Real Estate Institute of Western Australia (REIWA) is the peak body for the real estate profession in Western Australia, making the buying, selling and leasing of commercial properties easier. To improve the member and student experience, REIWA engaged Mav3rik to re-platform its CMS and Members and Training sites into a single, consolidated Experience Cloud instance. REIWA and Mav3rik utilised a mix of custom development and standard components to improve the user-experience for members, students and the REIWA internal teams.
The Challenge
REIWA’s legacy CMS application was outdated and lacked the self-service functionality its members needed. Internal teams were receiving a high level of email queries from members who needed to access content, update their information, order products and generate reporting. As the previous member site did not offer full self-service functionality, nor the ability to streamline product orders, each request was resolved manually, creating a bottleneck for the team. Additionally, there was no integrated functionality for members to access social events, despite several unsuccessful attempts to implement this with other providers.
The plan for the upgrade was ambitious, requiring complex integrations with multiple systems, many of which had not been built before. Also, REIWA’s membership structure and uniqueness of its student site meant the Mav3rik team needed to understand the nuances of the sector and create a site which appealed to a range of users.
REIWA had clear expectations around the user experience they wanted for members and the importance of the user interface design. Limited flexibility around front-end design tasked Mav3rik with balancing visual design goals with compatibility in the back end. According to Michael Bailey, Executive Manager ICT at REIWA it was a challenging project. “There was quite a lot of complex code that needed to be built. It wasn’t just out of the box implementation and Mav3rik had to customise the solution in order to make it fit for purpose,” he said.
REIWA had clear expectations around the user experience they wanted for members and the importance of the user interface design. Limited flexibility around front-end design tasked Mav3rik with balancing visual design goals with compatibility in the back end. According to Michael Bailey, Executive Manager ICT at REIWA it was a challenging project. “There was quite a lot of complex code that needed to be built. It wasn’t just out of the box implementation and Mav3rik had to customise the solution in order to make it fit for purpose,” he said.
After an in-depth tender and discovery process, the team chose Salesforce Experience Cloud and CMS. Given the many different user profiles, the ability to deploy both standard and custom features meant the upgrade would be truly fit-for-purpose. As an implementation partner, Mav3rik’s architecture, design thinking and delivery expertise gave REIWA the reassurance they needed. During the build, they used an agile methodology, showing deployment sprints and milestones as the site came to life. “In many respects, what we were doing was a learning curve for both parties, because we were doing things that hadn’t been done before,” Michael said.
The Mav3rik team went live with the first phase of the Salesforce Experience Cloud and CMS solution in 2021. Since then, more functionality has been added to produce what has been praised by users as a fantastic upgrade. For users, the self-service components mean they no longer have to wait for queries to be resolved by email, accessing everything they need on one site. Additional self-service components are planned to further streamline the members’ journey. For internal teams, a reduction in back-end administration and more flexibility and control has noticeably improved time-efficiencies.
From a cost positive perspective, the Salesforce licensing model allowed named users and end users based on number of log-ins. Based on this, REIWA is able to tailor the right log-in to suit the activity of the user while ensuring complex security and access and visibility requirements are met. On the new site, REIWA has also been able to launch an accreditation program, which allows members to track their progress for accreditation and CPD compliance. Now, members and non-member students and directors can browse courses, enrol, manage subscriptions, run reports and make payments, all from one user-friendly site.
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