Keller Williams’ Command app resolves to make agents more productive in 2022: Tech Review

Command is Keller Williams’ primary enterprise software solution, developed in-house over the past few years. The mobile version was released in mid-December after four periods of beta testing on a wide-selection of company agents.

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The Command app is a mobile iteration of Keller Williams Command CRM and business software.

Platforms: iOS and Android
Ideal for: All KW agents

Top selling points:

• Streamlined functionality
• Contact tagging
• Notification features
• Full access to all contact data
• Lead routing/claiming

Top concern:

There’s not a lot to worry about here, as KW isn’t new to app development, it’s clearly well-funded, and it knows its audience. In other words, we’re not dealing with a startup. I don’t love using birthdays and anniversaries as reasons to reach out to a person, it’s pretty contrived. But agents love it, and it’s prominence here isn’t at all related to functionality or the app’s stability.

What you should know

Command is Keller Williams’ primary enterprise software solution, developed in-house over the past few years. The mobile version was released in mid-December after four periods of beta testing on a wide-selection of company agents. It’s not a feature-by-feature take on the desktop edition, designed instead to give KW agents what’s most valuable to their day-to-day.

I called the Command app a “pared down version of the full-featured browser app,” during our demo, which Keller Williams CTO Chris Cox contested.

His take is that it’s not pared down, but deliberately designed to offer only features that are of the most value to agents during a typical work day. He’s right. Pared down suggests they worked top-down, eliminating non-critical functions. That’s not how good software development works; it should be solution-based according to its user base’s problem points.

In this case: What do KW agents need the most when on the go? Well, they need to know when they get a new lead. Check. They need to know the when and what about tasks. Check. And they need to address any immediate needs of active leads and clients. Also check.

This is why the app looks pared down. However, beneath its spartan UI and seemingly narrow function list is the ability to tunnel deeper into Command’s more robust offerings, such as SmartPlans, contact tagging, website lead activity and team-based lead claims.

What Cox explained was that his KW Labs crew wanted to build an app around the behavior of humans. It sounds esoteric, but if you marry how we work with what we need to do, you can create very good software. When a product is engineered merely to mirror a manual process, as opposed to helping shrink it, what’s really the point of it?

Command mobile empowers KW agents to accomplish important things in small windows of time. Grab leads. Find out where a deal sits. Tell a client “happy birthday.”

The interface is partitioned according to Tasks, Who to Contact and Things to Know. Under Tasks, you can jump into Opportunities, a catch-all for anything related to current deals.

Contact cards are nicely summarized and easy to reach through text, email or call with a quick tap of the icon. All app outreach will be tracked in the Command browser, too. Tags can be added and edited, and people can be pushed into to connected SmartPlans for marketing, another nice function to have in your pocket when a contact becomes a lead while you’re waiting for your lunch.

There’s a number of notification options and settings, and a feature I like to see in all kinds of apps, a visual, scrolling timeline of contact and deal activity.

I think its fashionable for industry players to brush-off what Keller Williams is doing. Its leaders stepped out there, made bold claims and as result, invited industrywide scrutiny. And that’s because Keller Williams is not a technology company; it’s a real estate company.

Which is what makes roll-outs like this all the more impressive.

Have a technology product you would like to discuss? Email Craig Rowe

Craig C. Rowe started in commercial real estate at the dawn of the dot-com boom, helping an array of commercial real estate companies fortify their online presence and analyze internal software decisions. He now helps agents with technology decisions and marketing through reviewing software and tech for Inman.