International property services group Savills has
extended its contract with customer relationship management
software supplier Pivotal to support planned global
expansion.
Savills said the agreement, which is similar to Microsoft’s
Enterprise Agreement, would allow it to expand its use of Pivotal’s
CRM and portal technology to enable a more efficient response to
customer demand.
“Pivotal is now almost as important to us as Microsoft,” said
Michael Ormrod, software development director at Savills.
“It is essential in allowing us to go on expanding. There is a
huge saving in terms of staff overheads, allowing the business to
grow without employing extra staff.”
The portal will allow individuals from the UK who are looking to
buy properties abroad to register their interest online. “That will
invoke an action plan and pass the event to the right person,” said
Ormrod.
“As some of the property is handled by partner businesses, they
have their own portal. The system allows us to direct-call to the
person with the most knowledge, who can give the customer the best
service.”
Savills said the software did not require a large infrastructure
investment to benefit the business. “We just had to pay for one new
server to run the Pivotal back end – we already had web servers for
our other sites, and the virtual private network was already
there,” he said.
The main benefit of the system lies in being able to centralise
the effort of managing customers, so that users only have to input
data once for it to be accessed by others.
Savills has a network of offices and associates throughout the
UK, mainland Europe, the Americas, Asia Pacific and Africa.
Employing more than 14,500 staff worldwide in 112 offices, the
wider Savills Group also operates a financial services division and
a specialist fund management operation.