Client Spotlight: Integrating Spitfire Homes with COINS

As our long-standing partner, Spitfire Homes recognises the value and importance of an elevated digital experience when it comes to engaging with the next generation of homebuyers.

With a commitment to premium quality and exceptional design in each and every home they build, Spitfire delivers a customer experience that reflects this – enhanced with digital technology. The next step was ensuring that their behind-the-scenes processes backed this up, in order to create a truly seamless journey.

To help with this, we completed a project with them to develop a custom integration between their website and a key piece of business software, COINS. We caught up with Mark Swaddle, Head of Marketing at Spitfire, about how the project has helped them streamline internal processes and improve the customer experience.

What is COINS?

Construction Industry Solutions (COINS) is specialist construction management software which is widely used in the homebuilding sector. COINS is a suite of ERP solutions across project delivery, finance and ops, supply chain, service management and CRM – helping to align and streamline processes across the lifecycle of a new home or development.

The Challenge

Pre-integration, Spitfire’s process around capturing new leads was a fairly manual one. Any enquiries, brochure downloads or viewing requests on new homes were received by the marketing team and distributed out to sales consultants. Consultants would then follow up on enquiries and manually input information into the COINS CRM system.

Mark commented:
“While our sales consultants were always on top of new enquiries and as thorough as they could possibly be, they’re only human – manual data entry takes time, and you have to expect that there’ll be slight errors or missed opportunities along the way.

“We were finding that not only was the manual entering of data into COINS taking up a lot of our consultants’ time, it was also leading to some enquiries and key information slipping through the net, as if a consultant was assigned to or dealing with an enquiry and then was away from the office, it was difficult for another consultant in the team to pick up the thread.”

The (semi) technical bit: integrating a website with COINS

As we built and manage Spitfire’s digital ecosystem, we had the tools and knowledge already in place to facilitate and implement the integration in such a way that would help them achieve their goal of streamlining their processes.

We needed to work with the COINS API to fetch and send data from three form types on their website: view brochure, make an enquiry and request viewing. Through exploring possible solutions, we found that we needed to do some work to configure the form data in a particular way for COINS to accept it. This required changes to both the backend and the frontend user experience.

The integration was also configured so that any duplicates would be automatically detected based on matching fields and records combined. For example, if a prospective housebuyer filled in a form to download a brochure for a development, and then went on to request a viewing for a different development, the records would automatically merge, keeping Spitfire’s CRM data neat and tidy.

Outcomes: how the integration has helped Spitfire

The integration between Spitfire’s lead gen forms and COINS has enabled a whole host of efficiencies and benefits that help them do more effective sales and marketing.

Capturing more detail

“Because we’re automatically capturing more data at the source from prospective homebuyers and storing that in COINS, it gives us more segmentation and targeting options when planning and executing our marketing campaigns.” says Mark.

“Equally, this additional data makes reporting and forecasting much easier too. We’ve got access to more filtering around budget, buyer status and source of enquiries so that we can more effectively plan where to focus marketing resources. For example, we can drill down into the data in terms of how many first-time buyers we have in the system, and if we find we’re not attracting many, we can plan some marketing campaigns around appealing to that group.”

Nurturing leads

All this extra data and insight automatically landing in their core system is enhancing the sales experience for prospective homebuyers engaging with Spitfire.

“Because leads are landing in COINS with a lot more data attached to them, and allocation to consultants is no longer manual, they can be following up with prospects much more quickly and armed with more detail.”

Mark goes on: “Consultants can make their calls much more personalised and targeted, and instantly match up buyers with properties in the development they’re interested in based on the information they entered. This massively improves the experience for the customer as they’re getting a quicker and more personal response.”

Better quality data

Because the prospect’s data is entered by the user at the form stage, and many of the form fields are standardised, this has lead to a higher quality of data in Spitfire’s COINS system.

“The integration has naturally made us stricter about data capture and management. Fields which weren’t required before are now mandatory at the form stage, so we’re capturing more data about our prospects and we have complete visibility over the customer from the initial enquiry right through to when they come to the end of their ten-year warranty.”

Future plans

Having put in place this key behind-the-scenes functionality to improve both their internal processes and the experience for the customer, Spitfire aren’t done yet in terms of digital innovation.

“We’ve got some really exciting plans in the pipeline,” says Mark. “We’re looking to do things with our website which no other homebuilders are doing, and I don’t think many organisations are doing overall.

“With this next generation of homebuyers, we know how important it is to be constantly evolving and bringing fresh ideas to the industry. They [customers] expect instant responses and exceptional, seamless experiences. We want to keep finding new ways to deliver this to them.”

Working with COINS or another construction management system and want to integrate with an industry-leading digital experience? Get in touch and find out how we could help.