A well-rounded tenant experience involves a diverse combination of skills and the efficient management of various departments. How you communicate lies at the centre of improving this experience. Your communication channels are a thread that runs through all aspects of your commercial property management. As such, it affects your tenant experience overall.
Most property managers and companies rely on traditional email to communicate. Although it does the job to some degree, email can actually harm your tenant experience.
So, how should you communicate then? And what is the best alternative to email for tenant involvement? We answer these questions and more below.
Why Do Emails Harm Tenant Experience?
Tenants are individuals with multiple facets of their lives - personal, professional, social, and more. All these parts of them converge in their email inbox. They may receive emails from their business partners and colleagues, get reminders for personal appointments, to name a few. In all that, your email becomes just another message in a flurry of others.
Thus, it might get lost amid all the other emails a tenant gets during the day. Tenants may forget to open or respond to an email on a busy day. It’s even easy for your mail to simply get deleted amongst other unopened messages.
Lost or forgotten emails can result in the tenant not being properly informed about the property and activities in it. This will leave the tenant surprised about potential updates to their tenancy, their rental facilities, or the property as a whole. It can also make them frustrated as they miss important information. This negatively impacts their experience and satisfaction.
The same inefficiency of emails applies to property managers, landlords, and facility managers as well. With multiple tenants and properties, as well as other stakeholders like service providers and co-workers, your mail volume also compromises you. You can miss tenant emails and questions, forget to address issues, and lose track of progress and conversations.
This lack of organisation and control over your communication affects various elements of your tenant experience including:
- Your responsiveness
- Document tracking and management
- Issue resolution
- Feedback and follow-up flow
- Tenant satisfaction and retention
- Alignment with service providers
- Correct task allocation within your staff
- Facility maintenance
Why A Centralised Portal Is Better Than Email For Tenant Experience
To ensure that your communication supports and upgrades rather than compromises your tenant experience, use a tenant portal.
Tenant portals have many benefits for your communication and this is how they have a leg up over email messaging:
1. Separates Communications
Having a separate portal for your communication helps tenants organise their lives. They don't have to worry about mixed inboxes or missing messages. The platform is dedicated to your chats. This helps address tenant issues such as forgetting to respond, missing updates, and more.
Tenants will also be able to replace emails to the property manager with messages via the portal. They can also easily follow up and see if any actions have been taken on their requests and if problems and issues have been resolved.
2. Centralises Property-Related Information
A tenant communication platform doesn't just centralise one-on-one chats between tenants and property managers. It becomes a central source for all information about the facility.
Your portal should allow you to make general group announcements to all tenants. You can engage service providers, like plumbers, directly on chats with tenants, making the process of addressing issues more transparent.
Tenant portals often have good security and cloud-based storage, too. With these features, you can keep documents safe. Moreover, important data becomes instantly accessible and available to all property stakeholders. No losing files or losing track of issues.
A dedicated portal will also make it simpler for tenants to find information about the property instead of hunting through hundreds of emails.
3. Provides Real-Time Notifications & Updates
Another perk of using a tenant portal is that it can notify you every time you get a message on the app. Yes, email can do this, too. But, tenants can set unique notifications so that they know exactly when it's the app delivering messages. While tenants may simply ignore a general email notification, seeing a portal notification informs them that they have an important update from you.
To guarantee that everybody receives notifications and updates, your portal may also send secondary email notifications. Tenants would receive these as reminders that they should check their app.
4. Feedback Collection
Tenants are the best source of improvement points for your facility. They use the space and know what works and what doesn't more than you or an inspector would.
A portal is an efficient way to constantly receive feedback from your tenants. This can be through chats and messages. Tenants can also attach documents or images for visual evidence of concerns.
In addition, you can create feedback forms and attach them for tenants to fill out at their convenience. This way, you can monitor how satisfied your tenants are with your property.
Introducing A Tenant Portal
Integrating new technology can be a tricky process to include in your tenant experience. Not all tenants have the same familiarity with software use and some may be wary to try something new.
To win them over, you need to show them the value of using a tenant portal over email. This includes the four points above.
You also need to help them make the transition easier. Having a training class, workshop, posters with instructions, and other channels to teach them how to use the portal.
Part of effectively adopting new systems is feedback. You need to constantly evaluate the efficiency of your chosen software. Collect feedback from your tenants on how the portal affects their tenant experience. And, as mentioned above, the best part is that the portal itself can become an effective tool for gathering feedback.
Final Thoughts
Tenant communication contributes to many facets of the tenant experience and can affect their satisfaction significantly. Email makes engagement with your tenants difficult and can result in delays and miscommunication. It’s easy to lose information and forget important discussions.
With a tenant portal, you can eliminate the challenges you face in interacting with your tenants. Improve your document management, responsiveness, and feedback receptivity and you can build a fantastic tenant experience.
If your organisation is looking for a 360° tenant experience tool to involve all employees, service providers and tenants to improve the quality of your operations, have a look at the 30-day free trial of Falcony Tenant Portal:
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.
