L&T Realty constructs connected customer experiences with Salesforce

For over eight decades, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has been transforming India’s technology, engineering, and construction landscape with its strong focus on customer satisfaction and continuous quest for quality.

It is this legacy that L&T Realty brings to the real estate sector. Customers know that an L&T Realty home will last a lifetime. They trust that their investment will be safe with the company because of the values it espouses.

“From day one, our promise to customers has been to deliver projects on time and with full transparency,” says Ajay Nambiar, CX Head, L&T Realty.

Everyone at L&T Realty – right from the MD & CEO, down to the front lines – is committed to delivering exceptional customer experiences. And key to driving these experiences is the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.

Prior to Salesforce, teams in marketing, sales, and CRM used disparate systems to engage with customers. This resulted in an incomplete customer experience.

Meanwhile, pre-sales teams had to manually gather leads from various sources. This took up most of their day and slowed down lead response time. Since customer forms were paper-based, mandatory fields were sometimes left incomplete, or data entered was not entirely legible. Without this data, teams couldn’t follow up with customers effectively.

This led to limitations in deriving insights on sales and marketing performance for informed decision-making.

These challenges led L&T Realty to upgrade to a more robust and sustainable CRM platform.

“We chose Salesforce because, like L&T, the brand sells itself,” says Nambiar. “Its technology is time-tested, user-friendly, and customisable. More importantly, it has a successful track record in real estate.”

Salesforce captures and consolidates leads from marketing campaigns, social media, inbound calls, and other sources. In doing so, it minimises leaks in the sales funnel, while also freeing up the pre-sales team to respond to leads faster.

“Our lead response time has shrunk 80% and is now within an hour,” says Harshul Trivedi, Head – Digital Marketing and Presales, L&T Realty. “We hope to reduce it even further in the days ahead.”

Salesforce also captures leads from prospects visiting an L&T Realty site through digital forms. Gone are the days of filling out cumbersome, paper-based forms. Instead, iPads loaded with Salesforce capture customer data quickly and accurately.

“When customers walk into our offices, they experience the L&T Realty promise, which is all about ease, efficiency, and modernity,” says Nambiar. “The Salesforce app makes it easier and quicker for customers to fill in their data. It also ensures that all form fields are filled, strengthening data integrity and marketing analytics.”

Meanwhile, with Salesforce cloud telephony integration, pre-sales and post-sales productivity has shot up. Agents are now handling at least 20% more calls in a day.

Salesforce enables L&T Realty to keep customers engaged across their journey through automated emails and SMSs at every touchpoint. The delivery rate and reach of these campaigns have improved, thanks to better customer data integrity.

“Earlier our approach was to spray and pray—run multiple campaigns with limited information and hope that some of them would yield results,” says Trivedi. “But now that we have accurate and real time information on campaign performance, we can evaluate  which campaign or channel yields better ROI, and quickly optimise our campaign strategy.”

With Salesforce Customer 360, all teams can access customer data on one platform, enabling them to deliver connected and consistent customer experiences. At each touchpoint, a wealth of customer data is captured and made available to teams throughout the customer lifecycle—which, in real estate, can stretch up to five years.

“We now have up-to-date information about the customer’s history, service issues, and queries, as well as property inventory and prices—all of which helps us serve the customer better,” says Trivedi.

This 360-degree view of the customer makes the handover from marketing to sales to CRM smoother and quicker.

“Salesforce has helped us stitch together the entire customer journey into a single, unified view,” says Nambiar. “Now, it all flows seamlessly from one stage to the next.”

For the first time, L&T Realty can measure sales performance in real time, with better visibility into leads, sales calls, and other metrics. Rich dashboards and reports track which sales and marketing campaigns are yielding the most leads or walk-ins. This helps senior management make informed decisions on how to sell more efficiently.   

“We can see how many pre-sales leads have gone cold, and find a way to convert them into potential customers,” says Nambiar. “We can also analyse post-sales customer sentiment based on complaints or tickets raised, and then take actionable steps to improve those metrics.”

L&T Realty is currently working with the Salesforce Customer Success team to optimise deployments.

“There’s tremendous value in having the Success team keep us updated on global best practices, and handhold us through an implementation,” says Nambiar.

Next up on L&T Realty’s agenda is to roll out a customer portal where customers can make enquiries, raise tickets, and even book a car parking space in their purchased property—all with a simple click. A similar portal is being built for channel partners to track their bookings, commissions, and more.

The company is also exploring omnichannel customer engagement on Salesforce. “Customers will have the flexibility to interact with us on any channel—be it calls, WhatsApp, chat, or email,” says Nambiar. “We’re even researching how augmented reality, AI, and IoT can be combined with Salesforce to enhance the customer experience.”

In the next 3-5 years, the company hopes to automate more processes and empower stakeholders with more insights to deepen customer relationships.

“We’re now exploring how Salesforce solutions can help us combine data from multiple sources to deliver more personalised customer experiences,” says Trivedi. “The end goal is to build a complete ecosystem in and around Salesforce.

“Marketing Cloud will increase leads; Sales Cloud and Service Cloud will improve the customer experience; and Salesforce analytics will strengthen decision-making.”