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AS POSTED ON THE LINKEDIN THREAD, SLIGHTLY MODIFIED:
I realize that it is a common practice in our industry for property owners to have the office staff manage customer service requests (SRs). I would like to suggest a different approach. Some years ago I was analyzing how to free up more time for our office staff so that they could put more focus on rental inquiries and prospect followup ("new" leasing). I was also looking for ways to improve customer maintenance service. I arrived at the conclusion that shifting the vast majority of SRs from the office to the maintenance staff made sense for a multitude of reasons. First, moving the management of SRs from the office to maintenance staff eliminated the "middleman" layer of bureaucracy for our customers to receive service and provided a more streamlined experience for our customers by dealing directly with the maintenance staff. Second, it freed up a lot of office time for our office leasing staff so that they could focus on inquiries and followup. Third, it provided a more logical division of "leasing". In other words, let the maintenance staff focus on better customer maintenance service and thus, better customer retention "leasing", with the daily leadership of the PM and MS. Let the office staff focus on "new" leasing.
In order to achieve the shifting of SRs from the office to the maintenance staff, we work hard to train our customers to use our separate customer service phone number with its voice message system, rather than calling the office for customer service. And, as I noted in my previous post, these voice messages for customer service can be managed in real time by the PM because the text transciptions are sent by text and app to the iPhone. Since we have assigned one of our maintenance staff persons the task of performing work day SRs, that person and the MS can also monitor customer service voice messages. In my previous post I also pointed out how our redundancy system can help in performing customer service.
Rick Hevier
Richard Hevier
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I realize that it is a common practice in our industry for property owners to have the office staff manage customer service requests (SRs). I would like to suggest a different approach. Some years ago I was analyzing how to free up more time for our office staff so that they could put more focus on rental inquiries and prospect followup ("new" leasing). I was also looking for ways to improve customer maintenance service. I arrived at the conclusion that shifting the vast majority of SRs from the office to the maintenance staff made sense for a multitude of reasons. First, moving the management of SRs from the office to maintenance staff eliminated the "middleman" layer of bureaucracy for our customers to receive service and provided a more streamlined experience for our customers by dealing directly with the maintenance staff. Second, it freed up a lot of office time for our office leasing staff so that they could focus on inquiries and followup. Third, it provided a more logical division of "leasing". In other words, let the maintenance staff focus on better customer maintenance service and thus, better customer retention "leasing", with the daily leadership of the PM and MS. Let the office staff focus on "new" leasing.
In order to achieve the shifting of SRs from the office to the maintenance staff, we work hard to train our customers to use our separate customer service phone number with its voice message system, rather than calling the office for customer service. And, as I noted in my previous post, these voice messages for customer service can be managed in real time by the PM because the text transciptions are sent by text and app to the iPhone. Since we have assigned one of our maintenance staff persons the task of performing work day SRs, that person and the MS can also monitor customer service voice messages. In my previous post I also pointed out how our redundancy system can help in performing customer service.
Rick Hevier
Richard Hevier
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Posted 11 years 9 months ago
AS POSTED ON THE LINKEDIN THREAD, SLIGHTLY MODIFIED:
Customer service requests (SRs) should not be outsourced; they should be performed in-house for several good reasons. Firstly, we carefully select the person who performs SRs, because that person becomes the "face" of our property, with perhaps more customer interaction than any other member of our staff. Secondly, the person specializing in customer service is continually trained in the particular methods for positive interaction and outcomes with customers (Deming principle #6, #13).
Two of our five staff members live on the property and perform our on-call "Anything Anytime 24/7/365" same day customer service, i.e., a customer can call for any kind of service request at anytime. Also, because we constantly ask for SRs whenever we talk to our customers, we generate much of the approx. 2,500 SRs we perform annually. However, the outcome is highly rewarding - the NAA estimates that the average industry turnover rate of customers is 60%, but over the past 15 years we've averaged about 28% and last year dipped to about 20%. This means we lose fewer customers and have fewer vacant apartments to prep.
Is managing this level of service challenging? Yes - and there are times we screw up. There are several redundancy approaches we take to try to minimize "screw ups" and improve service. First, before the maintenance staff is dispatched each morning, the PM discusses the SRs from the previous day since SRs often provide service training opportunities and help reinforce our service expectations (Deming principles #5, #6, #7). Second, the PM can review SRs in real time - our customers leave a voice message for their SR, which is then transcribed by a third-party service with the text transcription delivered to the PMs iPhone by text alert and iPhone app. The advantage of a voice message system is that we have a calling tree "redundancy", which increases the likelihood of a timely response from someone on the calling tree 24/7/365. Third, if an SR can't be performed "same-day" the person performing the SR contacts the PM before the work day is over, so that the PM can help troubleshoot issues causing a delay in service. Fourth, we have another procedure such that if an SR is a second request for service, then the MS takes personal charge of the SR, and if it is a third request for service, the PM takes personal charge of the SR. Then these added SRs are evaluated to figure out how to keep them from happening again (Deming principle #5, #6, #7; also google "Deming+Poka-Yoke").
Under our management approach, the PM is highly focused on customer service, whether through SRs or other customer issues. Better customer service results in better customer retention, and keeping more customers is the best kind of "leasing". Further, better customer retention results in more customer referrals, and it is generally recognized that word-of-mouth customer referrals are the least costly form of marketing with the best conversion rate when compared to other methods of "new" leasing. Word-of-mouth referrals from our past and current customers end up resulting in about 25% of our new leasing. What would any property owner rather be doing - Anything Anytime 24/7/365 customer service with higher levels of customer retention and word-of-mouth-referrals, or two to three times more new leasing and vacancy prep? Over the long run, which is more costly?
Rick Hevier
Richard Hevier
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Customer service requests (SRs) should not be outsourced; they should be performed in-house for several good reasons. Firstly, we carefully select the person who performs SRs, because that person becomes the "face" of our property, with perhaps more customer interaction than any other member of our staff. Secondly, the person specializing in customer service is continually trained in the particular methods for positive interaction and outcomes with customers (Deming principle #6, #13).
Two of our five staff members live on the property and perform our on-call "Anything Anytime 24/7/365" same day customer service, i.e., a customer can call for any kind of service request at anytime. Also, because we constantly ask for SRs whenever we talk to our customers, we generate much of the approx. 2,500 SRs we perform annually. However, the outcome is highly rewarding - the NAA estimates that the average industry turnover rate of customers is 60%, but over the past 15 years we've averaged about 28% and last year dipped to about 20%. This means we lose fewer customers and have fewer vacant apartments to prep.
Is managing this level of service challenging? Yes - and there are times we screw up. There are several redundancy approaches we take to try to minimize "screw ups" and improve service. First, before the maintenance staff is dispatched each morning, the PM discusses the SRs from the previous day since SRs often provide service training opportunities and help reinforce our service expectations (Deming principles #5, #6, #7). Second, the PM can review SRs in real time - our customers leave a voice message for their SR, which is then transcribed by a third-party service with the text transcription delivered to the PMs iPhone by text alert and iPhone app. The advantage of a voice message system is that we have a calling tree "redundancy", which increases the likelihood of a timely response from someone on the calling tree 24/7/365. Third, if an SR can't be performed "same-day" the person performing the SR contacts the PM before the work day is over, so that the PM can help troubleshoot issues causing a delay in service. Fourth, we have another procedure such that if an SR is a second request for service, then the MS takes personal charge of the SR, and if it is a third request for service, the PM takes personal charge of the SR. Then these added SRs are evaluated to figure out how to keep them from happening again (Deming principle #5, #6, #7; also google "Deming+Poka-Yoke").
Under our management approach, the PM is highly focused on customer service, whether through SRs or other customer issues. Better customer service results in better customer retention, and keeping more customers is the best kind of "leasing". Further, better customer retention results in more customer referrals, and it is generally recognized that word-of-mouth customer referrals are the least costly form of marketing with the best conversion rate when compared to other methods of "new" leasing. Word-of-mouth referrals from our past and current customers end up resulting in about 25% of our new leasing. What would any property owner rather be doing - Anything Anytime 24/7/365 customer service with higher levels of customer retention and word-of-mouth-referrals, or two to three times more new leasing and vacancy prep? Over the long run, which is more costly?
Rick Hevier
Richard Hevier
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Posted 11 years 9 months ago
AS POSTED ON THE LINKEDIN THREAD:
@Jen- This question requires a complex analysis and is affected by how each property allocates maintenance work, i.e., outsourced/contract labor or in-house staff.
We have 346 apartments and townhomes. For the past couple of years we've assigned work for our five person full-time maintenance staff as follows: one maintenance person is assigned to customer service requests ("SRs"), one person is assigned to cleaning about 15,000 square feet of hallways weekly and valet trash/recyclables pickup, two persons are assigned to vacancy prep, and finally, a working maintenance supervisor who also coordinates vacany prep and most projects. Painting and vacancy prep cleaning is performed by contract labor.
When vacancy prep is at its peak in the summer, we have two options: first, since the hallway cleaning + valet trash/recyclables pickup tasks require fewer skills than vacancy prep, we can more easily temporarily fill that spot with a temporary maintenance person and reposition that permanent staff person who has the necessary skills for vacancy prep; second, while we outsource painting, we've trained our painting contractor to perform much of the vacancy prep work tasks, and we can draw upon that contractor in a pinch. Since this contractor has many years of experience with our business, the contractor understands our prep methods and quality expectations (Deming principle #4).
Clearly, while there is a cost to this "added" work, there is an even higher cost to either failing to have apartments prepped for leasing or compromising the quality of the vacancy prep. In particular, compromising the quality of the vacancy prep passes onto new customers defects in their homes, i.e., future SRs), which will negatively affect customer retention (Deming principle #5; also google "Deming+Poka-Yoke").
Rick Hevier
Richard Hevier
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
@Jen- This question requires a complex analysis and is affected by how each property allocates maintenance work, i.e., outsourced/contract labor or in-house staff.
We have 346 apartments and townhomes. For the past couple of years we've assigned work for our five person full-time maintenance staff as follows: one maintenance person is assigned to customer service requests ("SRs"), one person is assigned to cleaning about 15,000 square feet of hallways weekly and valet trash/recyclables pickup, two persons are assigned to vacancy prep, and finally, a working maintenance supervisor who also coordinates vacany prep and most projects. Painting and vacancy prep cleaning is performed by contract labor.
When vacancy prep is at its peak in the summer, we have two options: first, since the hallway cleaning + valet trash/recyclables pickup tasks require fewer skills than vacancy prep, we can more easily temporarily fill that spot with a temporary maintenance person and reposition that permanent staff person who has the necessary skills for vacancy prep; second, while we outsource painting, we've trained our painting contractor to perform much of the vacancy prep work tasks, and we can draw upon that contractor in a pinch. Since this contractor has many years of experience with our business, the contractor understands our prep methods and quality expectations (Deming principle #4).
Clearly, while there is a cost to this "added" work, there is an even higher cost to either failing to have apartments prepped for leasing or compromising the quality of the vacancy prep. In particular, compromising the quality of the vacancy prep passes onto new customers defects in their homes, i.e., future SRs), which will negatively affect customer retention (Deming principle #5; also google "Deming+Poka-Yoke").
Rick Hevier
Richard Hevier
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Posted 11 years 9 months ago
@ Jen
Thanks for your question. We (in this neck of the woods) call "On-Sites" the usual Husband/Wife team who manage the property, aka "The Managers". Normally, the wife runs the office, leases and moves out folk, and in the case of a Tax Credit Property, does the recertifications. The wife normally holds the title of "manager", while the husband holds the title of "caretaker".
What is difficult to do, is to locate people to perform these jobs. IE: You don't have much luck getting a person who has only worked at Sonic to do Recertification paperwork on Tax Credit, unless you either train her (assuming she is clerically skilled to begin with) or send her off to a school. Both are done. On the caretaker, you can usually find someone who knows how to mow. If you have to teach someone to mow grass, you have an immediate problem anyway. So take someone who can mow grass and graduate them to doing commercial landscaping work, it is not that difficult. It gets harder to find someone in the caretaker field who can figure out what is leaking, or not switching on, or not cooling, or the washing machine won't spin. We hire folks under the title of "light" maintenance, and if they are a skilled handyman, all the better, for us, and for their own paycheck. So hiring "On-Sites" can be the luck of the draw, but amazingly, we have some long term, excellent people on the payroll as managers. They are, however, same as good tenants, becoming harder and harder to find.
We don't really have the management hiarchy of the large zillion unit property management agencies, but we have a lot of properties in the less than 100 unit arena.
The On-Sites get a salary, free apartment, free utilities, salary for the office, salary for the grounds, and usually minimum wage for other work. (I don't agree with maintenance type work at MW, but it is that way.) They also have the authority after a period of employment, to contract out work they are unable to do.
The On-Site managers are the backbone of the property management company, and the actual success fixtures of the business. In the corporate office, you have a couple of floors full of desks, and people who stare into computers, and dress in "business casual". These, of course, are the people who post the rents and deal with all the cough and jerk stuff from USDA-Rural Development, HUD, The banks, the finance companies, the government, etc, etc. Then on another level are the managing agents. Each managing agent will have up to around 15 properties. Then you have the VP's and finally the president of the company.
The managing agents have the responsibility to either hire On-Sites, send someone else from another property to run the property, or run the property his/herself (Good luck on the latter!) The corporate office is well overstaffed, but this is necessary. There is always a "new" thing coming around, or compliance issue, or just another letter to write proving we do/did or will, in the future, do better.
All these corporate employees should first receive baptism as an On-Site, and a lot of them have. Some have not. Another job of the corporate is to send out some nasty grams to the On-Sites chiding them for late rents, vacancies, and when the next Staff Infection (oops I mean "Inspection") will be held. Also we need a few desks down there to quote "book, chapter, and verse" when someone drags a foot over the "Fair Housing Laws" or the "Americans with Disabilities Act".
So, Jen you got more than you wanted on my answer, and your probably sound asleep by now, that is the view from my window!!
Cheers.
Thanks for your question. We (in this neck of the woods) call "On-Sites" the usual Husband/Wife team who manage the property, aka "The Managers". Normally, the wife runs the office, leases and moves out folk, and in the case of a Tax Credit Property, does the recertifications. The wife normally holds the title of "manager", while the husband holds the title of "caretaker".
What is difficult to do, is to locate people to perform these jobs. IE: You don't have much luck getting a person who has only worked at Sonic to do Recertification paperwork on Tax Credit, unless you either train her (assuming she is clerically skilled to begin with) or send her off to a school. Both are done. On the caretaker, you can usually find someone who knows how to mow. If you have to teach someone to mow grass, you have an immediate problem anyway. So take someone who can mow grass and graduate them to doing commercial landscaping work, it is not that difficult. It gets harder to find someone in the caretaker field who can figure out what is leaking, or not switching on, or not cooling, or the washing machine won't spin. We hire folks under the title of "light" maintenance, and if they are a skilled handyman, all the better, for us, and for their own paycheck. So hiring "On-Sites" can be the luck of the draw, but amazingly, we have some long term, excellent people on the payroll as managers. They are, however, same as good tenants, becoming harder and harder to find.
We don't really have the management hiarchy of the large zillion unit property management agencies, but we have a lot of properties in the less than 100 unit arena.
The On-Sites get a salary, free apartment, free utilities, salary for the office, salary for the grounds, and usually minimum wage for other work. (I don't agree with maintenance type work at MW, but it is that way.) They also have the authority after a period of employment, to contract out work they are unable to do.
The On-Site managers are the backbone of the property management company, and the actual success fixtures of the business. In the corporate office, you have a couple of floors full of desks, and people who stare into computers, and dress in "business casual". These, of course, are the people who post the rents and deal with all the cough and jerk stuff from USDA-Rural Development, HUD, The banks, the finance companies, the government, etc, etc. Then on another level are the managing agents. Each managing agent will have up to around 15 properties. Then you have the VP's and finally the president of the company.
The managing agents have the responsibility to either hire On-Sites, send someone else from another property to run the property, or run the property his/herself (Good luck on the latter!) The corporate office is well overstaffed, but this is necessary. There is always a "new" thing coming around, or compliance issue, or just another letter to write proving we do/did or will, in the future, do better.
All these corporate employees should first receive baptism as an On-Site, and a lot of them have. Some have not. Another job of the corporate is to send out some nasty grams to the On-Sites chiding them for late rents, vacancies, and when the next Staff Infection (oops I mean "Inspection") will be held. Also we need a few desks down there to quote "book, chapter, and verse" when someone drags a foot over the "Fair Housing Laws" or the "Americans with Disabilities Act".
So, Jen you got more than you wanted on my answer, and your probably sound asleep by now, that is the view from my window!!
Cheers.
Posted 11 years 10 months ago
Hi Stephani - Excellent point about needing someone to oversee the contractor in an occupied unit. I guess all of these points lead me to believe that the ideal situation would be for a team to have access to a part-time floater during those crazy turn months. Someone who is employed and trained by the property management company and known and trusted by the staff. Of course, the world is certainly not ideal, and teams most often just need to make it work any way they can with the resources they have. Great input!
Posted 11 years 10 months ago
Hi Chris - I think you make an excellent point. It does make sense to outsource what your team is not good at. Like they say, "Don't major in your minors." And it also makes sense that the residents and the property staff would not be 100% comfortable with a temp doing routine maintenance requests. Thanks for your input!
Posted 11 years 10 months ago