The best business leaders in property management constantly look for ways to give their customers a voice and collect more feedback. In fact, feedback is probably the most dynamic space in our industry right now.

Just a few years ago, business leaders were primarily gathering feedback from customers reactively – noting a passing comment from a property investor they ran into on the street or fielding a call from a renter frustrated with a broken appliance.

Today, the industry has evolved considerably and customer satisfaction email surveys, comments from reviews and social media, and even trigger-based net promoter score (NPS) pulse surveys all play a critical role in helping business owners connect better with their customers.

With thousands of customer feedback data points flooding your business every day, it’s critical to find an efficient and effective way to document and review it. Make time to collate and review the data regularly, and bucket the feedback into key areas where you deliver immense value to your customer – and for areas that need improvement.

Customer feedback delivers rich learnings on how to improve your business – even the critical and constructive comments that are sometimes difficult to hear. Feedback is a great catalyst to ensure we regularly review our systems and processes, and continue doing things we are good at, and review the things we are not so good at. These present us with learning opportunities for our team and become the foundation of our team training.

Cathie Crampton from Place Estate Agents regularly uses customers feedback in her business to train her team.

I recently sat down with a group of Ailo Insights customers to talk about the results from their customer surveys. Their customers considered their property managers as knowledgeable and good at communication, but they didn't see value in the fees they were paying. This allowed us to open up the conversation about how they could provide better value to their customers. Lots of creative ideas surfaced, however, we soon arrived at a consensus that perhaps the value was already there – but they simply weren’t communicating it to their customer.

Digging more into the data, we found most offices had scored very well in communication and so they had overlooked it as a solution to improve their customer value score. As it stood, it was the content of the communication that would influence the value score. For example, renewing a lease is a lengthy and time-consuming process, so it’s critical to keep customers informed at each step. That way, they will have a better appreciation for the value they are receiving for this service while maintaining our customer communication score.

Like we did as a group of business leaders, take the opportunity to review the feedback coming from your customers, and brainstorm ways to adjust your systems and processes to improve the service and value you are delivering. This will enable you to build a strong and valuable relationship with your customer.