5 steps to successfully turn customer relationships into profit for Property Managers

Relationships are everything in business. It is particularly true in the Property Management industry where building, nurturing and ending relationships with customer are core activities.

No good business decision can be made without a clear understanding of the relationship with your current customers.

You certainly shouldn’t think about growing a Property Management business leaving the trust and happiness of your existing customer to chance.

Healthy relationships make your company profitable, while some relationships may end up costing you a lot of money. In fact it is often hard to separate the two, and solely relying on your feelings to classify them is a notoriously bad idea. If you’re growing your business, remember that the larger the company the harder it gets.

The challenge is how do you start monitoring existing relationships and turn them into profit, efficiently and at scale?

1. Show your customers that you care

• Take the lead and ask your customers how they’re feeling. Do it before they feel the need to do it themselves. Otherwise the situation has usually developed to a point that is much harder for you to recover from.
• Give customers an opportunity to raise concerns internally, and on a regular basis. The status of the relationship with your tenants and landlords is everything but static. Often do customers move from advocates to detractors, and the other way as well. This is constantly evolving and highly impacted by punctual events.

2. Automate regular customer satisfaction, designed for property management

• Make it methodological. Relying on the traditional customers lifecycle touchpoints is a start but isn’t enough for two reasons. Firstly, the touchpoints with tenants and landlords are usually very transactional and give little room for an honest “relationship health check”. Secondly, some of your customers could be months without any memorable interaction with your business.
• Yes to automation, but no to spamming. People hate spam, seriously. So don’t just send your customers the same surveys over and over again, but delight them with an experience that is engaging and relevant to them. For example whilst NPS systems provide some insight for you as a business, they are typically not leaving your customers looking forward to the next one which inevitably leads to churn.

3. Have a proactive approach to feedback

• Understanding the expectations based on actual feedback from both your tenants and landlords is where it all needs to start. Asking for regular feedback and therefore detecting issues early leads to early stage problem resolution.
• It’s only once your customers needs, wants and experience are well understood that you can rectify and substantially reduce their churn.
• Being proactive with the management of your clients satisfaction is giving you a huge advantage to better understand your team and reduce staff turnover by providing a healthier work environment.

4. Build a culture of performance in the property management industry

• Provide transparency and accountability across the board. Satisfied customers and a culture of performance in general can simply not be achieved if everyone isn’t involved. Transparency and accountability for the results naturally leads to healthy competition and support between team members.
• Make it actionable. Armed with Property Management industry-specific insight, you now need to make sure that the knowledge you gathered is not only clear but also easily actionable for your business and its team members.

5. Build, and strengthen your brand

• Nurturing relationships strengthen your brand. The impact of a customer satisfaction strategy goes far beyond the individual, it yields advocates for your company and shapes the perception of your brand.
• You have identified happy customers? Good. Now ensure that promoters are always given the opportunity to share the love and write your next good online reviews.

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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.

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