Your tenants demand, and deserve the best, and it is up to you to make sure that your team is delivering.
Unfortunately there are certain realities that can make that job difficult, including the need to cut costs, reduce workloads, and back up your actions with data. So how can you, the property manager, possibly balance these expectations and make everyone happy?
It’s quite simple. (Really!) You need a tool that can help you set and prioritize tenant and team member expectations, publicly communicate work progress, and track service performance against your goals.
You need a new Service Delivery Program!
Evaluating your process and expectations
Meet Janet. She is a longtime property manager who represents a portfolio of five commercial real estate buildings in the Northeastern region of the United States.
Recently Janet has been under a lot of pressure to minimize the number of open work orders that her team needs to complete. Tenants are upset that things aren’t being handled as quickly as they’d like, and her team is getting overworked in an effort to manage the overflow.
Upon sitting down and evaluating her process, Janet realizes that part of the problem is that tenant service requests are coming in faster than she can prioritize and assign them to her team. To make matters worse, she doesn’t usually know the status of work orders until her team updates her, which really bogs down her ability to make quick decisions.
What Janet needs is a way to set expectations so that her tenants and team are on the same page, and a way to measure said expectations.
As an exercise, ask yourself:
At any given time, do you know…?
- The average response time per work order / work order type
- How many work orders are open, and their current status
- Which work order requests are the most popular
- The priority of work orders based on type
- Who relays changes to work orders, and how long it takes them to update
- How long it takes to close particular work order types
- The level of tenant satisfaction following the completion of a work order
If not, you are in need of a new Service Delivery Program!
Establishing Realistic Expectations
Earlier on we mentioned that your tenants will always demand the best. That means fast service, great communication, and getting to be as hands-off as possible throughout the service process. And let’s face it: your team would probably rather be a little hands-off as well.
So how can you set realistic expectations?
Realistic service expectations come from setting up attainable public benchmarks and targets. They could be anything from:
- Responding to service requests within a certain time period
- Setting service time estimates and sticking to them
- Standardizing your terminology
- Creating priority levels based on the type of request
- ..and so much more
Janet may have done well to establish a few of these expectations herself, prior to managing her work order list. But it is never too late to change – the first step is questioning the status quo.
Ask yourself:
- Does your service plan set up realistic expectations?
- Are you meeting, or exceeding them?
- How can you better measure your success?
- Do you have the data you need to react to problems?
You’re only as successful as your least happy tenant
Meeting service delivery standards can be a tough task, but benchmarking them can be even tougher – at least, not without the right tools.
Janet recognized that her team – and her tenants – were unhappy with the status quo. Work was near endless, and it never seemed to get done quickly enough. All she needed was a little help.
So Janet did a little research and discovered that there was a tool out there to help property managers manage service delivery more effectively. It could help her manage her work order priorities and benchmark them, as well as always stay “in the know” with instant alerts and notifications at the office, or on the go with a mobile app. Heck, she could even track performance over time and compare them against her preset goals.
She found a service delivery partner in Building Engines.
Building Engines has more than 12 years of experience helping thousands of highly successful property teams improve their management processes, resulting in highly satisfied tenants and lower turnover rates.
By utilizing Building Engines’ unified platform of property management software tools, which includes the Service Delivery Program, and Tenant Satisfaction Survey, you too can work to improve your process!
There has never been a better time than now
Fill out the form below, and request a demo of our unified platform, today:
