The NAHB reports that more than six out of every 10 new homebuyers use the Web as an initial point of contact with their homebuilder. So it's not an option for large homebuilders to maintain Internet leads, sales and ongoing customer management as separate, disconnected silos of operations. In fact, integration of these functions not only simplifies the home buying experience for the customer but also smoothes out the entire home-selling experience for the builder.

Beazer Homes USA is one large homebuilder that has become a fan of an integrated software solution. The company has recently implemented a company-wide rollout of a new customer relationship management (CRM) software system that ties together the functions of over 300 customer care representatives and more than 800 sales staff with more than 6,000 Web leads per month. The overall goal is to improve the customer experience while boosting efficiency to help keep the company on an upward growth curve.

Using Tech as a Differentiator

For decades, Beazer Homes USA has been building homes and communities. Headquartered in Atlanta, Beazer is a highly regarded industry leader, active in over 40 markets in the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, West and the central United States. Consistently ranked as one of the top 10 single-family homebuilders in the nation, Beazer operates as a family of local homebuilders; its customers benefit by working with people who understand regional needs while being backed by a financially solid national company.

A model of success over the past 10 years, Beazer has grown dramatically, doubling in size every four years. In the last fiscal year alone, Beazer closed over 16,000 homes. Even through such periods of high growth, the company says its goal is to make every customer's experience as enjoyable as possible. Central to this effort is a new software system from Pivotal Corp. to deliver on its word.

Not only does Beazer take advantage of technology to manage the volumes of information routinely generated by over 3,500 employees, the company also uses technology to differentiate itself from the competition.

"We've driven a lot of the activity in the industry around technology solutions," says Beazer's CIO Jonathan Smoke. "We're the largest builder with a constant set of applications running in every market and automating all of the major parts of our business processes. What we've been doing with Pivotal has helped us complete the picture."

From the back-office to core front-office applications, technology has actually enabled Beazer to grow in ways that once seemed unattainable. "The big builders are now the size that a decade ago people thought would be impossible to reach," says Smoke. "We're all continuing to grow; technology has really helped us overcome some limitations."

In order to increase its presence in new markets, Beazer uses cost-efficient technology, such as the Web, to communicate with customers. The ultimate goal is to improve the handoff between business functions.

An Exchange of Ideas

For more than seven years, the back office at Beazer has been well supported with an ERP system and a construction management scheduling system, but the company lacked any sort of integrated application to manage the home inspection process, warranty claims, service issues, and service requests. Customer Care was the last piece of the puzzle Beazer needed.

From an IT perspective, the capability for a Customer Care solution was already built into the company's application architecture. As Pivotal began to develop products for the homebuilding industry, Smoke became interested in working with them. Discussions began in September 2001. "Pivotal asked us what we needed, and we were happy to share with them what we thought an ideal system would be, but we didn't believe that we would be looking at solutions so quickly," says Smoke. "In the last three years Pivotal has delivered much of what we said Beazer needed."

Beazer's decision to implement the new software for its Customer Care solution culminated in March 2004 with a two-day pilot test. "They built us features that met over 90 percent of our users' requirements 'out of the box' with the homebuilding template," says Smoke.

Putting the Pieces Together

Pivotal Professional Services worked extensively with Smoke and his team during the implementation, training, documentation development, integration with other applications, and customization of the system to give it a Beazer look and feel. When it came time to go live, Beazer launched the sales facing CRM system in one day, in the summer -- a peak time of activity.

Beazer rolled out its Customer Care solution in the fall of 2004 to approximately 110 employees across the country who field calls and requests coming from customers and as a result of proactive customer care courtesy visits. On the sales side, Smoke's team turned the system on in mid-August for about 700 sales users -- all of Beazer's divisions in every market nationwide. This number has since grown to just over 800 people. Smoke expects Beazer's business units to push out Customer Care to all of the company's field service technicians -- over 350 people by the end of 2005.

"We were able to move very quickly because of the homebuilder orientation and template that Pivotal offered, taking something off the shelf to fill the needs of those sales people who wanted something more robust," says Smoke. "We basically had it implemented nationwide within 90 days." Through growth, Smoke says he expects to add another 200 to 300 users in the near future. By the end of 2005, approximately 1,200 people are expected to be using the system.

Walking Through the System

Beazer's software system is an integral part of the company's goal to deliver the most enjoyable customer experience possible. And walking a homebuyer through the system is a good way to get a sense of the entire process. More than 10,000 people a month browse the Beazer Web site (www.beazer.com) and request information on a community of interest. Beazer's "new home information managers" qualify these leads, using the new software to keep a record of communications throughout the qualification process.

In each community, a Beazer prospect is assigned to a "new home counselor" who uses software to review the prospect's file. By the time the prospect arrives at the appointment with the new home counselor, specific building plans are ready, and a new lot can be selected in a Beazer custom application that is integrated with the contact information in the Pivotal system.

Contract transactions are recorded in Beazer's ERP system, and builders use other applications to track construction schedules, but all of these systems are linked together so the new home counselor -- through the software -- knows the key stages of construction and key dates during the process. When the home is ready, Beazer representatives use the software application to conduct the home inspection process. "We believe that when customers come to a new home orientation, they should receive a home that's as perfect as possible," says Smoke. "Our goal is to ensure that when customers walk through their new home they are learning how to take care of it rather than looking for flaws."

Any necessary service calls are managed directly through Pivotal to trigger the right type of rapid response. During this cycle, Beazer stays in communication with the customer. And a Beazer representative follows up regularly in subsequent years to maintain contact. "Now our Customer Care representatives have the capabilities in all of our markets to do things that they only used to dream about being able to do," says Smoke.

400,000 Contacts and Counting

Automating sales and putting tools into the hands of customer-facing employees has been a learning experience for Beazer. At this point, over 400,000 contacts are being managed through the CRM system.

During development, Smoke says the company learned to define business processes more clearly and to listen closely to what customer-facing people say. "It's important," he says. "You have to be willing to adapt and respond."

Smoke also believes that it's important to integrate back-end systems with customer-facing systems as closely as possible, ideally offering one version of the truth from as few vendors as possible.

"Everything we've done with Pivotal has been consistent with our business strategy to deliver an enjoyable customer experience," Smoke says.

Beazer has created a platform to store a record of communications with every customer, their unique requirements, and their history of interaction. Currently the company is refining its relationship with homebuyers by implementing Pivotal's MarketFirst engine. Beazer expects to use MarketFirst to conduct surveys and initiate a more fluid, two-way conversation with customers -- tracking progress objectively in real time.

Brock Butler, is real estate and homebuilder solutions group director, and Steven Lewkowitz, is homebuilding professional services director for Vancouver, B.C.-based Pivotal Corp. (www.pivotal.com).