Boosting Customer Insights and High-Quality Sales Leads for Clayton with a 3D Experience

When designing a new home, every buyer has different desires, needs, and circumstances. Homebuilders need to understand these motivations and be able to quickly determine which customers are serious about buying. Without this insight, the sales process becomes bogged down with customers window shopping. So, when Clayton wanted to revamp their sales strategy, they knew they needed a digital experience that could streamline the process. They sought to create a 3D tool that would allow homebuyers to customize their home online through a seamless digital path to ownership. With an idea for their future, Clayton turned to UDig to help them bring their digital vision to life.

STRATEGIC SNAPSHOT

Challenge

A previous shopping experience that doesn’t allow interested customers to explore many design options and only captures limited information for Clayton to qualify sales leads.

Strategy

A collaborative, agile delivery process to create a tech platform that allows homebuyers to customize their design and Clayton to capture higher quality leads.

Outcome

The 3D Home Designer, a customizable tool that enables homebuyers to design a home to fit their lifestyle, resulting in a 2.5x increase in serious buyers.

Clayton has seen a 2.5x increase in leads from serious buyers in pilot markets. The tool has been so successful that it’s featured as a standout project in the company’s Annual Report.

The Challenge: Improving the Sales Process

Clayton offers home products to fit the needs of many types of buyers. With expansive product inventory, an in-person retail experience was largely driving the buying process. While the company does have a robust digital catalog, the inventory offers customers static imagery. They lacked the ability to combine design elements together and visualize bringing their home to life. Clayton also was unable to gain insight into their customers’ build preferences in a home before engaging them in the buying process.    

These challenges meant that:  

  • Clayton spent time working through low quality sales leads, slowing down the sales process 
  • Customers lacked a way to self-identify what they wanted out of a Clayton home 
  • The digital experience was unable to help the sales team identify and predict purchasing behaviors from interested buyers 

Because real estate is a cyclical business, Clayton needed to meet a target window of peak buying. So, their new tool had to be in place before this fixed deadline.  

The Strategy: A Flexible, Collaborative Team in Design and Development

To meet their goals and deadline, we recognized that there were four crucial elements that would be required to deliver on their vision — and within their timeline. In every step, we supported them with a cross-functional, collaborative team.

Element 1: Full-Stack, Cross-Functional Delivery Team 

We launched our work with a versatile team who would be available throughout the project. They could support front- and back-end development and easily respond to our client’s needs and pivot whenever a challenge arose.

Element 2: Software and Data Design and Development 

Clayton had a vision for what they wanted — and needed a team who could design and develop the software, and build the data-management foundation. From start to finish, we advised them and created the framework and tool that would make the 3D Home Designer a reality.

Element 3: Agile Delivery Method  

Our agile process enabled us to stay efficient, break up the workload, and focus on specific tasks at hand. Further, this method opened up transparency so that everyone stayed aware of the project’s needs, goals, and action steps.

Element 4: Collaborative Partnership  

Collaboration was integral to the project’s success. Not only did our team work together throughout the process, we collaborated with Clayton across the project. At every step, Clayton remained informed of the project’s timeline, process, and progress. When challenges arose, we were able to easily make Clayton aware and know our plan to overcome roadblocks. 

The Outcome: Engaging Digital Customer Experience That Boosts Sales

Our versatile team and agile design approach helped Clayton meet their goal within budget and ahead of schedule. Today, the company has a consumer web application in select markets that deepens and improves how homebuyers explore their catalog. Potential customers can customize their home design before even talking with a sales rep and see these updates in real time. Clayton has also seen a 2.5x increase in leads from serious buyers in pilot markets. The tool has been so successful that it’s featured as a standout project in the company’s 2021 Annual Report. Further, this digital toolset is a foundation for continuing to digitize their homebuying process and improving the experience for both their customers and their company.

How We Did It

Application Development
Application Integration
Solution Architecture

Tech Stack

  • AWS 
  • GraphQL 
  • .NET Core 
  • Node JS 
  • PostgresSQL
  • React