Industries all over the globe are competing in the customer experience space. Compare the customer experience you receive today from restaurants, hotels, airlines, and even supermarkets, against the experience you received ten years ago. You will see a significant upturn in how businesses deliver value to you as a customer. We are not exempt in property management, and we are competing with every other business around the globe in the customer experience space.
To deliver an exceptional customer experience, we must first know what our customers want. The only way to do this is to survey them or seek feedback. We need to gain an understanding of what keeps them coming back to our business or, in some cases, what drives them away. Our goal here is to create advocates for our business or service.
Seeking feedback from our customers is not a new space for property management; however, what we do with this feedback varies from business to business. Sometimes it comes via the phone, and sometimes it comes via email. Now and then, you may even receive a beautiful gift basket at reception. How many of us take a pragmatic approach to seek feedback from our customers, and then use this feedback to reflect and improve on our current systems and processes.
To do this, we must first choose a platform where our clients can not only give us feedback but also give us a score. The most common survey system in the world is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is used by nearly all fortune 500 companies around the world. If you have shopped at any of the major telcos or chain stores, you have been surveyed. Receiving a score allows you to benchmark yourself both against the industry and yourself. Our LPMA sister company, Ailo, also offers a customer survey tool that requires minimal effort from the user.
Once you have received your feedback, break it up into themes so you can gain a better understanding, at the highest level, on what drives your customers. Some ideas I have used in the past include communication, value for money, helpfulness, and expertise. Once you start segmenting your feedback out, the themes will also fall out. These themes give you areas to focus on rather than trying to deal with each feedback item one-by-one.
Once you have segmented your feedback out, split it into negative feedback and positive feedback. If you are using a survey platform such as NPS or Ailo, this will be easy to do based on the score received from your customer. Pick up the phone and ring all your negative feedback and delve more into why they gave you a low rating. Do the same with our positive feedback, except this time, ask them to leave you a Google review or write a short testimonial about you and your business.
The final step in actioning feedback is to use both negative and positive feedback to optimize your internal processes. Negative feedback may indicate that some of your internal processes may need a tweak. Positive may suggest that some of your internal processes are spot on, and you can endorse this down into the through celebration and recognition. This final step is the foundation for improving your customer’s experience and ensuring you develop advocates for your business.
Seeking feedback from your customers will change the way you think about both them and your internal processes. Overnight you will become a more customer-centric business. You will then be able to optimize your business processes to ensure you deliver a high-quality customer experience for your clients.
