Good tenant communication is one of the keys to a well-run property. Yet despite the importance of good communication to tenant satisfaction, many property teams are slow to respond to tenants. And they frequently fail to convey important information to building occupants.
Great communication takes time. But if you are consistently unresponsive and do a poor job communicating, you increase tenant turnover.
So how do you balance good communication with all the other things you need to do each day? Increase the efficiency of your tenant communication. When communicating efficiently, you can save time while still providing great tenant management.
Here’s how you can spend less time communicating and more time making tenants happier.
Make Your Tenant Communication Multichannel
The first step to communicating more efficiently is to talk with tenants on their terms. While you might prefer email or calls, many tenants feel differently. According to Building Engines research, nearly 80% of tenants prefer to communicate with text over email. If email is your main or sole communications channel, a large portion of your tenants could be missing your messages. Some tenants also prefer other options, such as Slack or other instant messaging services.
However, keeping track of everyone’s preference and communicating accordingly is time-consuming if your comms process lacks automation.
Building communication software makes communicating across multiple channels easy. Firstly AI chatbots can talk with tenants to log issues and distribute important info. So you don’t have to spend time manually texting every tenant.
Building communication software also lets your tenants update their contact info and communication preferences. So whether it’s text, email, chat, or a combination of channels, your tenants will get your message. Instead of having to track down tenants every time their info changes, your software updates your contact list in real time.
Reaching tenants through their preferred channel is one step in an efficient building communications strategy. Building communication software saves you time by helping you do this more efficiently.
Create Custom Contact Groups
Improve communications efficiency further by ensuring the right people get the right information—create contact groups.
Sometimes you need to send different information to different tenants. You might have maintenance that only affects one floor. Or you might need to reach troublesome tenants. Regardless, you need a way to easily differentiate who you communicate with.
Manually adding tenants every time you need to communicate with a group isn’t efficient. But building communication software makes it easy to create groups for managing tenants. You can sort tenants by floor, occupation, or any other characteristic.
Once you’ve created a group it’s easy to reach those tenants. You don’t have to add everyone each time you send out important updates. Instead, simply write your message and send it to your pre-defined group.
Manage Communications From One Place
If you’re manually reaching tenants through email, Slack, text, and other channels, it’s easy to lose messages. Or to miss sending important updates to every channel.
Worse, if you have to sort through multiple channels in multiple locations it’s even more chaotic. Using a unified platform massively simplifies your tenant management.
With building communication software, you send and receive all communications from the same platform. Whether normal building messages or urgent info like COVID-19 updates, you can view and send all messages on all channels from one place.
This way you don’t have to hunt for messages in multiple places. Instead, just look through your communication history to find what you need.
You can use your communication overview to ensure you send important updates to everyone. See at a glance if you sent a message to everyone or only certain groups. If you missed anyone, it’s simple to copy a message and send it from your dashboard.
Some building communication software also comes with an AI assistant, which you can manage from the same platform. AI chatbots can free you from many routine tenant communications.
Having a single platform for your messages is important for an efficient building communication strategy.
Good Tenant Communication = More Satisfied Tenants
Communicating well with tenants is important to keeping them happy enough to want to stay in your building. But manually sending every message or update can eat up a lot of precious time.
Building communication software enables you to quickly and efficiently communicate with tenants. It helps you reach tenants on their preferred channel, easily create frequently-used contact groups, and track your messages. So you take less time to communicate with tenants more effectively.
If you’d like to learn more about improving building communications, read Building Engines’ 5 Minute Guide to Effective Building Communications.
