The Story of Av-Gad: “With Salesforce, We Anticipate a Significant Leap in Managing Company-Customer Relations”
“The ability of Salesforce’s people to understand Av-Gad’s business, create the right connections, and recommend suitable partners,” says Yuval Arad, Deputy CEO, VP of Marketing and Sales at the real estate company Av-Gad, “is part of the keys to success in implementing the system in the company, a project we are completing these days.” Av-Gad implemented a Salesforce CRM system at record speed in collaboration with AllCloud experts and is already looking ahead to new horizons.
“Throughout the process of specification and implementation that we did with Salesforce and AllCloud, I told ourselves – and this is also an important insight for anyone who will read this article – that the key to success is to focus. This means you need to identify the main axis of change you want to make, go live with it – and only after that, add additional layers. On the other hand, don’t wait for a perfect system, because then the launch will be postponed again and again. The reason is that Salesforce’s system is almost infinite in terms of possibilities, and it’s very easy to get scattered during the process.”
These words come from Yuval Arad, Deputy CEO, VP of Marketing and Sales at Av-Gad, a company engaged in urban renewal. Av-Gad was established 15 years ago and is currently promoting the planning and execution of 13-14 thousand housing units. These days, Av-Gad is launching Salesforce’s CRM system, which was implemented in partnership with AllCloud experts after a meticulous specification process.
Why now?
According to Adv. Ram Ratzon, CEO of Av-Gad, “In recent years, and especially when we look at 2025, 2026 and beyond, we realize that the projects – which are in a very long planning process – are about to mature in the next year or two. Therefore, we anticipate a significant jump in the number of housing units that will be marketed and executed. When we looked at the processes during 2024, we realized that we couldn’t manage the growth professionally and service-oriented, efficiently and well, without an appropriate CRM system. One that emphasizes service, marketing, and sales aspects and aggregates all the knowledge accumulated in online core systems that also offer advanced control, analysis, and monitoring tools. After a preliminary specification process and identifying challenges and gaps, and after checking several options in the market, we approached Salesforce to implement this system at Av-Gad.”
According to Yuval, the initial specification and implementation process was defined for a period of only about three months, at the end of which certain components of the system are already implemented and functioning in the organization. “From this point, we expect to continue implementing additional processes, those that were defined in advance alongside new needs that were added during the process, gradually, which will reflect all departments of the company and allow different internal customers to contribute and receive information from the system. The service we received from Salesforce and AllCloud throughout the entire process – in the contracting process, in the characterization, and in the guidance – was exceptional.”
How was the characterization process carried out?
“First, we defined a leading steering team in the organization that included Yaara Balzam, Assistant CEO; Hila Bella, Head of the Inspection Department; Neta Einhorn-Levi, Customer Service Manager; and alongside them, Dor Melamed, who managed the ‘Get Status’ mailing system, who was chosen to lead the implementation of the new system. The Salesforce and Av-Gad teams conducted a preliminary process to understand the needs to match the partners. We chose to proceed with AllCloud for the implementation process, with the decisive factor being the specific experience in the real estate world and the people we met, people who understand and can move forward with. It was a successful connection. This is an opportunity to give great credit to the professional team that led the process on behalf of AllCloud. And in general, the ability of the people at Salesforce to understand the business, create the right connections, and recommend suitable partners.”
“First, we defined a leading steering team in the organization that included Yaara Balzam, CEO’s assistant; Hila Bella, manager of the inspection department; Neta Einhorn-Levy, customer service manager; and alongside them, Dor Melamed, who managed the ‘Get Status’ mailing system and was chosen to lead the implementation of the new system. The Salesforce and Av-Gad teams conducted a preliminary process designed to understand the needs in order to match the partners. We chose to proceed with AllCloud for the implementation process, with what decided it being both the specific experience in real estate worlds and also the people we met, those who understand the matter and with whom we can move forward. It was a successful connection. This is an opportunity to give great credit to the professional team that led the process on behalf of AllCloud. And in general, the ability of the people at Salesforce to understand the business, create the right connection, and recommend suitable partners.”
Noam Rotem, Account Executive at AllCloud, adds: “We took our extensive experience in the real estate world and came to Av-Gad with solutions that are more or less ready and known. We understood their needs well and knew how to give them the added value so that the implementation would be carried out smoothly. All this, while characterizing all the needs and being able to see where we can help from our experience.” Noam added that the AllCloud team of experts provided and continues to provide Av-Gad’s people with the support and guidance that will allow them to manage and work with the system efficiently and independently in the future.
The Data Challenge
Let’s talk numbers and data for a moment: What has gone live so far?
“We have gone live with about 30 out of 74 active projects that are in planning and execution stages and about 20 projects that have been completed and are in the inspection stage. According to the plan we defined, future projects that are still in early planning stages will be uploaded to the system later, and according to progress. We have also uploaded all the price lists, the customer databases – compensation residents, interested parties, and buyers. We have accumulated a lot of information and data over the years. These days, we are carrying out a data refinement process through automatic questionnaires that are sent to customers and allow them to update their customer cards in Av-Gad’s information systems.
What was the technical challenge in moving from offline work to working with the new system?
“The fact that the data is not in one place in the organization and some of it is not up-to-date or complete. It took a long time to collect the data, validate it, refine it, and arrange it in a format suitable for uploading to the system. We saw this as a positive process and an opportunity, because it allowed us to organize all the distributed information. This alone is a significant and dramatic leap in managing customer relations. After all, the defined goal is to improve the service provided to the customer with all means and interfaces, and with all possible automations.”
How did you manage the information until today?
“We need to distinguish between the financial part of the company and the various service interfaces. As a public company, all the financial and economic aspects of contracts with customers and suppliers are managed online in SAP systems. On the other hand, the customer and compensation resident service interfaces were managed in regular offline systems, where each user managed their files in a way that often created gaps in the information available in the company and in synchronization. Additional gaps were in documenting these interactions and in response time targets.
How did the company’s employees receive the fact that they need to work on a new system?
“I think that initially only a few understood the move, although the gaps were clear to everyone. On the other hand, we engaged people from different departments in the company in the specification process from the very beginning, who were partners throughout the process in a way that gave representation to all the needs and internal customers of the system. The characterization itself was done from the bottom up, which gave people the opportunity to understand that they could find great value in the system – that it is not threatening them and that they can influence how it will look in our organization. When we reached the implementation stage, this became an advantage because people understood the importance and contribution of the system to the organization and knew what we were heading towards.”
Dor Carmi, Account Executive at Salesforce, recalls one of his first conversations with Av-Gad’s people. “The first thing that jumped out at me was Av-Gad’s awareness of the need as a company to be technologically up-to-date. In my opinion, if the awareness is there and the desire to listen and adapt Av-Gad to the changes and pace of things – if all this is there, it’s a good starting point. They also understand that we are laying an infrastructure for the next five years or more.”
Dor also notes Av-Gad’s ability to focus the solution and the discussion – at least in the first stage – on action that will have the biggest impact on the business in the near future.
Lightning-Fast Implementation
As mentioned, in a lightning process that lasted only three months, the system went live. One of the reasons for this acceleration is related to the fact that Av-Gad sees 2025 as a year of significant growth. And so, already in the first half of January – everything worked according to plan, with considerable efforts both in the company and on the part of the AllCloud team. “And from this point, we are in a trial run process that will continue until the end of the first quarter of the year. The idea is that everyone will get to know the system and experience it,” says Yuval Arad. “Together with the professional AllCloud team, we managed to break down the process into many components and set procedures for the responsibility of each component in the system. The strength of the system is that many internal customers in the company will share the information – and it will be available and accessible, based on access permissions, and will create improved work processes for us.”
How is all this supposed to affect the level of customer service?
“Ultimately, we look at it through the prism of how the customer looks at us. Excellence for me is not a dirty word, and that’s where we want to aspire. I want to jump the level of service we provide to the customer a generation forward, that we’ll be at the forefront of excellent customer service. Service is also measured when there are malfunctions that require a response and solution. Alongside this, we want to improve the level of documentation of service interfaces for control and internal learning. The fact that all information will be documented and accessible within a customer card and will be available to anyone who is supposed to approach the customer on this specific issue is part of the required improvement. As managers in the organization, we will all sit on the same information base that will be shared by everyone. The moment we look like a unified organization to the customer, we are already improving satisfaction.”
Satisfaction Surveys: The Next Generation
One of the requirements that Av-Gad set in the specification process was the implementation of an additional layer in the service area: implementing satisfaction surveys, “I believe there is no place for fear of satisfaction surveys but rather see it as part of a process of improvement and progress. Sometimes service people see these surveys as a threat, but I prefer to look at it as a process that matures and improves an organization. Because if we don’t know where the customer thinks we are less good, we won’t be able to improve in those points. I see it as another tool that wasn’t available to us in the past, and Salesforce’s system allows us today to measure and control ourselves from the level of the individual customer on a specific problem to the ‘packaging’ of processes, such as delivery of an apartment or delivery of a building with 100 apartments. The cliché says: ‘What is not measurable cannot be managed.’ So now we are developing available measurement tools so that we can manage them.”
And the question of questions – why did you choose Salesforce?
“From my experience over the years, when you choose a partner for a significant long-term strategic move as was done here, it’s important to choose a partner with horizon, stability, and market leadership. You don’t expect to replace such core systems with great frequency. Therefore, not only the cost alone should be before your eyes in decision-making. The product needs to be competitive in price, but what is no less and perhaps more important is to find a system that suits our needs – and people you can work with. Beyond the system that suited and the people who were committed to the issue, we received exceptional service in this entire process – both from Salesforce people and from AllCloud people – right from the first conversation. We have expectations and hopes, some of which we hope are already being realized now.”
And how can we not ask: What about artificial intelligence?
“The issue of implementing artificial intelligence in real estate worlds is very broad and yet still preliminary. These are worlds we will need to enter in the coming years, and the implementation of artificial intelligence-based tools is a goal we set for ourselves. I believe that in the current move with Salesforce, we are laying the foundations so that we can build on them to be part of this thing called artificial intelligence. We had to create an initial basis that would allow us to continue and develop to these places both in the professional aspect of planning and in the marketing and service aspect. Either way, the customer’s expectation to receive exceptional service should be our goal. That’s where we need to aim, and alongside the significant growth and development of the company in its core activity, we want to continue to develop in the worlds of service and customer experience management.”
