The spaces we inhabit are changing. The blurring of boundaries between work and home, a year of isolation, and the social inequalities we’ve confronted -- we’ve emerged from this mass social experiment with so many questions around where this will all leave us.
Questions like: What do we really value? What do people really want from the future? And how can we be more inclusive of everyone’s needs?
We’ve reached a strategic tipping point, where real estate and the built environment face an opportunity to radically reinvent spaces around daily life in the next normal.
It’s this fundamental mindset shift that’s causing a reboot of work and living spaces, based around richer, more meaningful experiences.
People want to return to these spaces, but only if their experience is positive and reassuring, and engages their needs.
For the real estate sector, these questions have implications across every touchpoint, from developing, to selling and management.
The space to innovate
As we rethink the value that spaces have to offer, successful customer experience in the real estate sector is going to hinge on keeping a real-time pulse on changing customer preferences.
There’s a strong sense that a lot more thought needs to be put into how spaces can support wellness both physical and mental.
There’s a focus on flexibility, diverse use and value added services. Work and living spaces now need to be able to adapt to be fluid to whatever challenges await. There’s a shift emerging towards community-led spaces designed more carefully around work/life balance needs.
In the future, will boundaries between work and living spaces be even more important when it comes to offering connected experiences that engage and excite people?
Just as the ‘as-a-service’ model has disrupted software, retail and everything in between, this model represents a new kind of value for real estate.
Creating fantastic experiences through services drives loyalty, if the real estate business can get it right.
Putting customers at the heart of transformation
There are so many unknowns right now, and that makes keeping a keen ear open to what clients actually want so crucial.
As they navigate this exciting but daunting time, businesses in built environment sectors will need data-driven insights to identify opportunities, predict shifts in customer expectations and understand behavioural change.
At Salesforce, we’re ready for this with intelligence and innovation built in.
As the sector evolves, we can plug in the greater agility and speed to meet these exciting new possibilities head on, and our tech can enable experience-led transformations where businesses can ‘meet the moment’ and create spaces that put customers front and centre.
The Salesforce platform exists with customer-centricity as its guiding principle, and equipped with these tools, there’s no telling where the built environment sector can take us next.
For more information on delivering what the client really needs, please watch my webinar with experts from Colliers International, McCarthy Stone, Bizspace on 'Driving success in real estate with digital transformation.'
