At the end of a week where two of the biggest threats to our way of life appear to be waning – Trump and Covid -19, one of the most frustrating basics is re-emerging.
No one likes double entry and as a result many agents can’t see beyond their CRM – of which there are many dozen different flavours and versions, so they often struggle to engage with even the most useful tech.
This is exacerbated by the fact that communication is needed NOT just with other agents, it’s also required between solicitors and mortgage brokers. Such communication is currently c. 98% human and 2% tech – even that 2% is phone and email, hardly 21st century. Even if Brokers and Solicitors, the other sides of the blame triangle, were to use a CRM system, the chance of it talking to yours is pretty much zero.
So what remedies exist?
This is where Star Wars comes in – in the future received wisdom is you’ll arrive at an alien planet and immediately be able to talk to its inhabitants through the medium of a universal translator. In the world of CRMs I have to assume someone is working flat out on something similar for our much less advanced sector. If not it’s clearly either impossible or, if you’re a conspiracy theorist, it would destroy the divide and conquer mentality that is the status quo and enables CRMs to keep the money flowing in.
There are some pointers in the right direction. Onedome have a full ecosphere insofar as they have a portal, communication platform and membership extending to agents, solicitors and mortgage brokers. But even this hasn’t won all users round, yet. A relatively new outfit called Property Information Products [PIP] have just launched what could be a return to the stone age and future at the same time – a dataroom that’s powered the auction sector for years, for the Private Treaty market – namely a PIP Vault. This simple item, think it’s free, gives all parties somewhere to put stuff, informs everyone when anyone does anything and seems to me to enable easy platform agnostic communication and redress the tech/human balance – maybe to a more efficient 70/30.
I know there are some rocket scientists that read PIE – is a universal translator possible?
You are absolutely correct – the frustrating thing about this issue is that this technology has been around for years.
The problem is that software providers need to embrace it and many simply don’t want to do this, primarily to retain control of their infrastructure.
Brilliant examples of people who do, are Reapit, Mio, and Yourkeys. We have integrated our case tracking with these guys and it took about a day to get it working. We have other projects in the pipeline including Offr, OpenBrix.
The technology is here today but it does need the owners to have the confidence to open up their platform realising that it doesn’t weaken their proposition.
Oh, and yeah, the other problem is so few lawyers are actively using modern, or any, case management systems.
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EDI has been a reality for more years than I care to remember, primarily for ERP. There are modern data interchange standards which can be quickly and easily implemented in any type of ‘admin’ system. There really is no excuse for any CRM system not ‘talking’ to another type of system. If it’s a business requirement, simply don’t buy a CRM system that won’t!
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“No one likes double entry” – Point of order!!!
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Agents, Solicitors and Brokers already pay significant sums each month for their respective CRM’s so will not be prepared to add yet another ‘small monthly fee per month per user per location’ and whilst CRM providers could design their systems to talk to each other, they choose not to as they understand that to do so would be commercial suicide and their ability to charge for bespoke development would disappear. The answer will come, but it will more likely come from those developing AI in other consumer communications who will naturally see agents, solicitors and brokers as data sources which need to be amalgamated and channelled.
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We don’t need Star Wars. We need to wake up, it’s called an API.
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