Smooth communications with your tenant body is arguably the most crucial aspect in the efficient management of your properties. Keeping your tenants informed and involved is in your best interest to avoid misunderstandings, miscommunications, and/ or important information being missed. Ensuring proper communication with your tenants is also a great way to ensure that your good reputation and likability is maintained and bolstered consistently. But how you go about doing this will determine whether your messages and bulletins will be received and read, or completely missed.
Why and When Bulletins and Notifications Are Missed By Your Tenants:
Whether it’s a building newsletter, survey, notification of elevator closure or of the water being shut, you want to make sure all your tenants will get the memo. Dealing with the fallout of missed notifications that are sometimes time-sensitive or of utmost importance, can be a pretty unpleasant experience. Lost opportunities, and lost time and money can lead to much aggravation for everyone involved. So why are tenants missing my messages? The answer to that is likely, because you are using the wrong means of communication.
While emails have a professional touch and it is difficult to find a tenant who does not have email these days, people’s inboxes are constantly flooded with unessential messages or advertisements. Many have become accustomed to simply ignoring most emails, not to mention the possibility of your messages being sent to their spam folders as well. The chances of your emails getting overlooked is pretty high. Phone calls are time consuming and impractical and likely to be missed anyways. Voicemails are rarely checked by millennials and are easily missed even by those who do check their voicemail periodically. And while text messages can be a tempting option as people are more likely to see them and it is quick and easy, it can also be impractical sometimes depending on the size of your tenant body. It also is inefficient in that it does not provide easily accessible records for future reference.
The Solution:
So let’s explore how to set out in achieving optimal tenant communications where your messages, newsletters, and bulletins are received, read and understood by your entire tenant body.
When your property management company hits a certain size it is high time to consider a proper tenant portal that includes top of the line communication features. Once you are managing multiple properties, it is essential that your valuable time is not taken up by the tedious task of trying to get through to your tenants to get them an important message. The communications module should have key features to ease the burden on your staff and ensure that your tenants receive any and all messages and information at any given time.
It’s What the Customer Wants:
Millennials are accustomed to fast and uncomplicated communication and even might view an unexpected phone call from the management as intrusive and unwelcome. Online messaging is what they want. People spend hours online and many have their phones within arms length at any given time of day. Sending your tenants messages via an online portal is the natural course of action. You can also provide your tenants with the ability to respond in real-time to a message via the portal. This is like a live chat and definitely within familiar territory for your tenants. Tenants will also greatly appreciate the feeling that there is an address for their requests and messages at any time of day or night, and that their needs will not be ignored or forgotten.
Digital Maintenance Requests:
Cut out paper work orders and reduce your staff’s workload by half! Receiving, filing and fulfilling hard copy work orders is a thing of the past. Maintenance requests via email or phone are a bad idea as well. These methods are inefficient and guaranteed to cause much aggravation and stress, when tenants’ don’t feel that their needs are being addressed and managers are overworked and overwhelmed by a flood of requests in disarray. Enable your tenants to file digital work orders including pictures and notes. This will ensure accuracy, efficiency and satisfaction in every step of the way until the work is completed for the tenant.
Proper Records and Tracking:
Avoid feuds and disagreements with your tenants with the ability to pull up any communications record at any time. You will also be able to properly track a work order from start to finish for quality assurance and monitoring purposes.
The MyPortal by Paquad Solution:
Payquad Solutions offers a tenant portal with multiple communication features for optimal manager-tenant relations. Some features include, Surveys, Maintenance, and the Communication Module. The Communications module offers the ability to send emails and sms messages with any message that gets sent out in the portal. The module also offers visibility to managers to see when their messages have been read. It includes dashboard messages, templates, groupings and scheduled messages as well. Book a demo today to learn more!
