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Tenant Experience – the customer experience of your tenants – is not a new word anymore. In residential it means how the tenant experiences living in their home and building, and is a major factor in tenant satisfaction and tenant retention.
With digital transformation, delivering a distinctive tenant experience means that the tenant experience strategy must incorporate the use of technology and software.
A significant component of today's tenant experience is now the digital part of it. And it can make such a huge difference. With the next examples, we’ll list the reasons why digital tenant experience should be also your focus.
Today's customers know how to search for information efficiently online. At the same time, they demand first-class customer service and expect the same efficiency from the service providers. In the HubSpot Annual State of Service Report 2022 edition, 79% of respondents agreed that customers are smarter and more informed now than in the past, and 88% of respondents agreed that customers have higher expectations than in the past.
Today's customers are used to getting a digital and seamless service in most places. It's no longer a "nice-to-have" extra for them, it's the default. Many would choose a digitally-enabled and modern property rather than one with an old-fashioned way of communicating and doing things.
The traditional way to communicate between landlords and tenants tends to be emails, phone calls and letters. This way of communicating means that all the information is scattered and the tenant has no one place to look for answers – or indeed no place at all.
The tenant experience platform solves this problem by gathering everything under one roof. Via their app tenants can for example:
Self-service has a great potential to answer most of the customers’ questions and eliminate the need to send an email or call customer service. Many studies support this point:
The majority of the customers choose self-service if it is available. And in most everyday services it is - take for example banking services, gym membership or grocery shopping. So why not in the most expensive subscription of one’s life – the tenancy?
With a tenant experience app, you can offer a wide database of information for your tenant to dig into independently and find answers to their questions without a single email or phone call. You can provide answers, instructions and guidebooks even in form of pictures and videos.
Not only it makes your tenants happy, but offering a self-service function on a tenant experience platform saves incredibly a lot of time for you, too.
Communities have become more and more important for people living in urban areas. In buzzing cities, people who live in apartments do not often know each other at all even though they share the same walls. But this doesn’t have to be the case – and we can see it changing. More and more urban communities are forming, giving residents a bigger meaning to living in a building – the other people in it.
The statistics are supporting the rise of communities: The Satisfacts Biennial Study from February 2022 asked about the most important lease renewal drivers. In renewing a lease, the importance of a “sense of community” grew 19% since 2019 – increasing the most out of the renewal drivers.
From a property owner's perspective, this is also a good development. When you help residents get to know each other and form a community, they are less likely to want to move.
The state of global customer service report by Microsoft does not leave anything unclear: An overwhelming 95% of respondents cite customer service as important in their choice of and loyalty to a brand, with even 61% of respondents have switched brands due to poor customer service, with nearly half having done so in the past 12 months.
Tenant Experience technology of today truly enables you to provide the service level the tenants are looking for:
Tenants, like any customers, want to know what’s going on. Like when you order an item from a web store, you can follow its journey to your mailbox. Tenants want to be updated on the progress of their issues. This is good customer service and increases their satisfaction. With traditional methods, however, keeping customers informed about different steps of the process (of handling an issue in their apartment) takes a whole lot of extra time and effort for you.
Tenant experience software is the lifesaving tool in this one, too. Tenants can follow the status of issues they have reported directly in their tenant apps – and the status updates in their apps automatically, when you have for instance opened the ticket or completed it.
We all want an easy living. With digital transformation, it is possible, so people know to demand and expect it. If you want to provide your tenants with a modern, distinctive digital tenant experience, it's worth considering this from the construction phase. How digital technology supports building operations and everyday life?
Technology can also be added later to the building. It can be everything from automated ventilation and heating to electric locks in common premises – connected to the tenant app, thus creating a seamless digital tenant experience.
