Case Study: Digital furniture staging library – Fewer changes of mind, less hassle
Mar 18, 2022
Having a white-labeled digital furniture staging library helps many of Esoft’s clients offer better and higher-end virtual staging services to their end clients. Read how DEF made a real difference here.
The Story
DEF (client’s abbreviated name) is a real estate marketing company based in the US and they first offered virtual staging services in 2015. In 2020, they started working with Esoft for photo editing services. Noticing that the client’s website didn’t feature virtual staging as a public service, we asked the company owner why out of curiosity. He replied:
"We ain’t ready to offer this service to all agents because the rendering quality and workflow are not to the point we expect. For most orders, our customers often have to send work back for corrections since they wouldn’t know what the staged images will look like. It’s not good for our reputation and also our client’s reputation."
DEF CEO – company owner
After that conversation, we immediately realized what went wrong here and came up with a remedy, to help solve a long list of issues with DEF’s current setup. The client accepted Esoft’s proposal despite our price point (which is higher than most other providers’ average).
The Client’s Objectives
Higher revenue from virtual staging services
Lower work correction rate
Higher client satisfaction score
More efficient and leaner workflow for 3D service orderings
"Been hitting and missing the mark! Now we want, maybe, a digital furniture staging platform or even a folder so our clients can easily access all the styles quickly and decide the look. Plus we don’t fancy long emails for instructions and corrections of staged images."
DEF quality manager
The Approach
Digital furniture staging libarary – fewer changes of mind, less hassle !!
Featured service: Virtual Staging
Our first step was to enable DEF’s end clients to see the virtual staging design, expecting fewer change-of-mind corrections and higher satisfaction. We provided DEF with a white-label digital furniture staging library so they can share it directly with clients. Our 3D library at the time had over 700 digital furniture design templates for users to pick and choose from. With that, agents can easily visualize the work outcome before the stagings are completed, take responsibility for their own choices.
Plus, Esoft assigned a dedicated account manager and a 3D quality expert to catch up with DEF regularly via online calls to ensure consistent quality every second week. Previously, the client never met or talked directly to the former vendor, but had to go through endless email threads for issues or complaints.
Finally, to streamline the correction flow and speed up delivery time, we introduced an ordering portal with a visual annotation, correction tool for the client to place virtual staging orders. The client only needs to provide the furniture template codes in the instruction box when placing orders. Once done, Esoft’s 3D team will get notified immediately and exactly understand what the client wants. Communication was changed from long email briefings to a simple, visual-driven ordering system.
The Impacts
After 3 months of working with Esoft, the client reported significant improvements in their customer experience and a record-low correction rate. Since the ordering process from the DEF to Esoft was managed on one portal, the client was able to cut down operational costs and daily cumbersome communication efforts. As a next step to streamline our end-to-end work processes, from agents to DEF and from DEF to Esoft, we worked on an API integration to even further streamline the collaboration.
Highlights
Virtual staging was made as a public service at DEF and after the launch, and the volume increased from 10 orders per week to 25 orders per week on average (a 150% increase).
Correction rate drops from 55% to 15% with the use of 3D furniture library.
Agent satisfaction (NPS) score jumped from 60 to 65 as measured in the client’s 2020 satisfaction survey.
