Founded in 2018 by CEO Iranthi Gomes and CTO Jarkko Oksanen (wife and husband team), Serviceform now has clients in over 50 countries, more than 60 employees and offices in Finland, Sweden, Spain, Sri Lanka and now London, UK.

In each country, Serviceform’s innovative technology has been quick to attract customers and gain market share.  It is now, for example, the most trusted lead generation platform in the Finnish real estate market.  “We take away the fear of technology,” explains Iranthi Gomes.  “In the UK we are looking for those innovators, companies that want to be data-driven and understand the need to embrace new technology.”

UK property market lagging behind Europe and North America for use of technology

Serviceform’s initial assessment was that the UK was the correct market to target next and this was reinforced when Iranthi and Jarkko started house hunting in the UK. Iranthi looked at more than 1000 estate agencies and realised that Serviceform’s lead generation toolkit could immediately improve the home buying and home rental process here in the UK.

“It’s fascinating to see what the UK market is up to – or more accurately not up to. Almost none of the well-known names are using live chat on their websites.  Those that are, are unnecessarily wasting a lot of time and money on live chat agents.  Most estate agencies did not have a chatbot either. By not using any tool to engage your web visitors, estate agencies are missing out on masses of potential revenue – and better customer service and engagement.”

In Serviceform’s view, this lack of chat function creates two major issues. “One is that you are effectively asking web visitors to manually find their way to the property that might interest them. But that could mean navigating and scrolling through loads of pages until they find something that matches their criteria. With a chatbot, a web visitor can simply input their criteria such as area, budget and type of property and the chatbot can easily take them to a page with all the properties that match their specifications, saving them hours of time. It can also send vital information about visitors directly to the agents, while being completely GDPR compliant. This function differentiates the platform from property listings search filters because the agents get to know details such as whether the visitor has a property to sell, for example.”

“The second major issue is that without a chatbot, estate agents are missing out on an extremely easy way to qualify leads. Some visitors may not be looking to buy immediately, so following up on these leads would waste valuable time. With a chatbot, you can easily ask those qualifying questions such as the prospect’s budget and when they’re looking to buy to help companies prioritise which leads to focus on first.”

On top of the chat-bot functionality, Serviceform also offers estate agents a tool called ‘Ourly’, a calendar scheduling tool synced to their Google or Outlook, which allows customers to schedule in meetings or viewings directly. This removes a lot of the time-consuming admin involved in the sales process. Plus, all Serviceform clients get their own Account Manager and Customer Success Manager who advise, onboard, set up all the tools, optimise and help them whenever needed at no extra cost, making the implementation and usage of the platform extremely easy and stress-free. 

Serviceform success stories – testing, personalisation and understanding: traffic conversion to get the best results

Successful customers, explains Serviceform, are those who recognise that live chat is a technology that’s older than a decade. Technology is moving forward and so should the property industry. With Serviceform’s dynamic property chatbot, when a visitor lands on a property page, they’ll be greeted by the individual listing agent for that specific property.  Agencies can personalise each property page and provide accurate information without requiring 1000s of different chatbots for each listing. Serviceform’s tool suite is then capable of routing every lead generated to the appropriate agent, making the process much faster and efficient. 

US brokerage firm First Team, with over 2,000 agents, is one of the biggest real estate players in the United States and has been successfully working with Serviceform for over three years, generating better quality leads and saving money.

“We were able to do a bunch of unique things that weren’t done at the time,” Steven McCloskey, Chief Product Officer at First Team real estate, explains. “We were able to connect our real estate agents with the users on the website. The sky was the limit for how we could use and adapt the tool. One thing I love about Serviceform is it’s not just set and forget it.  It’s something we can constantly improve and change. They also have a lot of personalization options and to me, personalization is very important when it comes to both sales and marketing.”

Serviceform will be exhibiting at the property technology expo and conference, PropTech on 15 - 16 February, at the Business Design Centre in London.