General Manager - Performance Marketing

Ray White upgrades contact centre with AI oversight. Fri, 25th Sep 2026 (Today) Ray White has upgraded its Concierge contact centre to a cloud-based system with conversational AI from RingCentral, affecting its 110-agent operation across Australia and New Zealand. The updated platform combines RingCentral's RingCX contact centre system with its AI Conversational Expert tool, ACE. Ray White Concierge supports home buyers, renters, investors and sellers, and arranges related services including insurance, removals and trades. According to Ray White, Concierge helps more than 5,000 people a month move into a new home. The unit makes more than 50,000 calls a month, delivers almost 40,000 real estate opportunities to agents each year, and handles an email queue managed by skills in the same way as inbound calls. The upgrade builds on a broader technology shift that began several years ago. Ray White adopted a cloud-focused strategy in 2015 and rolled out a cloud-based platform across its 1,000 franchise offices, including Google Workspace, as part of a wider digital ecosystem called One System. In 2020, the group replaced its on-premise corporate PABX environment with RingCentral's RingEX unified communications system. Ray White's in-house IT team completed that deployment in stages across Australian corporate offices. Integration with Google Workspace gave staff single sign-on access and click-to-call features in Workspace and customer relationship management applications. "Having these micro efficiencies provides a better user experience for our internal teams," said Ben Cowie, CIO at Ray White. Contact centre changes Ray White executives said the contact centre upgrade had an immediate effect on supervision, reporting and coaching, with improvements in call disposition reporting, timecard reporting, call volume analytics, contact history reports and call recordings. Kelly Tatlow, chief executive officer of Ray White Concierge, said that visibility matters in a high-volume operation where agents handle large numbers of calls each day. The system also introduced real-time supervisor tools and callback functions, which she said improved both performance and customer experience. "Our conversations need to be welcoming and reassuring every time. We are a high-volume business, and our team handles a large number of calls every day. RingCentral allows us to better monitor our productivity, and work with our agents on their particular development areas, so that we can focus our coaching and training for individual team members. Breaking down the volume of calls per hour into skills, teams and agents is very helpful to compare performance within our teams and to compare the volume of calls different teams can achieve," said Tatlow. Ray White also highlighted compliance features in the system, including a launch call recording function that plays pre-recorded advice or legislative scripting, and a masking function that hides a client's credit card details in a recording when they pay for an insurance policy. AI oversight Ray White said the biggest operational change came from ACE, which analyses customer conversations. The tool summarises and transcribes calls, captures key conversation points, provides scorecards and coaching tips for consultants, and identifies calls or exchanges that may need review. According to Ray White, team leaders previously spent long periods reviewing large volumes of recorded calls to check whether consultants were using the right language. ACE is now used to narrow that task by highlighting potential concerns for supervisors and managers, who can then move directly to the relevant part of a call. "Team leaders used to lock themselves away in a room, trawling through high volumes of calls just to make sure our consultants were saying the right thing," said Mikayla McManus, operations and team performance manager at Ray White Concierge. RingCentral worked with Ray White to train the AI system to identify preferred practices and draw out customer insights from Concierge calls. The aim was to help managers spend less time on blanket monitoring and more time on targeted review and coaching. "ACE gives me a clear overview of every call before I even listen. If the wrong language is being used, we can capture it and correct it straight away, not weeks later," said McManus. Cowie said the shift changed how supervisors approach quality control and team growth. Rather than listening to all calls or relying on a small sample, managers can review flagged sections alongside transcripts and recordings. "That shift from listening to everything to targeting what matters completely changes how our leaders work. It has helped us grow without compromising our quality. This is where AI delivers value in real operations," said Cowie. Tatlow said the technology had given the Concierge team a single system to manage its workload and a platform for further development. "RingCX gave us a modern contact centre that could support the volume of calls that we do and scope of our business. It gave us one system across the whole team and also a platform that we can build on. ACE makes it easier for us to deliver the quality service that we're known for. We're really proud of our 4.9 star Google rating," she said.

Tom Gunness named Ray White Queensland's Head of Auctions. The auctioneer moves into a corporate leadership role with the network's 10,000-auction ambition in his sights. At a glance Tom Gunness has been appointed Head of Auctions for Ray White Queensland, bringing five-plus years' Ray White experience and a focus on agent mentoring into the state-wide role. For agents, his stated priority is supporting the network to hit 10,000 auctions by leveraging the auctioneer panel across metro and regional Queensland - directly tied to creating buyer competition and lifting property values. Tom Gunness has stepped up into the role of Head of Auctions for Ray White Queensland, moving into the corporate leadership team after a year with the state network and more than five years across the broader Ray White group. The appointment brings someone with a background in high-stakes negotiations, strategy and agent mentoring into a state-wide leadership position, with a brief covering both metro and regional markets. Tom said his move from selling into auctioneering came from what he enjoyed most on the auction floor. "Three years ago, I came into this space bright-eyed and bushy-tailed," Tom said. "As an agent, I sold a lot of properties via auction, and I realised that the negotiation on the auction floor and the moment the deal came together was what I enjoyed most. "I asked myself how I could do that every single day, and becoming an auctioneer was the answer." In the new role, Tom said his focus would be on supporting agents across Queensland to create competition among buyers. "It's extremely humbling, and I feel incredible excitement stepping into this role," Tom said. "It's a huge responsibility given the current state of the market and our fundamental duty to be best in market as competition creators. "My ultimate goal is to help our network reach our ambition of 10,000 auctions, leveraging our talented panel of auctioneers to support every corner of Queensland." Ray White Queensland CEO Jason Andrew congratulated Tom on the appointment, pointing to his mentoring of agents and his ability to develop sales strategies that track real-time market conditions. "Tom has consistently demonstrated exceptional leadership, strategic acumen, and an innate ability to drive success for sales teams," Jason said. "Auction is in the DNA of Ray White, and having someone of Tom's calibre leading the charge ensures our clients continue to achieve maximum property values through genuine competition." Ray White called 40,256 auctions across Australia and New Zealand last year, according to the group.