Highwoods Properties, Building Engines Client Spotlight Series
Transcription
“My name is Catherine Bradshaw. I’m the manager of customers service at Highwoods Properties.
Highwoods Properties’ corporate office is located in Raleigh, North Carolina. We manage over 250 properties all throughout the Southeast in just over 30 million square feet. Our focus is commercial real estate and roughly 200 to 250 thousand people come in and out of our properties every day.
We believe in providing a dedicated resource to our customers in the buildings.
They’re not just calling a wide open call center with hundreds of different employees. We have a dedicated team of seven people that take any requests, phone calls, or any kind of information from the customers.
We’re a first point of contact for them. We’re there to answer their questions and help serve them with any of their needs. They’ve got dedicated reps per division.
If someone is calling our department, they’re going to know who they’re calling. They’re on a first name basis. They’ve developed a relationship with this representative. They can feel comfortable calling this person, knowing that they’re going to get a friendly response on the other end.
We’ve consistently been able to hold a customer satisfaction rating of over 98 percent.
There are multiple factors that go into that 98 percent. Everything from call hold times to satisfactory scores on work order, response time, service levels, we factor all of those things into that score. We’ve consistently been able to hold over 98 percent satisfaction rating for the past five years.
Technology plays a very big role in the service that we provide to our customers.
We like to be able to provide them a variety of ways to get in touch with anyone.
We have phone numbers that they can contact to people with what we have, a customer service email, as well as our work order system. We have access to multiple websites online, where they can receive information, documents that they need, important information from property management, just a variety of ways for them to seek information that they might be looking for.”
Mobile-first customer experience
“Some of the tools that we have implemented recently to help the service experience, one is our ServiceLink Mobile app. We have released a mobile app to our customers to allow them to submit a work order request from maintenance, or reserve conference rooms, or even schedule their visitors.
No one has to be at a computer. They don’t have to pick up a phone and call anybody. They can simply get into a mobile app on their phone and take care all of their needs from there.
We call it the customer life cycle.
From beginning to the end of their lease, we have touchpoints where we constantly reaching out to them and just making sure that they’re satisfied.
If they need anything, knowing that we’re there for them, there is always an open door for them to contact somebody and make sure that they’re heard. They’re not just a tenant in a building somewhere, where they’re going to work every day. Just trying to understand anything we can improve upon from the feedback that we gained through that life cycle of the customer.
Building Engines has been a huge part of our customer service goals, as well as boosting our service level with our customers.
Yes, they have to come there every day and come to work, but we want to make their experience, while they’re there at work, the best experience that we can. Building engines has been great with that. Down to customers being able to log in and book conference for rooms quickly. They don’t have to contact anybody.
We were able to track their work orders.
They can log in and see when a maintenance tech might be coming to their suite to take care of something or if something was taken care of. Being able to know how it got taken care of. They don’t even have to see anybody. They can quickly check and know the things are being taken care of. Even down to providing us feedback, just on their experience with us.
They don’t have to wait for us to call them and ask. They don’t have to wait ’til they receive some long survey. They can simply just send us their feedback and we can take it from there.
We’re able to roll out the same consistent features across all of our divisions, helping us manage our 30+ million square feet of customer space down to preventive maintenance.
All maintenance technicians are using the same platform, tracking their equipment, making sure that the equipment is taken care of on that preventive basis, even the two certificates of insurance, being able to track those all in one place.
Everyone is following the same standard protocols within building engines and that helps tracking, and keeps things at a satisfactory level.”
