In the constantly evolving world of customer services, the pandemic has provided valuable insight and reason for reflection and change. As property managers, our job is to make sure that customers are happy in their home, and the way we’ve been living over the last year makes a property manager’s role even more important. More time at home for our residents means they can clearly see the benefits of a good property management company brings, but also results in higher expectations in terms of the service we provide.
Experience matters
It is so important that our customers recognise us, not just for the service we deliver, but also for the experience we provide them. This means that we can make an impact from the moment they buy a property to the time they sell it, and everything in between.
Key to this, is making sure our colleagues understand how customers ’experience’ our service. In recent months we’ve focused all of our teams on online review platforms, such as Trustpilot as a tool to learn and develop. Because of this sole focus, we’ve seen better and more consistent engagement from our customers with these platforms too. Trustpilot in particular has become a priority customer service channel for our customers to share both good experiences and those where we can improve. Our responsiveness to those who leave a review has helped us better understand our customers’ experiences and how we can improve them. It has also meant that we have been able to turn some reviews around from a negative experience to a positive one.
Our now four-star Trustpilot rated service is reflective of our colleagues’ efforts, but also reminder that we don’t always get it right and there’s always room for improvement (we’re aiming for five stars, of course!).
More choice means better engagement
This appetite for engagement is not unique to TrustPilot. In the consumerised society we now live in, our customers rightly expect a seamless property management service which makes their lives easier and is tailored to suit their lifestyles. This means it is important that we have a range of customer service channels available for them to use.
Our contact centres are the engine rooms that support our field-based colleagues to provide the very best service, and we’ve made changes to make them more agile and customer focused in recent months.
This includes the introduction of Webchat, which is a popular choice for our customers with over 4,000 interactions since its soft launched late last year. In addition, our online residents’ portal has proven to be a much-valued resource – particularly during the pandemic – helping us to respond quickly and proactively and to update residents in real-time.
Taking ownership
We’ve always encouraged customer ownership across FirstPort, and in recent months we’ve set our contact centres ambitious targets around ‘first time resolution’ which sees our customer contact centre colleagues empowered to take complete ownership for every single interaction. They don’t pass queries on if they can’t answer them. Instead, they find a way to resolve the issue from start to finish so that the customer has a single point of contact.
This focus on ownership is also ever-present amongst out field-based colleagues. A big part of this is ensuing visibility and availability for our customers. Whilst our teams working from developments have continued throughout the pandemic, many of our field-based employees have had to be more inventive to stay in touch. Zoom meetings have now become a common way of ‘meeting’ residents, not just 9-5, but at times that are more convenient for customers.
Around a third of the homes in our care are in independent retirement communities. We wanted these more vulnerable customers to feel supported through this challenging time. Our Development Managers rose to the challenge of making sure our residents’ experience was as good as it could be with pen pal schemes, weekly newsletters and entertainment packs posted under doors- all designed to keep our residents physically and mentally active and to help them combat loneliness.
Providing confidence, clarity and choice for customers is our ethos. Everyone at FirstPort is committed to, and takes ownership for, providing a brilliant experience for our customers and we’ll use the lessons we’ve learned over the last year to set the bar even higher.
