Notifications Initial Beta Release 1.0
Milestone
Smarter Agent Mobile successfully launched the initial beta release of our notifications platform in January. Notifications are one of the first services launched on our new big data platform.
We hit a huge milestone in our first 100 days with 1 million notifications saved. This was much earlier than anticipated. We were monitoring notification performance and search behavior closely, and we want to share our learnings with you.
Saved Search Notifications and Saved Property Notifications
The new generation of agents and homebuyers are using the two types of notifications we introduced in ways that have guided us to further iterations that will be ongoing to enhance the further user experience. They are setting up notifications early in the search process and using a broader filter to consider a wider range of properties. This is exciting for us and you the broker as the engagement and sales cycle could be immediate and/or shortened.
- Saved Search Notifications: users are conducting saved search notification for large geographic areas more often than we anticipated. For example, they are receiving updates whenever anything changes in the City of Philadelphia.
- Saved Property Notifications: these remain the majority of saved notifications, and are focused in areas around properties, neighborhoods, and points of interest.
This functionality is similar to a map search where, if a user zooms out too far, the app informs the user to “narrow your search”.
Update as of April 28th
In April, we informed you that we would be pausing all saved search notifications while we update our our software architecture to take on this spike in user activity.
We want to update you on our next steps. We are doing some fine tuning on the functionality of saved search notifications to ensure we can support an even larger user base and broader functionality for the future. If you have a saved search notification with instant notifications set on your app, you may have received some notifications today. This was just a test. Based on the notification frequency, here’s what you can expect:
- Saved Search with Instant Notifications: This frequency setting is still on pause. As we finish up testing, we scheduled this to go live again in May.
- Saved Search with Daily and Weekly Notifications: As a part of our plan for richer saved search notifications and additional app features we plan to introduce in the future, we are still testing daily and weekly saved search notifications. These two notification frequencies will remain paused for now. Stay tuned to our blog as we implement these updates.
You can still continue to use saved property notifications on your app with a notification frequency set to either instant or daily notifications. We’ve seen our users continue to enjoy this feature over the last week.
Customer Options
To make your users’ experience as seamless as possible, we want to offer you two options during the temporary pause. One option is stay the course, leaving on saved property notifications as we implement changes on the backend to the current configuration. If you prefer this option, nothing is required on your end. The second option is to email us at support@smarteragent.com, and we can discuss options to go forward.