About Virtual Staging Solutions

Virtual Staging Solutions offers services for real estate agents. In the real estate industry, the quality of the images presented for sale is extremely important. In this context, selling an unfurnished property could be much more difficult, while temporary furnishing is too expensive.

What Virtual Staging Solutions does is digital home furnishing, with over 10 years of experience and over 10,000 properties virtually staged. The result is so realistic and helps customers better imagine their future home. They can also help with remodelling homes, changing cabinets, countertops or flooring. The choice of furniture is handled by designers who collaborate with Virtual Staging Solutions, taking into account the budget, the room type, the requested style or any other preference.

Look at this. So satisfying to watch!

Difficulties faced

1. The difficulty of assigning clients to partner designers;
2. The speed of the process depended on the availability of employees and designers. They are only available during working hours. If the deliverable is completed by the designer outside the working hours of Virtual Staging Solutions employees, the client will be able to get the pictures only the next day;
3. Someone has to constantly take care of keeping the database up to date with customers. It’s a simple job, anyone could do, but it is rather boring. 

Requirements

Creating a web app with the following attributes:

• Allow user to upload images with the unfurnished spaces for rent;
• Allow user to select the room type (bedroom, living room, kitchen, etc.) and to choose their favorite style from a predefined gallery;
• Allow user to specify the available budget for rent and to write any additional comments or suggestions;
• After saving the images on the site, automatically create an order in WooCommerce.
• Choose a designer from a predefined list of WordPress users.
• The designer should only have access to the orders assigned to him, not to all the orders from the website.
• At the time of order assignment, the following actions must take place outside the site:
  • The designer to be automatically notified by email with “acknowledgment of receipt” (confirmation that the order has been assigned to him);
  • Automatically create a row in a Google Sheet document – containing data such as the month of the order, the number of pictures (because the price is calculated accroding to the number of pictures) and the name of the designer to whom it is assigned;
  • The images are uploaded to the designer’s Dropbox account.

After the images are processed:

• • Save the Dropbox images in another folder called “finals” on the server hosting the website;
  • Save the images from his Dropbox in another folder called “finals” on the server running WordPress
  • Resize images (because the websites where they have to post those images have size restriction)
  • Archive both versions (“raw” images and resized ones)
• The customer will be notified by email that the images have been processed
• The client logs in to the site, where he gets access to the uniquely generated archive → where he can copy the images.

Implemented solution:

Automating the existing process. What does the solution look like?

Benefits

• Time saving. All actions in the business process were conducted before, but manually. The implemented automations take over those tasks and solve them immediately, effortlessly and without stress.
  
• The ability to manage a much larger number of orders. When no more time is wasted for administrative tasks such as assigning the client to a designer, sending emails to clients and designers etc., that time can be invested in processing a larger number of clients.
• Better customer service. It’s important not to make the customer wait. The customer is automatically notified by email, so it will receive the deliverable as soon as it is ready. It doesn’t matter if this happens on weekends or outside of business hours.
• Better organization of deliverables. By organizing the images in dedicated folders and by archiving them, the files are always kept in order. Good organization increases productivity, reduces work related stress and helps save time – especially because people spend less time looking for things.
• Database updated in real time. Someone had to constantly keep the customer database up to date. Now an Excel document is automatically filled in for each order received. That’s how we know for sure that no order will be missed!

About us, Brunomag Concept

We believe that it doesn’t have to be “crazy at work”, but instead our job should be as pleasant as possible.

“Our secret weapon” is technology, which allows us to automate repetitive and tedious tasks, so that we can enjoy a challenging, fulfilling  job. We think that the boring parts of our work can be handled by robots (or automations, not to sound much sci-fi). In the meantime, unleash your employee’s creativity, stimulate idea generation in your teams, create a pleasurable work experience for all of your  employees. Because no one’s passion is to manually complete Excel documents (Or is it?).

You should keep in mind that even if we “preach” about automation, not every business process is a good fit for it. Don’t waste automation’s potential on a bad process. Also don’t give up just because automation doesn’t fit. We recommend improving the process first, that’s just what we do. 

Don’t know how to start business process automation? We have a few tips on this one! Contact us and we’ll see what can be done.