To say that Parker Dunahay is obsessed with the new agent onboarding experience is an understatement. As the Vice President of Agent Experience at eXp Realty, Parker is in charge of designing the onboarding experience from when an agent first becomes interested in eXp through their time joining as a full-time team member at the company. This includes running new agent orientation and their enterprise mentorship program. However, that’s no easy feat when your company grows as fast as eXp, now North America's third-largest real estate brokerage.
In fact, in 2019, they had 20,000 agents worldwide. By the end of 2021, they had over 70,000 agents operating in 22 countries. Adding upwards of 5,000 new agents some months and 50,000 new agents in under two years, the company faced some serious scaling challenges. Namely, their new agent onboarding experience couldn’t keep up. The amount of time that Parker and her team spent sending lengthy, back-and-forth emails with tons of links to new agents was unsustainable. Not to mention, it left a lot of room for human error and frustration for new agents.“
We have proprietary software that takes an agent through data collection so that we can license and transfer them,” says Parker. “We collect a bunch of information from them, and then we go to their state, transfer their license, and then make them an active agent at eXp.”
“But this proprietary software has never been plug-and-play for the business unit. What we were doing before Glide was sending a ton of really long emails with links to everything. It was overwhelming to the agent. We were doing the best we could with emails, and that wasn't cutting it.”
Worse, the overwhelming and frustrating onboarding process was starting to affect eXp’s Agent Net Promoter Scores (ANPS). Parker knew she needed to come up with a better solution. "I first stumbled across Glide years ago,” says Parker. “And then, I discovered that two other folks at eXp were using it for sharing org charts.”
Parker worked with her two colleagues to build a better org chart in Glide since their existing one in Facebook Workspace wasn’t user-friendly for new agents.
“Because eXp's org chart is internal and built on Facebook Workplace, it's very clinical,” explains Parker. “It's not sortable by state or user-friendly for the agent. You must know the person’s name, not their role, where they work, or what they work on, to find anything. So three of us found Glide to deliver a searchable org chart to agents.”
Once they saw traction with this searchable, simple org chart built using Glide, Parker set on the bigger project of overhauling the new agent onboarding experience to address their two most persistent issues: knowing who to reach out to and what they’re supposed to be doing.
“We're a virtual company, so agents don't come into the office and sit with someone who hands them a paper checklist and says, ‘Here, go do all these things.’”
To solve this problem, Parker built a Glide Page that allows new agents to register for their state and complete a check-listed series of onboarding steps. As new agents are going through this process, they also have access to all of the key contacts for their area and a full profile for each one.
“So, now we give them this Glide Page searchable by topic. Now if they have a question during onboarding, they know exactly who to talk to.”
As a result of introducing the new Glide onboarding app, agent satisfaction with eXp has substantially improved, as measured by an increase in their ANPS score by more than 5 points to 70 (industry best).
New and existing agents and new agents are amazed by the app. Parker says, “Actually, one of our most influential agents begged us to rebuild Glide strictly for our commercial agents.”
Parker loves that she can take her vision in her head and build things in Glide without writing any code. She could create the original org chart in Glide in no time whatsoever. In addition, she appreciates how open and adaptable the Glide team is.
“Something else that attracted us to Glide was the adaptability of the company, the startup spirit, and the openness of the platform. Glide lets anyone build apps of engineer-level quality, all without the engineer.”