To assure quality in facilities management (FM), you have to factor in a number of different components. These include various aspects of your facility and the services you provide.
No matter the type of facility, property, or client relationship, there are some key areas that you should always monitor, measure, and aim to improve. These include your customers’ expectations, facilities’ performance, and the effectiveness of communication channels. Focusing on these matters will help ensure that you provide the best quality possible.
To help you push for the optimal tenant experience, you should pay attention to these 3 points in your quality assessment processes.
1. Tenant expectations
Your tenants are the ones who use your facilities, generally on a day-to-day basis. They run their businesses or use your property for various other activities. It is important for you to understand how your customers intend to use the facilities, and what they expect to be able to do in those spaces. Better understanding helps you define their expectations, enabling you to cater to their spatial needs.
Part of your facilities management also requires you to inform customers when management activities may affect their business operations, building access or other parts of their facility experience. For example, if and when there is construction work done on a property, let tenants know what will be done, when, where, how does this impact them, and whether this will be a recurring part of your facilities management. Keeping customers in the know assists you in managing their expectations and keeping them satisfied.
How to measure tenant expectations:
- speaking with them
- conducting regular surveys
- opening feedback channels, and setting up accessible reporting platforms for tenants to share complaints, concerns, and issues
2. Communication
Communication plays a vital role in the relationship between a facility manager and the tenants. You need to monitor all communication channels and make sure you deal with all incoming customer queries efficiently.
Communication is also necessary for sharing knowledge effectively. It enables you to escalate any issues to the right people and address them in a timely manner.
Dedicated tenant communication platforms have the benefit of increasing clarity on both sides of the table. They provide facility managers the ability to keep tenant contact records up to date, send notifications and engage with any feedback provided by tenants, to name a few. Tenants on the other hand will have a better view on what is happening on the premise, and whether someone has already reported possible problems regarding the daily operations of the facility.
3. Performance
The final, fundamental step to optimal tenant experience is to boost the daily performance of your buildings. To do this, you need to track activities that affect the proper functioning and operations of your building.
A big part of the performance is about making sure the necessary fixtures of your building are always in working order. For example, possible problems with running water, sanitation, cleaning, electricity or lighting are something your tenants will immediately notice.
You must also ensure that all conditions and deliverables of your facility comply with the local, national, and international standards. Does the performance of the facilities and services of the property meet customer expectations? Even better, how could we exceed the expectations? Factor these things into your building inspections and assessments.
Final thoughts
Optimal tenant experience is about measuring and ensuring quality across your facilities and related processes on a daily basis. It requires dedication and consistency. You can’t do it once-off and think the standard you’ve observed will remain that way.
To provide consistent quality, you have to establish a quality assessment strategy with regular checks and inspections. Pay attention to tenant expectations, communication and daily performance to make sure everything stays working as it should.
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We are building the world's first operational involvement platform. Our mission is to make the process of finding, sharing, fixing and learning from issues and observations as easy as thinking about them and as rewarding as being remembered for them.
By doing this, we are making work more meaningful for all parties involved.
More information at falcony.io.
