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Smart conversations and seamless service on the web in the Swedish real estate market

  • 5 min read

With more than 11 000 apartments and 300 commercial premises, HFAB is the largest player in the Halmstad real estate market. That means that their customers will reach out with questions every day. HFAB recently launched ACE Knowledge with a smart FAQ on their website, with the ambition to offering their customers a simple and convenient way to quickly find answers to their questions, both when they search on their own, as well as in contact with customer service.

They have opted for the user friendly “One Widget” interface to present articles that provide high quality and consistent answers primarily to external users, but also for internal ones. The implementation of the smart conversational platform ACE Knowledge means that HFAB now has a tool that benefits the entire organization.

Can you tell us briefly how you use ACE Knowledge?

We use it both internally and externally, and have run both projects in parallel from the onset. At hfab.se we use One Widget to make it easy for our customers to find all the answers to their questions in one place. ACE Knowledge also works like a route to the subpages at hfab.se, for example when a question requires a more extensive answer or in-depth information. At the time of the launch, we chose to offer a call back option if the visitor provides negative feedback on an answer. The customer also has the option to chat, call, or send us an e-mail. We are confident that we have a high-quality knowledge base, that is developed according to the customers’ needs, and if they don’t agree, we want to pick up on that and help them personally.

Via Callback in ACE Knowledge the customer can decide what day and time they want to receive a call. Our contact center will get in touch with the customer and take it from there.

What goal do you strive to achieve by using ACE Knowledge?

It is simply to deliver uniform and qualitative answers to our customers, regardless of their questions and whether they visit hfab.se or have an interaction with one of your employees. That has been our goal since day one.

How do you use it internally?

We use different answer versions which means that internal users can see both internal and external answers. The external answer is that which the customer can read themselves whilst the internal answer has a broader information scope to support the employees in their contact with the customer.
Previously we have not had the opportunity to gather all information that is aimed at the customer in one place. It was stored in different places depending on the nature of the issue. Having all the information in one place is something we really have been looking forward to. In the beginning our plan was only to use the knowledgebase internally. But during the startup phase we started asking ourselves if it wouldn’t be a good idea to launch it externally, also since we are dealing with the same questions. The decision to implement the internal and external interfaces in parallel was a very successful one, particularly since it made the operative task of building the knowledgebase very efficient.

Can you tell us a little about the process of selecting interface and design at hfab.se?

We chose between One Widget and an inline. But since we have a comprehensive development project of the web ahead of us, One Widget was currently the better match.

The upside with One Widget was that we could add the chat that we didn’t feel had an optimal place on the page. By lifting the chat into One Widget we could achieve a complete solution.

Later during 2021 we will evaluate the result and will in the future also look at the possibility of combining a One Widget and an Inline. We have thus not closed the door to other interfaces either.

What are your key takeaways from the project?

It is important to get the tonality right from the beginning. It is important since we must speak the customer’s language and not use internal jargon. Getting this right was a parallel and separate project with contributions from Marketing and Communication.

We also thought a lot about speaking the customer’s language when we created the questions in ACE Knowledge. It is easy to write questions based on how we speak internally, and we asked our customer center staff to share information about how the customers formulate their questions.

We had a small but tightly knit project group with a wide competence range that was responsible for the implementation of ACE Knowledge, as well as fact checkers in the organization who performed all the reviews. In that way we could involve many employees and introduce ACE Knowledge to them at an early stage.

This was really a key to success. We created an interest and a feeling of anticipation among the employees to finally get access to the knowledgebase.

Last but not least, the collaboration with our project manager at Telia has also been a key to success. Our project manager has been perceptive, solution oriented and has worked for a great implementation in our organization.

Why not check out hfab.se?