Modernizing a 100-Year-Old Real Estate Business with a Cloud-Based Phone System Helps Company Realize Greater Efficiency and Record Sales

Many organizations are going through a digital transformation in the search for greater operational efficiencies, higher levels of customer care, and increased mobility. For more and more companies, this includes the decommissioning of on-premises business phone systems. That was the mission for Nadeem Muhammad, VP of Digital Marketing and Technology at F.C. Tucker Company Inc., a real estate brokerage company located in Indiana.

As the largest independent real estate firm in Indiana, F.C. Tucker has been in business for more than 100 years, employs over 2,000 agents, and has 36 offices throughout the state. The company offers a full range of additional real estate services, including mortgages, insurance, relocation, warranties, and more. With such an impressive history, the organization is well-known to Indianans for its honesty, transparency, and reliability.

The Search for Cloud-Based Technology

Mr. Muhammad sat down with me to discuss how he modernized business communication and collaboration, moving from on-premises technology to a modern, cloud-based solution.

“I was looking for cloud-based technology. Everything was on-premises,” said Mr. Muhammed. “We needed to align with new technologies, so I was testing different products.”

Mr. Muhammed noted that F.C. Tucker’s legacy phone system was a huge pain point. “It was old, difficult to manage, and if we wanted to change something, we had to dig out books. There was no support available.”

He shared that support for the system was no longer available and making changes required writing and executing scripts. If it was somehow incorrect, it crashed the entire system. And because the system was on-premises, his team had no way to take calls outside of the office through their business lines, which severely hampered their ability to work with customers and partners while on the go, not to mention earning new business.

Mr. Muhammed was looking for a system that everybody could use no matter where they were, with no worries about support. One that would allow him and his colleagues to transfer phones from multiple locations to better facilitate remote work, and that provided virtual extensions so employees wouldn’t need a physical desk phone and instead could use their smartphones as their business phone no matter where they were. The ability to video conference through the same system, as well as chat and share files was also very attractive to Mr. Muhammed. Plus, he wanted the system to be safe, secure, and reliable, and not a headache to manage.

In researching cloud communications providers, Mr. Muhammed found Intermedia. From his first experience with the sales team, he was impressed. “the sales rep had an answer for all my questions and was friendly and helpful.”

Mr. Muhammed decided to migrate F.C Tucker to Intermedia Unite, the all-in-one cloud communications and collaborations system that combines a feature-rich business phone system with video, chat, file collaboration, and more all integrated on one highly reliable, secure, easy-to-use and deploy platform. Unite is a turnkey solution with integrated mobile and desktop apps which allow users to seamlessly switch between most any Internet-enabled device and enjoy all of the features and functionality of the system no matter where they are.

After making the decision, Mr. Muhammed was impressed with the onboarding experience, “I can’t say enough about the implementation team. They were there every step of the way, teaching us how the system works, training users, and showing us different configurations.” And for any support or technical questions moving forward, Mr. Muhammed can reach Intermedia and its J.D. Power-certified (5 years running) support team 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

A Record Sales Year for F.C. Tucker

F.C. Tucker deployed the new cloud-based phone system right before the pandemic, which turned out to be fortunate timing. “We made a decision to close down offices, and we were lucky to have the technology in place, including phones, so we were ready. It took about 20 minutes to inform employees they could take their phones home and plug them in or use the app. We were fully operational the Monday after closing offices on Friday.”

Despite the pandemic, Mr. Muhammed shared that 2020 marked F.C. Tucker’s best sales year in the company’s 100+ year history. “We had the technology there, allowing agents to do the work they needed to do.” He added, “You don’t have to be at work to use the system, which isn’t a luxury we had before Intermedia.  We never closed down and never missed a beat.”

Watch my entire conversation with Mr. Muhammed to learn more about their business innovator story.