Brand EditorialElite AgentEPMEPM: Technology & Social

6 tips for property managers to thrive in the customer experience economy

The business of property management is changing fast, with technology enabling more and consumer expectations increasing. Console’s Helen Morris has six ways to provide customers a better CX.

The CX economy is already here.

Let’s begin by stating the obvious: the property management industry is in flux right now.

Owners have more options than ever and expect more value from property management services as a result.

Agencies can no longer compete realistically on price, with margins already wafer-thin across the industry.

Add difficult market conditions and marketplace disruption, and you have an industry that needs to reinvent itself to survive.

Investing in a superior customer experience is how you do that, and become more competitive in the market.

Agencies that want a stake in the future of property management need to kick their CX up a notch.

HOW TO KICK YOUR CX UP A NOTCH
Start by doing an audit.

Take a good, hard look at the experience you’re giving landlords and, to a lesser degree, tenants.

Examine from the moment they become aware of your existence, to the point at which they cease being a customer.

Every time a landlord or tenant interacts with your business – including your website, owner portals, emails, business cards, customer service, and so on – forms part of your agency’s customer experience, or CX.

List those touchpoints and identify opportunities for improvement.

SIX GOLDEN GOALS FOR BETTER CX
Using these findings as a base, you can start designing a CX strategy that achieves the following goals:

1. Makes it as easy as possible for people to become your landlords.

2. Enables you to provide customisable service to landlords. This can include simple things like how they prefer to receive information from you, and how much contact they prefer.

3. Delivers superior insights, advice, and valuable information to customers, that they couldn’t easily find on Google.

4. Gives customers more self-service options for simple requests, such as seeing statements and payment ledgers.

5. Empowers staff to share information more effectively internally, enabling them to be ultra-responsive to customers and across more information at the same time.

6. Enables everyone in the business to provide next-level customer service.

PROPERTY TECHNOLOGY IS ALL ABOUT CX
If you take a look at the rapidly changing PropTech market, you’ll notice we’ve moved past pure business-as-usual features and functions.

There’s now an increased focus in the tech sector on simplifying and compacting business-as-usual property management into the smallest possible amount of work, so that more time can be spent delivering CX.

That’s what workflows are designed to do.

For that reason, true workflow features don’t rely on tasks and manually set reminders to trigger and work – they should prompt you, not the other way around.

This shift in technology resonates with the change in thinking in the property management industry: the old-school property management as a series of transactions model is dead.

Long live property management as a relationship-based economy, where those who can provide the best experience for the owner wins their business and keeps it.

That’s why the smartest thing you can do is invest in the technology that makes it as easy as possible for your agency to kick those six goals.

The key here is to also invest wisely.

Something that looks familiar to what you ‘used to do’ in the past might be easier for staff to use for now, but it will cripple your business in the long run.

DO OR DIE
While the pace of actual change in the industry lags behind other industries, the gap is closing.

There is still time for your business to supercharge your CX, but not much. Do now, or die

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Helen Morris

Helen Morris is a Senior Product Manager at Console. As an experienced analyst, strategic leader and tech expert, Helen is a cornerstone of Console Cloud’s product development process and vision. For more information visit console.com.au