Is it easy for your property management team to communicate effectively with tenants?
Good communication can increase tenant satisfaction – because they feel valued at your property. And, it can help your building run smoothly and efficiently – because everyone knows exactly what to do.
But, many property teams struggle with effective communication. It either takes property management too long to communicate – wasting building resources. Or, they don’t communicate frequently enough or in the ways tenants want – leading to dissatisfied tenants.
As such, poor building communication not only increases your operating costs. It also has the potential to negatively impact revenue by decreasing tenant retention. Tenants who feel out of the loop or like your property team doesn’t listen to them are much less likely to remain in your building after their lease is up – leading to lower revenue.
How can you improve communication throughout your properties? By focusing on making it effortless for your property team to communicate internally and with tenants.
Wondering how better building communications could help your properties? Here are the key benefits of implementing great building communication.
Increase Tenant Satisfaction
One of the primary benefits of implementing better building communications at your properties is increased tenant satisfaction.
Most property teams communicate with tenants through email or phone. While that’s easiest for your property team, it’s not how tenants want to communicate. Many of them might not even check their email or voicemails regularly.
So, if you have important information to get to your tenants and are only sending it through channels they rarely check, your tenants are going to be out of the loop. Besides posing potential health and safety risks for your tenants (depending on what info you’re sending out), your tenants aren’t going to be engaged with your building.
A lack of tenant engagement means your tenants have little reason to stay in your building. When there are many similar buildings with great communication, your tenants are likely to move when their lease is up – which hurts your bottom line.
How can you communicate in a way that makes tenants happy?
Multi-Channel Communication
One way is to communicate with tenants through the channels they prefer. Instead of relying only on email, you should communicate with text, slack, or other channels tenants use more regularly.
But, manually sending every message multiple times on different channels is time-consuming and a waste of your team’s time. Instead, a building communications tool makes it easy to send one message on multiple channels – without your property team having to send it more than once.
Tenant Updated Preferences
Plus, it’s important to always have updated tenant preferences and info. That way, you know you’re always reaching tenants – and communicating how they prefer. Instead of hunting down tenants to get contact info – or not reaching them because you have the wrong info – tenants can input their preferences directly into a building communications tool.
So, you always know how to communicate with tenants and make them feel connected to your property.
Tenant Feedback
To make sure your communications are what tenants want, it’s also important to get tenant feedback. So, you know what you’re doing well – and what your team needs to work on.
Instead of giving tenants paper or email surveys – which are hard to collect and record, a building communications tool allows tenants to provide feedback. So, you have what you need to communicate with tenants and improve from their feedback all in one place.
A key benefit of implementing better building communications at your properties is increasing tenant satisfaction and retention.
Improve Team Efficiency
Along with increasing tenant satisfaction, another benefit of having better building communications is making your property team more efficient.
While important, communication – with tenants, vendors, each other, and more – can be time-consuming for your team. They have to hunt down contact information – and make sure it’s correct. This could take hours every time your team needs to send info to a large group. Instead of tending to other responsibilities, your team is stuck going through contact info.
And, once your team has recipient info gathered, they have to spend time writing the message – even if it’s a similar message to something they’ve already sent out. Plus, they have to take the time to respond to any messages they get back.
Instead of improving the tenant experience or keeping your building in top shape, your team has to dedicate hours each week to simply sending and responding to messages. This time waste increases your building operating expenses – in turn decreasing building revenue.
How can your team communicate more efficiently?
One way is to be able to see all your past messages, contact info, and recipient groups in one place. That way, your team can easily track who got what information and what everyone’s contact info is – without wasting time searching multiple places. This saves your team hours of communication related work each week.
Another way to communicate efficiently is creating message templates. Instead of starting from scratch each time your team needs to write a message, you can create templates of commonly used messages. This can save your team hours every time they communicate. Including images or logos in these templates can also boost the professionalism of your building communications.
A building communications tool can make all of these easier.
With a dashboard overview of message history, contact info, and recipient groups, your team has all the info they need to communicate well in one place. And, with saved message templates and drafts, crafting messages is a breeze. Plus, AI that responds to messages can decrease the time your team has to spend responding to messages – increasing team efficiency.
Another key benefit of implementing better building communications is that is can improve your team’s efficiency.
Wrapping It Up
Having great communication is crucial to having happy tenants and a well-run building. But, keeping up with tenant preferences, info changes, responding, and more can be a challenge for your team. Traditional communication methods take up a lot of your team’s time. And, aren’t guaranteed to keep tenants happy.
However, a building communications tool can make communication less time-intensive for your team – with features like saved message templates and AI-based communication. And, it can increase tenant satisfaction – by helping your team communicate with tenants on their terms and gathering tenant feedback.
Looking for a building communications tool that can increase tenant satisfaction and team efficiency? Consider using Prism. With Prism’s building communications module, your team can communicate through multiple channels, easily access contact info, use an AI virtual assistant to respond, and more.
Get started with your free Prism building communication demo today.
