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COMPANY
Mossy Oak Properties
INDUSTRY
Real Estate
COMPANY SIZE
11-50 employees
LOCATION
United States
1,800 emails
handled per month.
150 hours
saved per month.
5 inboxes
shared from Gmail.
The context
Mossy Oak Properties is a full-service Real Estate Firm specializing in land sales, with offices in Virginia and North Carolina. They started with the idea to help outdoor enthusiasts find and buy land for their own recreational and investment purposes.
Like a typical Real Estate Firm, they need to juggle and manage several different pieces of information. This includes bills, closings, listings, or general information inquiries from potential clients. Managing these pieces efficiently is very critical for their business.
They also rely on relationships and need to communicate well with several stakeholders at the same time, such as sales agents, potential leads, current customers, or other agencies or attorneys.
Email is the channel through which most of this communication is done. The results of that? An astonishing figure of 1,800 monthly emails. All of which they need to handle in an efficient way.
To manage these emails, their team uses several email inboxes, such as closing@, listings@, or even officemanager@ for administrative work. Each one of these inboxes needs to be accessed by a number of people.
The challenge
With many shared email addresses and employees, accountability was the first challenge. To assign emails or tasks to team members, they needed to constantly forward emails around their team.
Because they were sending information to individuals directly, nobody knew who was responsible for what. That process was leading to oversights, duplicate results, and a higher risk of errors.
On top of that, some employees work remotely, so the team needs to coordinate tasks asynchronously. This makes the lack of visibility and accountability became even more critical.
Efficiency was another challenge. Because the team was forwarding emails manually, it took a long time until the right message reached the right inbox.
Initially, they considered turning their shared inboxes into Google Groups to make sure the whole team received incoming messages instantaneously, as they hit the respective mailing lists.
However, accountability was still an issue. “We looked into Google Groups, and soon realized it was not what we were looking for. Prior to Drag we all had separate inboxes and all emails were forwarded to clog inboxes”, said Laura Glatz, IT Manager.
Google Groups also brought security issues. It was automatically replicating sensitive Emails and respective attachments or files to multiple users’ inboxes, including those who did not need to access those sensitive files.
The Mossy Oak team realized they needed a tool that would allow multiple people to be able to log in to manage several accounts, in a quick, secure, and user-friendly way.
“Drag has effectively streamlined the email system in our office and how we assign and manage work. It saves time and has significantly simplified our day to day operations.”
Megan Gray
Office Manager @ Mossy Oak Properties
The solution
After they realized Google Groups did not work for the collaboration they were looking for, they adopted Drag. As a result, the team has seen an outstanding increase in productivity with the addition of Drag.
Their team now uses different Drag boards for each of their multiple group inboxes, where they can clearly assign Emails and tasks to respective team members. Emails come into boards in real-time and everyone in the team with access to the board has instant access to them.
This way, everyone knows who is working on what, and they can eliminate confusing email forwarding within the team and make sure the right person is aware of their responsibilities. From general office inquiries to billing, incoming listings, and closings, they use Drag boards to manage their workflows.
The use case
The team at Mossy Oak properties has created one board for each inbox they have.
Within each board, the Office Manager is able to assign tasks (e.g. new listings and the tasks that come along with that), to a specific employee.
As that employee works on that email, they move it to the “Doing” column, and once completed they move that email to the “Done” column or the column that is labeled their name.
This is how IT Manager Laura Glatz describes their experience with Drag:
“Drag allows for complete accountability for each email that passes through that inbox. The Drag boards are able to be accessed from each team member’s personal work email address. Also, the ability to flip back and forth from a work email to a Drag board is super convenient.
During the height of marketing campaigns, the “listing@” inbox has seen a surge of activity. Having the ability to assign emails to employees in the office and working remotely, has proved to be quite helpful. Then we now know who worked on which file and when.
There’s less chance of error this way. Additionally, having the agents separate where they send their documents and information for a certain transaction has streamlined the process. With the use of the “closings@” board, agents specifically only send correspondence regarding contacts and closings. Before Drag, there was no way to distinguish between where correspondence was going”.
“We no longer have to forward emails and everyone is aware of what is going on, it’s great!”
Laura Glatz
IT Manager @ Mossy Oak Properties
