For many consumers, buying, selling, or renting a home is anything but simple. Major decisions, unfamiliar processes, and a long list of questions often come along the way. And when customers need help, they expect the same from every other digital experience: answers that are easy to find, relevant to their situation, and available when they need them.
That makes real estate an especially interesting lens for the broader customer experience (CX) conversation.
For companies serving consumers through complex, high-consideration journeys, support can’t exist on the sidelines. Every search, question, handoff, and moment of friction is part of the customer experience and can either build confidence or erode it.
That’s the conversation Phoebe Schultz, Vice President of Customer Experience Operations at Zillow Group, will bring to the main stage at CRS Scottsdale, September 30–October 2, 2026, at The Phoenician.
Turning Support into Strategy
In her keynote, Turning Support into Strategy: Zillow’s Approach to Smarter Self-Service, Schultz will share how Zillow approached a challenge that will sound familiar to many CX leaders: a support ecosystem that had become fragmented over time.
Zillow Group had numerous separate help sites, four technology platforms, and 12 support silos, an infrastructure shaped in part by years of acquisitions. The systems supported customers, but the experience reflected the company’s internal structure rather than how customers moved through their journeys.
That distinction matters.
For CX leaders, fragmentation isn’t simply a technology problem. It can show up as customers repeating themselves, searching across multiple places for answers, being routed to the wrong resource, reaching a human when a simple digital answer would have solved the problem, or being pushed into self-service when what they really need is human help.
Zillow’s experience offers a compelling look at what happens when an organization starts treating support differently.
Rather than viewing consolidation as an exercise in reducing complexity, Zillow used it as an opportunity to rethink the role of support altogether: not simply as a cost center, but as a product, a source of customer insight, and a way to connect customers with the right help at the right moment.
What CX Leaders Can Learn
The lessons extend well beyond real estate. As customer expectations continue to rise, organizations across industries are asking similar questions: How much should we automate? Where does self-service genuinely improve the experience? How do we make it easier for customers to find what they need? And how do we preserve the human moments that matter?
Schultz will explore how Zillow is approaching those questions through four key ideas:
- The org chart trap: Why support experiences can become organized around internal structures rather than customer journeys, and the strategic cost of that disconnect.
- Help as a product: What changes when support infrastructure is designed with the same discipline and intentionality as any other customer-facing product.
- Friction as a signal: How customer questions and support interactions can reveal problems in products, processes, and communications.
- Human where it matters: How intelligent triage and digital self-service can help organizations scale while still making room for the human interactions that build trust and loyalty.
For CX executives, the bigger takeaway is simple: support is telling you something.
The questions customers ask, where they get stuck, and when they seek human assistance can reveal where the broader experience is working and where it isn’t. The opportunity is to listen to those signals and turn support from a reactive function into a strategic advantage.
Join your CX leadership peers at CRS Scottsdale to see Zillow’s keynote. Learn more and register for CRS Scottsdale today.
