn’t just essential, but crucial to LJ Hooker’s ongoing success.

Until recently, the team was only able to handle queries from its franchise network via Outlook and in house systems with limited reporting, flexibility or tracking.

“The process was dated and time consuming,” says Joshua Evans, Manager Support & Systems. “Only help desk agents had access to tickets and knowledge base articles, which meant that finding and sharing information with our agents was slow and inefficient.

“There was also limited reporting available which made it hard for us to identify trends and real issues. Most significantly, it made it hard for us to show the business how well we were supporting our franchisees,” Joshua adds.

Usability, Flexibility and Comprehensive Reporting

LJ Hooker developed alternate methods to improve efficiencies, but over time, it was recognised that their incumbent systems could not deliver the level of support its franchisees required. In October 2010, LJ Hooker commenced its search for a system that would deliver all of the components it desired in one package.

“One of our key requirements was a system that gave the customer more control. We wanted a system that made the support process more transparent and allowed customers to self-service,” says Joshua.

“In the past only our support agents had access to tickets, so our customers were in the dark and did not know how close their queries were to be being resolved.”

LJ Hooker considered several systems before deciding to take Zendesk and one other system it had shortlisted on a trial basis. Over a three month period, both systems were run side-by-side in a sandbox environment and comprehensively tested by an internal user group. After final feedback was gathered from support centre staff, their technology development team and executive management, Zendesk was chosen.

“We came across a lot of systems on the market with very similar features and functionality, but when we balanced performance against cost, Zendesk stood out from the crowd,” says Joshua.

“The features which appealed to us most were its reporting capabilities and the flexibility and usability of the interface itself. The ability to give each of our agents a customised view of the system, really appealed to us. We also needed a system which was easy to use as we knew we’d be rolling it out to different parts of the business over time and it wouldn’t just be used by the support team.”

Empowering Employees to Work Smarter and Cut Response Times

Zendesk was implemented in the LJ Hooker Support Centre in January 2011. The company is now running 45 Zendesk Plus licenses and is looking to expand this to 60+ licenses in 2012. Since its launch, the company has seen significant improvements in customer response and resolutions times. Seventy-eight per cent of support queries are now resolved in less than two hours and ninety-three percent are resolved in less than 24 hours.

“In terms of industry averages, we are very happy with these figures and we have also realised a higher level of customer satisfaction,” Joshua says.

Zendesk is also helping LJ Hooker work smarter. Zendesk has been installed on iPads and iPhones throughout the organisation. The benefits of remote access are being seen in the boardroom and at locations LJ Hooker never dreamt it would operate.

“We now have the ability to act on queries from wherever we are,” says Joshua. “Every member of our support team has the Zendesk application running on their iPhone. We now handle queries on weekends and on our way into work. It has brought a lot of flexibility to the way we deliver our services and manage our workload.”

Making Knowledge Accessible to Everyone

According to Joshua, the stand out feature of Zendesk has been the Forums functionality, which allows commonly asked questions to be entered into a searchable database. This Knowledge Base can then be accessed by internal and external users. One of the key benefits, he says, is not just the fact that people can ‘self-serve’ and find answers to questions without submitting a ticket, but that they can access their customer enquiry records at any time.

So impressed by the functionality of Zendesk’s Knowledge Base, LJ Hooker used it to support the rollout of over 550 newly-branded websites for LJ Hooker residential, commercial and finance franchise offices across Australia in October 2011.

LJ Hooker used the Zendesk Knowledge Base to introduce the new website platforms to franchisees. Training, articles, videos and documentation were delivered via the Knowledge Base and forums were used to encourage collaboration.

“It was the best and easiest product we have ever rolled out due to all of the information we were able to store and share in the Knowledge Base. We are now looking to use the same method to support future rollouts and product releases,” Joshua says.

Zendesk Practice What They Preach and Deliver

Since its launch in LJ Hooker’s support centre, Zendesk has been rolled out to other parts of the business, including the company’s training centre, marketing department and network performance team. The aim is to give customers one point of contact where queries are answered by subject experts, or people closest to the information requested.

Looking to the future, LJ Hooker plans to have Zendesk live across the whole of Australia and New Zealand by February 2012. Their aim is to be able to support its network of franchisees and staff wherever they are in the region.

Recommending Zendesk to other users, Joshua says: “Zendesk really do practice what they preach and they continually show us why they are industry leaders with their knowledge and skilled customer service. Since we implemented the product, there has been nothing but praise from all levels of the business.”

He added: “The system operates like a web 2.0 application with enterprise capability, which for anyone in IT or Customer Support is a real breath of a fresh air.”