Before launching Ryna, co-founders Sheryl Song and KD Dao were both familiar with the struggles young women can face when looking for rentals. Not only did they both work in real estate, but they had each felt like their own past searches for open rooms in Toronto and Vancouver had felt unsafe, inefficient, and discouraging.
Those experiences sparked the idea for Ryna: a digital apartment rental platform that makes renting safer, more flexible, and more reliable for the next generation. Today, Ryna focuses on helping renters from underserved communities get matched with the perfect roommates and home.
"With OpenPhone and the ability to track all our conversations, we are able to really tighten up our sales process and make ourselves more efficient."
KD Dao
Before switching to OpenPhone, Sheryl and KD gave each of their 10 leasing agents their own business numbers through Burner. This setup allowed employees to separate their personal and work lives on their phones. However, the business numbers all existed independently without any connection to each other or Ryna — which presented multiple problems.
First of all, it was impossible for employees to transfer calls or fill in for one another — which meant when a coordinator took their days off (or worse, a vacation), there was a lapse in their responsiveness to customers.
KD Dao
At the helm of a young startup, Sheryl and KD also realized they needed better visibility into their sales operations. With their original setup — which KD calls “absolutely chaotic” — they relied on their agents to send them the data and details of their day-to-day calls. From there, KD and Sheryl would manually track metrics like conversion rate and sales cycle length in a spreadsheet, trying to find opportunities to improve their sales process.
“We were kind of in the dark,” says Sheryl. “If one person is performing well, we look great. If one person is not performing well, it’s hard for us to understand exactly what the problem is.”
Sheryl and KD knew they needed a better solution, but they had a hard time finding a platform that could do everything they needed.
Fortunately, Sheryl stumbled across OpenPhone on LinkedIn and realized the platform was able to solve the three challenges they faced.
Using OpenPhone, Sheryl and KD are still able to assign separate business numbers to each of their agents. Now those numbers can be shared amongst the team. When one agent has time off, another can hop in and start seamlessly responding to calls and texts.
OpenPhone keeps a full log of every relationship in one convenient view. That way, any coordinator can pick up exactly where their coworker left off by listening back to call recordings, voice messages, and reviewing any text messages in the customer’s conversation history.
“We get the most value from being able to track conversations, text messages, and phone recordings because we're better able to help the client,” says KD. “Whether it’s a client that signed up six months ago or a year ago, we can go back and go through the entire history of that specific client.”
Once Ryna adopted OpenPhone, Sheryl and KD were able to say goodbye to manually calculating and tracking their analytics.
Instead, they can use OpenPhone’s analytics dashboard to instantly see how many calls, texts, and follow-ups coordinators make each day. They also use the OpenPhone Hubspot integration to log all their call activities in their CRM and bring together that data into HubSpot to track other crucial KPIs, like their conversion rate and sales cycle length.
Ryna’s team is fully remote, which used to make it difficult for managers to coach agents.
Now, however, Sheryl and KD can simply review agents’ texts and recorded calls in OpenPhone.
“With OpenPhone, I'm able to track every conversation and also provide coaching to my specific sales agents,” says KD. She adds:
“We're able to better identify where a client falls off in our sales cycle. Maybe the message that we're sending isn't clear, or maybe it's turning them off, or maybe the conversation that they're having on the phone with the agent is not as specific as we need it to be. So we're able to better coach the agents and, that way, provide better services to our clients.”
KD uses recorded conversations as a coaching opportunity with every new Ryna agent. By going over the new agent’s first few conversations and messages with them, KD can pick out several key learning objectives and opportunities for them to work on. This type of specific, targeted feedback can help them improve faster.
By using OpenPhone’s analytics, HubSpot integration, and recorded calls together, KD and Sheryl can streamline their sales processes, investigate issues, and identify new opportunities. They routinely use their findings to coach their agents, update their training documents, and inform new approaches.
As Ryna expands to new audiences, Sheryl and KD only expect to scale up their use of OpenPhone’s features.
“When you are first launching a new product, there will be a lot of refinements required,” Sheryl says. “For me to be able to listen to our sales team’s conversations… we can understand what [customers] actually want, and then adapt.”
OpenPhone provides Ryna with the analytics, shared numbers, and coaching opportunities they need to streamline and scale their business.
Join thousands of businesses already using OpenPhone to communicate better with their customers.
