Developers maintaining a phone system isn't building your business

Redfin pride themselves on delivering a truly unique customer experience. And to do that well, Redfin built a custom communications platform: Their unique routing logic, agent availability rules, and specific workflows based on property type, location, and value.

For a business operating at this scale, that level of control made sense, but maintaining it was quietly consuming the business. Just keeping a custom phone system up and running takes over 2,500 developer hours a year. That effort consumes valuable engineers who should have been building the things that move the business forward. Instead, they were stuck maintaining a communications system.

Redfin tracked a series of internal quality metrics, one being "bad call metric" a measure of poor customer call quality. And despite all that investment, call quality stayed stubbornly poor. Without clean data across the full call workflow, there was no reliable way to see where calls were going wrong, let alone fix them.

Spoke replaced the in-house platform. Using Spoke's API, Redfin embedded their own routing rules, customer journey logic, and internal data directly into Spoke. Their standards, their workflows, their way of doing things, running on infrastructure they no longer had to build or maintain. And for the first time, they had full visibility at every step. When something goes wrong, the team can see exactly where and why, and act on it.
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Redfin's developers stopped being telecom engineers. Bad call metric dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. 2,500 developer hours came back to the business every year.

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