Residential Property Management: Creating a Meaningful Customer Experience
Today, effective residential property management goes beyond the basic upkeep of buildings and handling finances. At its core, property management is about delivering a seamless, positive experience for residents, from the very first interaction. Understanding the significance of good customer experience enables property managers to create lasting relationships, foster loyalty, and elevate the overall reputation of their properties and the services they provide.
This week, the POD team explore why prioritising the whole customer experience is crucial for thriving in residential property management and some of the key processes we implement to ensure first class customer service.
The Importance of Positive Customer Experience
Creating a good customer experience is crucial to residential property management. It has many benefits including:
Improved Resident Satisfaction: A seamless customer journey ensures that resident needs are met promptly and efficiently. Happy residents are more likely to stay at the property longer and in turn, tell others about their positive experiences.
Increased Property Value: Well-managed properties that keep residents satisfied typically maintain higher occupancy rates and yield better returns for landowners. A positive customer experience helps preserve the value of the property itself by encouraging everyone to take better care of the units and community spaces.
Building Trust and Reputation: In an industry where trust is essential, offering an excellent customer experience builds a strong reputation. Property managers who demonstrate true care and attention to residents’ needs can develop stronger relationships, which can be key for long-term success. This trust also leads to a more cooperative relationship, which can reduce frustrations and improve the quality of interactions.
Taking the Customer First Approach
In order to create a positive customer experience, effective communication is key. When it comes to residential property management, best practice is to put the customer at the forefront – but what does this actually mean? ‘Good customer service’ is often confused with basic polite formalities – although these are certainly part of it, it is only scratching the very surface of exemplary customer engagement.
In our opinion, a true customer first approach requires putting yourself in the mindset of the customer, or resident, and asking ‘how would they want to receive this help or information?’. For property managers, it’s imperative to have the right processes in place in order to encourage the seamless customer journey, but you must also be able adapt to the individual customer and property needs at short notice.
Managing Expectations
Unfortunately, there is often a preconceived idea about what residential property management teams offer and when needs are not quite met, this can result in disappointment. Contrary to what is often believed, property managers purely provide services to the communal areas of a development and are responsible for keeping the overall building in check. (Take a look at our piece on what property management companies do for an in depth overview!)
You may have heard us say ‘if a property management company is doing their job efficiently, residents shouldn’t even realise they are there’ – and it’s true. The aim is to cause as little disruption to the daily life of residents as possible. Processes should be streamlined, polished and pre-planned to mitigate expensive fixtures and repairs further down the line and to keep the building running as smoothly as possible to enhance living experiences.
Proactive Ongoing Management
Proactive management is key to the overall positive customer experience. At POD, we streamline maintenance and repairs with our innovative POD Planner system, where contractors directly update service sheets and remedial actions, giving us real-time task performance. Tasks are assigned urgency levels, from same-day fixes for urgent issues to obtaining multiple quotes for less critical repairs. During mobilisation, we ensure PPMs are recorded before starting management. We maintain statutory compliance with our automated system that reminds staff of tasks, issues weekly performance reporting and safety audits.
Proactive ongoing management should also ring true in the case of communication and keeping residents in the loop. We ensure that our residents are able to see where maintenance fees are being spent, all the way through to presentations on key fire safety information. We want all residents to feel that they are in the know, thus, we are completely transparent about our processes. We aim for clarity in our communications and delivery, incorporating visuals and infographics to ensure easy understanding of the important updates and information at hand.
Meaningful Interactions and Quick Response Times
In order to create a positive customer experience, quick response times are fundamental. If you saw our last blog on the changing face of communication in the industry, you’ll have read about the many ways that we ensure residents can contact us, and that the right people are able to help with the job. Our response times are under 6 hours (and under 1 hour if we have an on-site team in place). Due to the diligent work of our staff, our resolution rate is also 90% within 19 hours. This is unrivalled in the industry.
We want our customers to experience exceptional service and feel completely supported. This is reflected in our all-time happiness rating of 95%, our many 5* Trustpilot reviews and overall score of 4.3 stars.
It’s important to note that in the nature of the world we live in, things aren’t perfect and things can go wrong, however, it’s how the issue is dealt with that leaves an impact. In the case that there is an issue within a property, a resident will be able to accept this if it is sorted quickly and they are well-informed. This is where collaborative working and fast responses are key to enhance the customer journey.
Consistency and Transparency
Being consistent and transparent with residents is key to creating trust. Whether it’s maintenance requests, financial queries, or general inquiries, residents should receive the same level of professionalism and efficiency across the board. Each query is filtered through to the right support representative (to enable us to address 90% of queries straight away).
We are forthcoming and transparent in our approach to residential property management. We want residents to know exactly where they stand and how we manage their buildings. We are more than happy to explain our processes and can assist in providing financial breakdowns for additional clarification that may be needed. We are passionate about building communities and adding value to our customer relationships.
Listening to Feedback
Learning, building and growing in our industry is crucial because it’s ever-changing. If you fail to do so, you’ll simply be left behind. With this in mind, POD understand how incredibly important it is to listen to feedback and act on it. Customers are the ones on the receiving end of the service you provide, so are best placed to offer feedback. We strive to demonstrate our core values through every customer interaction and actively listen to improve where this may fall short.
Harnessing Technology
Technology has improved user experience across many industries. Within the property management sector, it is now becoming a necessity. At POD, we use bespoke software that integrates communication, task management, and automation to not only improve customer satisfaction, but reduce staff workload so that they have more time to focus on more complex or time sensitive tasks.
These systems can ensure that urgent matters are flagged and dealt with appropriately, while non-urgent issues can wait, enabling the important balance between responsiveness and employee well-being.
Get in Touch
If you’d like to speak to a residential property management company who genuinely value their customers and have with a proven track record of delivering exemplary customer experiences, POD are on hand to help you:
Fill out our enquiry form
Email us at relationships@podmanagement.co.uk
Call us on 0333 577 6656
We look forward to hearing from you!