JHerzog
All Aboard The Spirit Train
JHerzog · · 2 Comments
I recently heard a story from a friend who is also in the property management business about an apartment community that was promoting an early renewal contest. The community sent out flyers telling residents that if they signed renewal papers early, they would be entered into a raffle. So a resident excitedly entered the leasing office early with his paperwork and, as my friend stated, “that’s 12 more months of rent right there” and their office associate begrudgingly took the paperwork, almost as if not interested in dealing with this obviously-satisfied-enough-to-renew-for-another-12-months resident, that there was not even a smile on his face and didn’t even mention the contest until the resident asked about his raffle ticket.
I understand that sometimes we as property management communities forget that our every day job is the same place that our residents want to look forward to coming home to after a hard day of school or work. I can even think back to times when I was really tired and busy and would lose sight of the fact that where I work is where people live, their home, the place they chose to live (and renew) among the hundreds of others, but even then I can’t remember being annoyed and ungrateful when they brought their renewal paperwork back or got excited about a contest or event (especially because sometimes it took a lot of work on my part to get that renewal paperwork back!). The fact that they got excited about contests and events was often the motivation I would need to get back on the spirit train.
I visit on-site teams now to help them think of new ways to involve residents in the community, and more and more I hear them tell me that their residents don’t want to be involved or aren’t interested in the community experience. And I honestly started to believe it. Then I hear a story like this, and it makes me think: If when they are excited and motivated enough to participate, they are then let down by feeling like they are being bothersome, it’s no wonder they “don’t want to participate”. Just as we would not want to go home to someone who’s miserable to have us there, neither do our residents and it just might mean they go elsewhere where they are appreciated.
While I will not naively believe that every resident will get excited about or become involved in every community activity that is presented to them, that story helped me to regain that spirit and confidence in the importance of resident appreciation and community activities and I hope to motivate our teams to get back that spirit instead of giving up.
I would love some advice and even some great stories that I can share to help others regain their spirit and motivate them to continue to think outside the box and create a living experience that is truly memorable for their residents.
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How’s My Service?
JHerzog · · 3 Comments
We’ve all seen one of one of those How’s My Driving stickers on the back of a truck.
They seem to care but do they really?
My boyfriend recently ordered my birthday present online from a popular home and garden store. I won’t disclose the name, but let’s just say it rhymes with Shmowe’s. Anyway, he ordered it through their In-Store Pick-Up service so that he could pick it up from a store near me while he was visiting for my birthday, but when he went to pick it up, it wasn’t there. He was told that someone was supposed to be in charge of calling him to let him know it hadn’t arrived yet, but apparently they forgot, and they would have to call him back Monday. When they didn’t call, he called them, only to continue to get the run around. Almost a week later, the item showed up at his home (in a completely different state than where he had requested to pick it up). The only solution customer service would offer was for him to return it to the nearest store (40 minutes from his house) and have me re-buy it from the store where it was originally supposed to go. Only when he went to the store to return it, they couldn’t access his order in their system and refused to give him his money back. After spending almost an hour in the store dealing with several different store associates and managers, and becoming infuriated, he was given his money back. Needless to say, after their complete lack of help and horrible customer service in dealing with his issue, he would not be re-buying anything from any other ‘Schmowes’ store.
No matter how bad his issue became, not one person was willing to become solely responsible to insure he received call backs and verify that the matter was corrected and the customer was satisfied. Instead, he was given different answers from several different people and given the run around to the point where it ended up losing them two customers (both him and myself), and potentially more because apparently he was not the only person in their customer service line who had issues with their online in-store pick-up program (and of course all of you reading this who don’t want to take the chance of this happening to you).
The point of all this is that I work for Mills, a fairly large company that relies mostly on our site teams to handle property specific customer service issues. However, we recently added a resident relations position to our portfolio for those times when an issue reaches the level that the above mentioned story reached. This person is specifically responsible for getting to the bottom of such issues and working directly with the resident until the issue is resolved. This has become a great asset to our company and I believe that no matter how big or small the company, there should be some type of position similar to this available for customers.
Do you have a program in place to insure that customer issues never get out of control? Any tips on what has been most effective?
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Fill Your Marketing Balloons With More Than Air
JHerzog · · 14 Comments
I was recently given the privelege to co-moderate a brainstorming session on the topic of marketing. The session was held for members of the apartment management industry at various stages in their careers, from leasing agents who have been in the industry for 2 months to property managers with 10 years of experience. My topic was old school marketing. Old school referring to anything not social media. More specifically, tools such as resident retention, outreach marketing, Craigslist, etc. The idea was to get creative juices flowing, discuss what’s working, what’s not working and maybe learn a few things to take back to the rest of the team.
I was surprised by the lack of marketing knowledge…and for that matter, the lack of creativity. I heard the same 3 “best practices” from a majority of the groups: Generic signs and balloons for drive by traffic, generic Craiglist ads and monetary resident referral incentives. I heard questions like: “What do you say when you’re marketing to a business?” and “It’s ok to send thank you cards and gift baskets to businesses who refer someone to you?” Leasing agents and PMs who had no knowledge of free additional ILS marketing template tools like VFlyer and Postlets, who had never thought past posting a flyer with a resident referral rent credit in terms of using residents as a marketing tool, and those are just building blocks. It’s as if they were told that marketing is something only a rocket scientist can figure out.
First let me say I’m not exactly saying the 3 best practice items listed above are crap, I’m simply saying that they shouldn’t be IT. Also, I’m in love with social media and believe it’s an insanely valuable tool, however 1. It was not my topic to discuss and 2. I also think that personal touch and those face to face human interactions through outreach marketing and resident appreciation events are valuable, and combining the 2 forms is fabulous! (Read Urbane Media’s QR Codes blog). But I’m not sure I believe you can be effective with social media if you don’t even know the basics of effective old school marketing tools. And if no one is teaching or motivating their team on the basics of marketing, then I doubt that there is any social media marketing in place anyway.
So I guess what I’d like to learn from this eye opening experience is: Am I way off base in believing that some old school marketing techniques are still a valuable tool in the industry? Is someone teaching your staff about marketing? Do you believe that one can effectively use social media tools without ever having learned/practiced old school marketing strategies?
Title courtesy of Melissa DeCicco
Photo credit bloggingoutloud