After two years of development and much hype, Keller Williams has officially launched its new agent tech platform, Command, which functions like a customer relationship management product (CRM), but which company founder and CEO Gary Keller says is actually larger, smarter, and more comprehensive than any CRM to date.
The system is powered by its internal investments in artificial intelligence software, was formally unveiled this weekend.
Command is designed to act as a kind of one-stop shop that streamlines agents’ jobs, allowing them to automate tasks, create customized marketing campaigns, and manage databases and contacts all in one place, among other things.
During Saturday’s Family Reunion, Keller Williams President Josh Team explained that an agent using Command can input a contact, which will then prompt the system to generate a customized landing page for that person. Team used a hypothetical client, dubbed “Sarah,” to show how Command aggregated neighborhood insights, agent branding, and other information into a custom page that is delivered via an emailed link.
Command also generates data based on consumers’ interactions with the customized websites, and agents can use that data to guide their clients through the buying or selling process. “Command’s going to show me when she visited her website,” Team said.
This kind of customized landing page, with neighborhood-specific data, is vastly more effective than typical agent websites — which he said 97% of the time don’t actually accomplish what they’re supposed to.
“We saw a 400% increase in engagement and conversion for agents,” Team added.
No one else in the real estate industry has created anything equivalent to Command, which isn’t so much as a conventional CRM as it is a broader platform that draws in a variety of Keller Williams technology. “It’s not a CRM we just don’t know what else to call it,” Keller explained. “It’s a set of applications on top of a platform where all of the data is connected and artificial intelligence is running it.”
Both Keller and Team characterized Command as the culmination of years worth of technological development at their company.
That process included building what Keller called an “innovation platform” in 2017, and working on artificial intelligence in last year. As the company crossed into 2019, it was trying to bring those technologies together in a way that was simple, smart, and cost effective.
“In 2019 we’re now ready to begin rolling out all of the technology that we have built,” Keller said.
To produce Command, Keller Williams worked with 27,000 people — many of them agents — and had engineers go through other CRMs to see what worked well. The goal was to create something that was customizable, and which could be configured according to the needs of agents.
“We believe the technology should learn how you do business,” Team told the crowd of Keller Williams agents, “and not the other way around.”
Keller Williams is expected to unveil a new customer-facing mobile-first digital experience later this year to counter portal giants like Zillow and Realtor.com, as well as digital brokerage Redfin.