Village House Management Co., Ltd. offers affordable rental housing in community settings throughout Japan. Managing and leasing over 100,000 low cost units in 1,000 locations in 46 prefectures.
The main challenge we faced and successfully resolved in this amazing project was not only the diverse languages spoken by the visitors of the site (English, Japanese and Portuguese). It was also the challenge to let users find properties of interest across all of Japan in an easy and straight forward way. At the same time, support staff needed to make sure, all enquires are captured accurately and each case is processed in a professional and timely manner.
Only this leads to customer satisfaction and higher occupancy rates.
We worked with our design partner who has extensive experience in Japan to design and develop a modern, clean, mobile responsive TYPO3 website that is easy for editors to maintain in multiple languages.
We enabled language and location detection to provide a user experience, which allows users to find, bookmark and enquire about properties simply. To support easy search and location of properties, we worked with a partner specialising in geo-located data. The outcome of this collaboration is a tailored property search/filter functionality: by area, map, transport and free text. All this is supported by property data exposed via API that is synchronised with business master data for easy maintenance and up to date availability information.
In parallel we worked closely with Village House stakeholders to design and develop a custom client relationship management system (CRM), to meet the specific needs of managing customer interaction across multiple calls centres and activity groups. With industry specific models and relationships the system provides workflows and interfaces to make it easy for staff to take and respond to customer enquiries, access full history of interaction, set reminders and follow up as required, ultimately supporting higher occupancy of properties. The system also deals with unique aspects of Japanese business such as dealing and searching Kanji and Kana, single and double width input and so on. Extensive import, export and reporting functionality, as well as integration with other business systems allow for greater insight in to call centre performance and opportunities for ongoing optimisation.
Applications are hosted and maintained in specifically configured instances with a range of security and redundancy setting to provide a robust platform for business critical tools.
