About Rightmove

Founded in 2000, Rightmove is the number one portal in the UK for linking house buyers with properties and property professionals. Rightmove is focused on the UK property market, and also has an overseas offering.



Rightmove wanted to find a new customer support platform that could help provide an even better customer experience for their customers and for home hunters. The Rightmove team turned to Freshworks to scale up its customer support infrastructure and to meet its support needs.

Customer Support Challenges

Rightmove supports more than 20,000 estate and letting agent and developer customers with a team of around 200 support personnel. As the customer base grew, the company’s existing infrastructure at times limited the support that could be offered to its customers.



“We were providing support using standard corporate products that we had outgrown,” said David Cray, Head of Customer Experience and Product Development.

Specifically, one of the challenges for Rightmove was tracking the volumes and resolution rates of inbound calls and emails to the high standard that they wanted. Some of the manual processes and lack of self service options were compounded by siloed support channels, which at times reduced the overall efficiency of support.

David continued: “We decided that we needed a dedicated solution for multi-channel management of customer and consumer contacts so that we could track, manage and report on inbound and outbound calls, emails and social media.

“The intention was to provide a single place where customer support agents could handle all calls, emails and social media. This would provide them with all the necessary information around a customer so they could provide the best service possible.”

How Freshdesk helped Rightmove

David’s team assessed multiple options from other providers and felt that Freshdesk offered the right competitive mix of features.

“We chose Freshdesk for a number of reasons. The ticketing solution was powerful, flexible and customisable. We felt there was a good cultural alignment between Rightmove and Freshworks, and we felt there was a roadmap that was interesting. The other products were a little more mature, but they didn’t have such interesting ideas relating to their future,” said David.

Since completing the implementation, Freshdesk has helped Rightmove improve its service delivery to customers across multiple channels. Freshdesk has enabled improved ticket traceability among teams and helped the team realise efficiencies in email handling. Implementation of the knowledge repository has helped reduce incoming ticket volumes and empower self-service.

“We have increased visibility of inbound emails and recurring themes that customers are facing. Based on this new data, we can analyse trends quickly and create education materials for the customer support teams. We can bring together all the threads of conversation across multiple channels and provide better context to a support agent when handling a customer request. We can also have traceability that actions had been performed, so we can prove we are meeting the standards we set ourselves,” commented David.

Success with Freshdesk

Since implementing Freshdesk, David has seen several key positives within support; he has also seen improvements in Rightmove’s overall customer experience.

“We have noticed increased levels of satisfaction from customers and our customer support staff are happier too. We now have multiple teams on Freshdesk and they are operating in a more joined-up way.”

David Cray

Head of Customer Experience and Product Development

Rightmove

David particularly calls out the overall improvement in the quality and maturity of customer support. “We have improved response speeds and first contact resolution rates. For example, first response times are down by 26%, and first contact resolution is up to 75%. We have also identified trends and used this to prioritise knowledge articles and FAQ pages on the support portal. In conjunction with a number of other initiatives, we have increased the quality of the support service we provide,” said David.

The successful implementation has spurred on more ambitious customer support and experience projects within Rightmove.

“We are building Freshdesk-powered FAQs into the public-facing website. This means we can begin to provide support at the point it is needed and reduce inbound tickets over time. We are integrating a full two-way sync between Freshdesk and our CRM system to provide rich context data to our support agents whenever they receive an inbound call or an email. We have also started using social media through Freshdesk,” David adds. One of the key factors in the overall success of the project has been the partnership that Freshworks and Rightmove have formed.

“From the outset, Freshworks set out to be a business partner and not just sell us a product – which has been a really refreshing experience. At Rightmove, our vision for customer experience is to be the best business partner to our customers that we can be and Freshworks has worked with us to build, implement and evolve a solution that matches that vision.

"In addition to the functionality, I think both the culture of the company and the roadmap it provides is as much of an asset as the product itself," concluded David.