Challenge:
Harcourts struggled to understand which factors drove profitability across its hundreds of franchisees worldwide.

Solution:
Domo helps Harcourts bring all its franchisee sales and performance data together for data-driven insight across its global operations.

Impact:
Harcourts now uses data to benchmark franchisees so that it can identify opportunities to improve operations and drive revenue.

Harcourts improves insight into its global real estate empire with Domo.

Harcourts International is one of the world’s leading real estate agencies, with more than 900 offices in nine countries around the world encompassing 6,700 sales consultants. The agency works as a franchisor to support its global franchise network as it manages real estate transactions totaling more than $40 billion each year.

When CFO Kym Warner joined Harcourts, she had one question: what impacts each franchisee’s profitability? This deceptively simple question turned out to be far more challenging to answer than it should be. Franchises were siloed off from each other, preventing the operations team from easily gathering data, comparing franchisees across markets, and sharing best practices.

“Being able to answer this question is critical,” Warner said. “Profitable franchisees are engaged franchisees, which deliver better customer service, which in turn leads to the repeat business that grows revenue and drives further profits.”

Turning coffee chats into actionable conversations.

Thanks to Domo, Harcourts is able to automatically collect, analyze and visualize the data associated with franchisee sales performance. Because sales agents and managers are constantly on the go and away from the office, Domo provides franchisee sales managers the mobile access to data they need to manage their business. This increased access also enables the operations team to provide focused support at the franchisee level so they can prioritize actions that contribute most to profitability.

“Our operations team was able to convert their standard ‘coffee and cake’ chats and turn it into a visit where data is driving authentic conversations,” Warner said.

“What we see now within our network is that when our operations team members go out and visit an office, they are actually able to share insights with the team that’s involved in delivering those results.”

Sharing data, driving success.

“Domo is absolutely brilliant at being able to create the art of the possible,” Warner said. But to do so effectively, she found that she needed to adapt and leverage Domo in different ways with different teams to meet their specific needs or overcome hesitations.

For example, its sales offices traditionally shared sales and performance metrics manually on whiteboards to keep staff accountable. Warner created a ‘digital whiteboard’ in Domo that displayed each agency’s appraisal-to-listing ratio to track conversions; however, displaying this metric across the organization led to agents only entering appraisals into the system that had successfully converted, defeating the purpose.

Warner quickly adapted the card to show only the number of appraisals each consultant undertook, encouraging consultants to enter all their appraisals into the system. Sales managers could then privately see the appraisal-to-listing ratio on an individual basis so they could identify consultants who need extra support.

“Our guiding principle with Domo is that anything we build has to be culturally relevant, and acknowledgment is important,” Warner said. “Leaderboards and alerts that indicate when performance or personal bests are achieved are crucial to our success.”

Harcourts now uses its digital whiteboard in 600 of its offices around the world, with the data shared driving results across the board. “We see franchisees leverage the data not just for themselves, but are really sharing it with their teams,” Warner said. “The digital whiteboard quickly evolved into providing data that franchisees use with the sales managers when they’re having conversations about growth, along with one-on-one performance conversations with sales consultants.”

Setting a new standard.

Harcourts also uses Domo to incorporate franchisee data into their annual business planning processes, giving franchisees and the operations team the ability to assess actual versus target performance in real time throughout the year. This allowed the operations team to introduce benchmarking so that franchisee groups can assess their performance against other groups.

“We can now benchmark individual performance against other people in their region or against the top 10% of our agents in order to identify any trends that show an opportunity for additional training,” Warner said. “This enables us to deliver a culture of continuous improvement while acknowledging the success of those who achieve their own targets as they make their way into our top 10 of our entire group.”