Based in Seattle, Washington, findwell is a startup real estate company that strives to deliver exceptional service through the smart use of technology and a progressive business approach. The company implemented Microsoft Office 365 in 2011 for cloud-based email and document sharing. We recently sat down with Kevin Lisota, Chief Executive Officer at findwell, to discuss his business and technology plans for the coming year.

Are you making any New Year’s resolutions for your business?

Lisota: We’d love to resolve that the real estate market will improve, but unfortunately don’t control that. I do anticipate modest improvements in the market this year, but the difficulties in real estate aren’t totally over yet. In terms of our own resolutions, we’ve done a lot of work to have a really strong online presence. We’d like to put more quality content on our website, better track customers through our web properties, participate in more social networks, and do more email marketing. That’s what helps our business to succeed, and there’s a lot more that we can do on that front.

Do you have specific goals for the growth of your business in 2012?

Lisota: The short answer is yes. There are two ways to expand our customer base. The first one is out of our control, which is the health of the real estate market. The second is by making a significant investment in getting our name out there, which is what we plan to continue.  By providing outstanding customer service, our reputation and client base will continue to grow through referrals and word of mouth. However, we are still a young company, and we need to pair that with an expanded online presence and marketing effort to make sure that we can gain more mindshare in our target markets.

Jumping back to 2011, what were the major technology improvements you made this year?

Lisota: One of the biggest improvements we made was implementing electronic signatures, which has increased our efficiency and really reduced our paper use. Migrating our email and team portal to Office 365 was probably the biggest technology move that we made. It’s been a huge win for us in terms of being reachable at all times and having the answers our customers need. It has also made it easier for us to collaborate internally and provide training to new and existing employees.

How will Office 365 support your growth?

Lisota: Office 365 provides the foundation for the quality service we provide. It enables us to communicate in a timely and consistent manner, ensures our agents are well-informed, and gives us quick and easy access to timely market data we use with our clients. Office 365 enables us to take that extra step and host online meetings with clients when it is more practical. It also allows us to access information from our portal when we’re out in the field. It really gives us a professional, tech-savvy image.

Has this new professional image helped you to land new clients?

Lisota: Absolutely. When someone comes to you as a prospective home buyer or seller, they want to know you’re responsive and knowledgeable and that you are looking out for their best interests throughout the transaction. Being perceived as a tech-savvy real estate company has been a major differentiator for us and helps us win new clients from competitors.

How important is customer communication to your business?

Lisota: Communication with the public is the most important aspect of our business. People have really short attention spans. If they’re shopping for a Seattle real estate agent and it takes us a day to get back to their initial inquiry, we’re going to lose that customer. Once we land a new customer, they expect us to be available pretty much at all times. There’s an expectation when a home come up online that they want to see it tonight. We need to be able to communicate with them quickly and effectively to meet those expectations.

How has technology improved the way you communicate with clients?

Lisota: It helps us to communicate instantaneously with our customers, which is a big differentiator for our company. When we’re out in the field, we need to be able to respond quickly by email or phone, and connecting up from a huge variety of devices and locations is mission-critical. To give a tangible example – we just successfully negotiated a purchase offer for a client on a home that had been on market just 1 day with 7 competing offers. Technology most definitely played a role in being able to act quickly for our client, and for them it means they get to move into their dream home!

Do you have plans to add technology in the coming year?

Lisota: Yes, we want to improve our consumer-facing technology—how we communicate with prospective customers online, how we use email marketing, and the quantity and quality of market data we provide to customers. On the internal side, we’d like to build a better process for onboarding new real estate agents so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time we bring someone on. If I can point new employees to a central resource that shows them how we do things, it will improve our onboarding process. We also have loads of data that we track about the health of our market and our business. We need to do a better job of surfacing that data to our agents on a day-to-day basis. We plan to implement using our internal SharePoint sites.

Looking ahead toward the New Year, what are you excited about?