How Aircall supports GetGround’s start-up journey

When your business is growing rapidly day by day, how do you find some calm to counter the pace of change?

Internal processes evolve all the time, particularly if your business is scaling. Identifying these areas of focus is one thing – but managing the transition between one iteration of your team and the next is another entirely. That’s why finding the right tools – and doing so at the first time of asking – is crucial to keep up momentum.

A shared sense of success

GetGround’s primary aim is to make property assets easier to access for everyone, unlocking an ability to trade with a greater degree of transparency.

Property as an asset class is worth over £1.2 trillion in the UK alone. It means there are huge opportunities to democratise an extremely diverse, but often unattainable, sector – but it also means the stakes are high for their customers, too.

Charles Rule, GetGround’s Financial Controller, believes that tapping into a way of sharing success with their customers is what helps nurture these relationships, so everyone feels like they’re on the same side. 

“Taking pride in our customer service is a cornerstone of building a strong brand. We want to deliver a product that’s easy to use, and delivers value to our customers – but we also want to ensure communication lines are always open. Being available, being contactable – that’s how you cultivate a shared sense of success.”

Combatting the chaos

Mirella Deocadiz is the Director of Operations at GetGround, looking after all the teams that deal directly with those customers (think onboarding and customer support). For her, strong internal processes are the power source behind the consistently-positive customer experience Charles talks about. 

“As a start-up, it’s rare for everything to be running completely smoothly on a given day. There’s a really strong sense of community within our customer-facing teams; they trust each other, solve problems together, and keep their cool in trying circumstances.

“One of the challenges I face is ensuring that the processes and the tools we use are suitable for our needs, and adaptable to our pace of change. We used to operate with company mobile phones – everyone had one. There was no accountability at all. If a call came through, we wouldn’t know about it. It was so chaotic; we needed to find a better way of doing things.”

Making the right buying decision

When it came to finding that solution, Mirella, Charles and the team approached it from three key areas. The first? Flexibility, to support the business throughout its journey. “It had to grow with us”, says Mirella. If requirements changed, they needed a tool that could, too.

Next, they looked at implementation and maintenance. “We don’t have the resources to spend on a complex build, or to manage a system with heavy maintenance requirements. I needed something that I could oversee on behalf of the team.”

Finally, data. “Enough data not only to make decisions”, Mirella says, “but to hold us accountable. We don’t just want to deliver a high level of service to our customers – we want to prove that we’re doing it, and keep improving.

Right people, right calls, right time

As a business with a mission to move the physical to the digital, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all their communications with customers are digitised, too. But in reality, that’s not the case – and the reason why Aircall presented itself as such a suitable solution for the GetGround team.

“So many of our customers, or potential customers, look for support via voice. Centralising the phone system was a key step in streamlining all of that”, says Mirella, although that only tells part of the story.

“With several teams supporting customers, our challenge is getting the right people to respond to the right calls at the right time. That’s exactly what Aircall’s IVR [Interactive Voice Response] system helps us to do.

It helps with tracking and reporting, too. Aircall’s integration with HubSpot brings all this call data into one place, accessible for the team when they need it. “Now”, Mirella says, “we have so much more accountability on the data side; the team has a holistic view of each customer and their journey with us.”

Opportunities to create new workflows soon presented themselves. “We never want to miss a call from a customer, but sometimes it happens – we’re a small team, and we don’t have weekend coverage.

“To solve this, we now create a ticket directly in HubSpot as soon as a call is missed via Aircall. From there, we can allocate it to the right team or person straight away. We can track our response rate, and set our SLAs accordingly. I absolutely love it.”

Hitting the ground running

As with implementing any new system for a growing team, it didn’t come without its concerns, Mirella says. Thankfully, though, they were alleviated almost immediately – well, within two hours, to be precise.

“I just can’t get over how easy it was to set up! The phone line was up and running within a couple of hours, something I’ve never experienced before. I’ve never been able to carry out an implementation that fast.”

Getting her teams up to speed also turned out to be stress-free.

“All it took was one training session, and there were no questions after. Everyone was a bit taken aback by how simple it was to use. From a productivity standpoint, that’s huge.

“And for a business like ours, things like that really do matter.”