Bring back customer service; let me speak to a human
Customer service is dead.
It’s so frustrating you can never get a live person to
handle your question or complaint.
After several minutes of music and advertising, you might
even hear “all our customer service people are busy… You might want to go to
our website to handle your problem.”
The message is loud and clear: Corporate America
Richard Lynch (Charlotte
From his “Letter to the Editor” Charlotte Observer
As a Charlotte
property manager and owner of BDF Realty, I was thinking about our firm’s value
proposition the other day in the context of the “Big 3”. The “Big 3” value proposition is a formula
that includes picking which two of the following a firm wants to excel at:
Price, Quality, Customer Service
Realistically, no firm can excel at all three. McDonald’s, for example, shoots to be great
at customer service and price; however, they know the quality of their burgers
is not exactly filet mignon (you would go to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse for that).
On the same token, Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse
wants to be great at quality of product and customer service, but know their
prices are way higher than McDonalds; there are no Value Meals there!
So any firm that tells you they are great at all of the “Big 3”
is probably not being overly truthful (including BDF Realty!).
So how does this boil down to property management?
Price: Most reputable property management firms compete
on quality and customer service and forgo trying to position themselves as the
lowest cost provider; BDF Realty is a member of this group. It helps that home owners are typically too
smart to go with the lowest cost property management companies as their home
investments are typically in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Any mistakes in tenant screening, mismanagement,
or prolonged vacancy would cost thousands of dollars and make any relatively
negligible monthly savings on service quickly moot (without even mentioning health
costs associated with a continuously elevated stress level!).
Quality in property management really boils down to
technology and efficiency. Though very important, much of the impact of quality
as a differentiator can be negated by software and hiring good people.
Customer service is really where property management
companies should be competing and where BDF Realty aims to shine. Through BDF Realty’s innovative Pod System
(PS), we look to eradicate the two biggest customer service killers: lack of
personalization and lack of ownership.
Lack of Personalization
Michael Gerber’s book, The E-Myth, was a huge seller and
really revolutionized the way businesses looked at systems. It made a great case about writing out all
job responsibilities and then plugging people into the positions with a
detailed function (compartmentalization).
McDonalds was his textbook example of a restaurant becoming a
multi-billion dollar company based on using systems that were so detailed that
they could plug in high school kids and still turn out the same quality of
product in any McDonalds restaurant in the world. There was a detailed set of instructions for
the fryer person, the burger flipper, the cashiers, etc. Sounds efficient, right?
However, the one drawback to Gerber’s approach was the
maddening lack of personalization when this process was taken too far. Uber-Gerber disciples thought that all
business functions could be compartmentalized for the sake of cost. What resulted was the rigidness and lack of
personalization we see when we interact with big businesses now.
Take banks, for example.
A call to the bank to find out if your mortgage payment was received
takes you through a number of menus and prompts. Then an automated voice might tell you after
five or ten minutes after you punch in your account information. If you then want to see if there is a better
mortgage rate available, you’ll need to go through even more voice prompts and
wait to talk to a live person. You’ll
need to give them your account information again. And if you want to let them know you’ll be
travelling overseas so your credit card will work, and though they are the
issuing bank, they’ll give you another number to call entirely! And you’ll input your account information
again!
It’s frustrating, but personal customer service costs companies
more money. To achieve personal customer
service, companies need to pay and retain good employees who know you, what
services you have, and what you like.
The higher employee wage cost and the perceived loss of efficiency (for
not using compartmentalization) is why it is not prevalent in today’s business
world.
The bank example is not surprising because it is part of our
everyday life; we’ve become largely numb to it.
On-line services have relieved some of the customer service inefficiencies,
but this approach is even more impersonal than the phones! Going on the website doesn’t make me feel any
closer to the bank and neither does e-mailing support@bigbank.com. Who is “support”? If they don’t get back to me, do I follow up
with Support’sImmediateSupervisor@bigbank.com? Or how do I praise “support’s” handling of my
issue? Can I contact them directly next
time and get the same competent person?
Will “support” remember who I am?
Of course not. And I see
property management companies setting up their businesses with similar
structures. The impersonal approach is
simpler to manage when employee turnover is high. It would be easier to just plug in another
newly hired person and not worry about changing the contact information.
Lack of Employee Ownership
The other common issue is lack of complete account ownership in
property management. If customers have a
problem receiving the monthly rent, they need to call the finance
department. If they have a question
about the repairs being made on their property, they need to talk to the repair
department. If they want to know the
progress of tenant placement into their property, they need to talk to someone
else. Then they often get parked into
multiple voicemail boxes! This can
really be a headache. What makes it
worse is when the person they need to speak to is not Jim@PropertyManager.com, but rather Finance@PropertyManager.com.
These “catch-all” e-mail addresses are making employees less
accountable. And with this lack of
accountability, comes an incentive problem.
How do we tie in financial incentives to good performance when one
property management account deals with so many different people? Did they leave our company due to
dissatisfaction with not getting their rental payments in a timely fashion, or our
reports are not what they wanted, or the tenant fill times are too slow, or the
communication was poor, or some other reason?
Did they stay and want to add other properties with us because of their
work with a specific person? It makes it
much tougher to correct what is wrong and reward what is right when accounts
are overly compartmentalized. I don’t
want to piece this information together from seldom filled-out, outgoing
customer surveys!
So how is this fixed?
Let’s go back to the bank example and see how I would ideally
like to deal with my bank. When I want
to find out if they got my mortgage payment, see if there is a better mortgage
interest rate available, and let them know by credit card is going to be used
overseas, I want to simply write this e-mail (or text message):
To: Jim.Anderson@BigBank.com
(cell # 704-902-7777)
Hey Jimmy-
Hope you had a good time in Aruba ! And congrats on wife #2.
Could you check on a couple of things for me:
1. Did you get my
10/13 mortgage payment?
2. Is there a better
mortgage interest rate available that I should be considering?
3. I’ll be in London
Thanks!
Brett
Why is this e-mail laughable based on service levels now? A bank customer service employee wouldn’t
even know how to begin answering this e-mail.
4 Requirements for an Ideal Customer Service Relationship
My customer service needs for an on-going business relationship
(like property management) boil down to 4 things:
1. I need a single point
of contact for almost all issues (with a real name / e-mail / cell phone)
2. I need to have the
ability to reach them directly during business hours (my vendors are allowed to
have a life outside work…)
3. They need to know who
I am by name and what business I do with them
4. I need to know they
care about keeping my business
BDF Realty provides these four requirements through our
innovative Pod System!
Property Management Solution- The Pod System
So what is the property management solution for differentiated
customer service? BDF Realty strongly
advocates and utilizes the Pod System.
It’s very simple.
At BDF Realty, every property is assigned a Pod Owner
(PO). PO ’s
are managed by a Pod Manager (PM). The PO :
1. Is the single point
of contact for an assigned set # of properties
2. Fosters a tight
relationship with the owners and tenants (their clients)
3. Handles all needs for
the properties except:
a. Prospective tenant inquiries
b. Initial home fix-ups
to prepare the homes for market
c. Outside business hour
repair requests
The incentives are in place where the PO
has complete ownership and dictates their own earnings based on the
financial performance of their pod. The
PM just keeps the PO ’s on track and measures
their activity with the following metrics:
1. Active properties in
their pod under management
2. Commissionable items
(lease extensions, tenant procurement, etc.)
3. Google Reviews &
customer feedback
Being that a BDF Realty PO’s earnings are based on their pod’s
monthly financial performance, the PO has a
direct incentive to:
1. Treat owner clients
well so they retain their management business, add other rental properties they
have, and gain referrals
2. Screen tenants well
because non-paying tenants are not commissionable and this directly affects
their monthly earnings
3. Keep tenants happy so
they pay rent and sign lease extensions
BDF Realty’s innovative Pod System promotes personal
accountability and employee ownership in residential property
management. By increasing customer
and employee satisfaction, a true customer service differentiator is achieved.
The Pod System does not reinvent property management; it just
makes it… better!
Brett Furniss is the President & Owner of BDF Realty (Charlotte Residential Property Management), the trusted real
estate advisor for Charlotte
landlords. BDF Realty utilizes their innovative Pod
System for exceptional customer service in residential property management,
home repairs, and home sales (including Rent-To-Sell) for single-family homes,
condos, and town homes in the Charlotte-Metro Area. Contact Us Today!
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