Digital transformation in the real estate industry in the Middle East

UAE-based Emaar operates a complex business in several verticals including premium properties, shopping malls and retail, and hospitality and leisure.At the recent Salesforce Live: Middle East and Africa virtual conference, Emaar’s Analytics leader, Shaily Verma, explains how they used Salesforce to break down business siloes and enhance data visibility.This session, “Digital transformation in the real estate industry in the Middle East”, was a favourite of George Smith, Horizontal Regional Managing Director, MEIA: “The challenge of real estate developers in the Middle East is that they have so many channels where they get their leads from, whether it’s broker channels, events or conferences. But the most cost-efficient is lead nurturing.” Which is where Salesforce Sales Cloud comes in.“If you can take all of that data and bring it into the CRM, you can start doing some really interesting things around cross-selling, personalisation and segmentation,” he says.In her interview, Verma says that “according to Gartner, less than 10% of companies have 360- degree customer data and of those, less than 5% actually use that data to grow their business”.She identifies the two key challenges facing business today as the fact that data sits in “disconnected siloes” and that there is a “lack of operationalisation to execute any actionable insights”.By implementing Salesforce as a unified CRM across the Group, Verma says Emaar has been able to overcome these issues, and the accolade of “Best Customer Experience (CX)” at 2019’s World Retail Awards is testament to this. She believes that successful omnichannel CX is reliant on a technological partnership between these three key elements:1. Reliability – integrating network systems 2. Availability and flexibility of these integrated systems3. Adaptation – being able to react fast in the ecosystem “The Emaar case study shows how Salesforce will knock down the siloes in your business so that you can operationalise the insights it gives you,” concludes Smith.