Grow your Property Management Business without a BDM – Customer satisfaction

Introduction

Research found that almost 90% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, and 57% of customers visit a company’s website only after reading positive reviews. Nowadays good reviews are infinitely more powerful than any marketing or advertising strategy. The good news? It’s also much cheaper to achieve! In order for your business to grow organically in today’s market, you need your happy customers to share their positive experience and turn your reputation into a lead generation machine. Fortunately, customers are usually more than happy to do so, since over 90% of customers that are asked for feedback are willing to leave one. All you need to do is ask your customers how they feel, at the right time. Sounds easy right? But asking for feedback should be the last step of a customer satisfaction program, not the first or only one. And this is where most systems fail because they’re only designed to solve the problem superficially and in the short-term. So how can it be done? Simply follow these steps and grow your property management business organically, without a Business Development Manager (BDM):

Measure and improve your customer satisfaction

Online reviews are intrinsically linked with customer satisfaction. It is the voice of your existing customers, and it is always louder than your own. In fact, your online reviews only represent the tip of the iceberg of your level of customer satisfaction and service delivery, that’s why there’s no such thing as a quick fix for your online reviews. Leveraging only your existing happy customers isn’t a sustainable solution and will backlash at some point should you not address the unhappy ones. Not only because unhappy customers are on average more likely to leave bad reviews than happy customers; but also because customer satisfaction is the number one metric to creating a sustainable business, and it might take time to fix it. Therefore growing your business involves having strong foundations on service delivery and being able to take informed and timely business decisions. Good management leads to good service delivery via customer satisfaction focus / programmes. If you want more information about the costs of customer satisfaction read our article: “The real cost of customer satisfaction”.

Identify your happy and unhappy customers

Once you have strong foundations, the first step is to differentiate and identify your happy customers from your unhappy ones. In fact, if you don’t make this distinction you won’t be able to only leverage your happy customers / promoters because asking for a review to every and each customer without prior identification will not only lead to damaging the customer experience but will also have the opposite impact on your online reviews. How? You should identify your level of customer satisfaction according to defined metrics. The easiest way to measure customer satisfaction is by asking your customers questions with scores and reading the score results like the NPS score system: if the answer is between 1-6 it’s a detractor, if it’s between 7-8 it’s considered a “neutral” customer, and if it’s between 9-10 it’s a promoter. Once you have identified your 3 categories of customers you have to figure out how to leverage your happy ones, how to turn your neutral customers into happy ones, and finally how to deal with the unhappy ones internally.

Turn happy customers into advocates

This is the easiest step and for many online reputation systems the only step they focus on. Once your happy customers are identified and you know they are ‘promoters’ of your company you only have to ask them to leave a good review.

Turn your neutral customers into happy ones

The customers that you’ve identified as being “neutral”, meaning neither promoters nor detractors don’t represent a major risk at present, but can be on the tipping point of going one way or the other. Your neutral customers are opportunities, the goal is to turn them into promoters. Therefore, keep an eye on them, ask what you can do better and show them you continually want to improve their experience. Keep them engaged because they are often the forgotten ones but are likely to be the bulk of your customer base. You don’t want them to turn into detractors and they shouldn’t be the hardest ones to turn into happy customers so don’t miss out on these potential promoters.

Deal with your unhappy customers internally

Truthfully, this step is the most important of all. Once you’ve identified your unhappy customers you should always keep them engaged with you, these are the customers that represent the greatest risk for your business. That’s why you need to address their problems, and it’s absolutely crucial to do this internally. In fact, reaching out to frustrated customers to address their issues internally will not only improve their customer experience and show them that you care, but it will also make your business systems stronger in the long run. And obviously avoiding bad online reviews. At Umanest we designed an online reviews management tool, specifically for property managers and their needs, around the following process: – Measure and improve your tenants’ satisfaction – Identify happy and unhappy tenants – Leverage your happy ones – Turn your neutral customers into happy ones – Deal with the unhappy ones internally Forget about the costly BDM and start growing your business organically through a system that has a direct impact on customer retention and your business reputation. Because keeping customers is always less expensive than attracting new ones, and your good customers spreading the word impacts your business reputation, gives you better visibility and attracts new customers. If you’re interested in knowing more about our product, you can schedule a meeting with us to see how we can help you.

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Interested to know how we helped a company save over $150K annually with our customer satisfaction programme?

Download our Case Study HERE

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Max Oliviero is helping Property Managers grow profitable and reputable businesses. He is the Founder of Umanest. Connect with Max on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Want to take your Property Management business to the next level? Schedule your free meeting here.