PropertyGuru: How We've Levelled Up Our Client Service With Data Storytelling.

PropertyGuru is South East Asia’s leading property portal. Their success is firmly rooted in solving a very big consumer pain point: making the process of finding a home straightforward and transparent for everyone involved. With many advertising options that enable tailored campaigns, the team are dealing with a lot of data on a daily basis. We spoke with Lik Win Chan, Head of Client Servicing & Project Management to understand more.

“PropertyGuru helps property seekers find their property on our website. I’m based in Malaysia and I’m supporting 4 countries. Our customers are developers and agents. They can often require very targeted campaigns with specific requirements.”

          Lik Win Chan, Head of Client Servicing & Property Management - PropertyGuru

The Challenges With Reporting for 300+ Clients

Offering such targeted campaign services for each client presented a few challenges for Lik Win's team.

“We wanted to give a better service to clients. We were using quite manual processes to generate data and present it to clients for their campaigns and we wanted to improve it and beautify it.”

Previously, creating the client reports had been a real drain on resources. “Basically we used PPTX, Excel, PDF, Microsoft Word, whatever format the client wants. This is a lot of work for someone on the team. We have a person that helps us generate reports for clients on a daily basis. It takes on average over an hour per report depending on complexity and when you think about doing this for 300+ active clients it’s a lot of work.”

For Lik Win's team, the process of pulling together all the different data points needed for a single report was a challenge in itself.

“Banner data could be in one platform, listing data in another and other data in another so we needed to extract each individually. It’s difficult and manual to aggregate all this.”

Image shows an example of the manual report format PropertyGuru were sending out to clients prior to Nugit.

The aim of each report is to keep clients informed about the success of their campaigns, showing the value that they’re getting from PropertyGuru's advertising services.

“The data we normally share to clients is about their campaign performance & analysis, such as what’s worked best and what’s not worked so well. The numbers are very important and have to be accurate.”

The reports were not always easy for clients to understand and often needed the PropertyGuru team to spend more time talking through them to explain what it all means.

“Our reports were mostly just showing numbers. There were no beautiful charts or breakdowns, just static numbers. Normally clients see the numbers and would ask questions to understand more about the campaign, how it worked and how to improve the performance.”

Introducing Data Storytelling to PropertyGuru

Lik Win's team discovered Nugit and have been using the Data Storytelling Platform for all of their client reports.

The platform pulls in data from all PropertyGuru's different sources, automatically cleaning and harmonising it. Once initial report templates were agreed, the reports could then be automatically generated and scheduled to send to clients as often as required.

Discover how Nugit's Data Storytelling Platform works.

Improved Efficiency & Communication for their Advertisers

One of the biggest instant benefits to the Client Service team is their increased efficiency. As the data story reports are all automated it frees up valuable resources to focus on other tasks.

“With the time that we have saved on the manual work, we put more effort on monitoring the campaigns, optimizing if necessary & dealing with client enquiries. We now don’t spend time on the labour but instead focus on the strategy, planning and executions.”

“The platform is very easy. You can drag and drop, find what you need and preview it. We save a lot of time and don’t need to think so much as everything is already there. Now the whole team is using Nugit and we don’t have to rely on one person to build the reports, everyone can produce the data stories for themselves.”

Another major benefit is that the Data Storytelling format helps the audience digest clear actionable insights instead of being bombarded by numbers. The simple, visual format is very easy for anyone to navigate without any data science skills, making it ideal for client communications.

“The Nugit reports definitely help us communicate better with clients. We used to have to see the clients and explain to them about the campaign. These days we can just send them a URL or schedule the data story because it’s so easy to understand.”

Customised to Each Client & Market

Each data story is customised to the audience, with insights specifically selected to suit the client’s campaign. PropertyGuru customers were quick to notice the difference with the new data story reports.

“The client feedback on the Nugit report is very positive. They’re very happy with the improved experience. They can see more detail and breakdown than before and the reports are on-brand. We check with clients what kind of data they actually want to see and we will customise and cater the reports to their specific needs.”

Image shows an example of a new PropertyGuru Data Story report. The report showcases a series of key performance insights, each one paired with a visualisation to make it clear for anyone to understand.

Bringing Data to Life with Visuals

The data story reports show a series of insights, each one paired with a unique visualisation to bring the data to life and make it easy for everyone to consume. This has been a step-change from the previous reports.

“Previously our clients never had access to view all these kinds of data analytics and breakdown of performance.”

“The item that most clients like best is the Top Performance visual and we always highlight insights about the creative as this helps to identify improvements for the next campaign. The location pie chart and day/hour metrics are useful too as they show which time & place has the best traffic.”

Image shows examples of some of the visualisations that are included in Property Guru's reports.

Proving the Value of PropertyGuru’s Advertising Services

Lik Win is pleased with the investment in Nugit and believes Data Storytelling is working well for the business.

“I think it shows the value PropertyGuru provides our clients and is definitely helping with renewals. I think the Nugit reports give us a really high value to our clients to push beyond good.”

Schedule Reports for Convenience

With multiple sharing options available using Nugit, Lik Win's team make sure clients get the data stories in their preferred format.

“We are quite flexible to clients needs. I think the Nugit feature that I find most useful is that the reports can be automated and scheduled. You don’t have to download the whole data story report, you can preview it first with the URL and send this link to the client. It’s very convenient.”

Image shows examples of Nugit's convenient sharing formats to suit all audiences.

Fast & Easy to Get Started

A big part of the Nugit solution is the level of service that goes alongside the Data Storytelling Platform technology. Workshops, onboarding sessions and a dedicated account manager are all part of the package and help to make sure the tech is adopted across the business and all users are confident Data Storytellers. Win Lik shares his experience.

“Everything went quite smoothly. It was fast and straightforward to get started and we were able to get everything set up in a very short space of time. Overall the Nugit team has been really helpful. Our Customer Success Manager has really helped us a lot with the setup and onboarding, whatever enquiries we have she always answers on time and gives us a solution.”

After the initial setup, PropertyGuru's dedicated Nugit CS Manager continues to help the team get the most from the technology.

“We work very closely with Nugit. We have a bi-weekly meeting actually. Our Nugit CS Manager will follow up with us on the status or provide any help.”

Image shows Nugit Customer Success Manager Eunmi Jeon (left) and Customer Support Ying Hui Chua (right) visiting Lik Win at Property Guru HQ in Singapore.

Clients Shape the Data Story Reports

Creating the initial Data Story templates is a collaborative effort. Nugit CS worked with the PropertyGuru team to understand their goals for the reports before putting together initial templates. These were then tested and refined after getting feedback.

“We worked together to set up the first templates. We did make changes on the templates. We had client feedback that they didn’t need specific data so we removed that as we didn’t want to have reports that were too long.”

“The data storytelling is very important as it has actually improved our clients experience with PropertyGuru. We are really satisfied with the service from Nugit, all the way from set up until now.”