Residents of both apartment buildings and cottage settlements equally feel the need for high quality maintenance of the premises. Digitalization of the management of an apartment building is a trend of a modern management company.
Users are increasingly ordering services using their smartphones. Giving customers an opportunity to order both property-related and third-party services and interact with a management company online increases their loyalty and, therefore, make them feel positive about ordering services which generates profits for the company.
Users are increasingly ordering services using their smartphones. Giving customers an opportunity to order both property-related and third-party services and interact with a management company online increases their loyalty and, therefore, make them feel positive about ordering services which generates profits for the company.
Digital transformation in the property management presupposes surrounding the residents with a fully integrated service available in the interfaces most convenient for them and having all the means for control and data-based constant improvement of services that customers receive. The most common elements of such a transformation are mobile app for the customers and a set of administrative interfaces for employees of a company.
What activities of management companies can be improved by digital transformation?
Developing a mobile application will allow you to place most of the services in a residents’ smartphones, hence, cover all the aspects of residents care and service provision digitally. Below there is a list of essentials of a modern digital system for management company covering needs of both customers and business.
Interaction with residents
Direct interaction with residents is a mandatory for providing high quality client services. Gathering feedbacks from residents is the key of developing a relevant vision of the attitude to the clients. This can be achieved by conducting surveys and sending newsletters. Communication can also be conducted online in a chat with the operator of the contact center, or by providing clients the way to share suggestions / complaints via the feedback form.
It is important to ensure not only the communication channel between the management company and the residents, but also the communication between the residents themselves. This need can be addressed by providing residents with the opportunity to make their own proposals for improving the quality of life in the house. By voting, other residents can express their attitude to this proposal. For the company, this approach will provide information about the priorities and needs of residents, without interfering in the process directly.
Bill payments
Paid services for the residents is the main source of income for the management company. Hence, there is a need to provide residents with an effortless way of making payments. The less efforts are required from user to pay for the services, more positive are the customers about ordering those services repeatedly. Along with a common way of using debit/credit cards, there are even more seamless methods such as MasterPass by MasterCard which also should be utilized. Integration with popular payment services is an important step in simplifying the financial relationship between residents and the management company.
Closed-circuit television 24 hour
Video surveillance allows residents to receive real-time information on the state of the local area, entrance or floor. Having such an opportunity will significantly increase the feeling of security among the residents, which will help increase loyalty to the management company.
Intercom
Integration with an intercom allows residents to receive incoming video calls of their guests at the lobby or an entrance directly in the mobile application. Hence, the apartment residents always knows who comes to them and let the guest or courier in or conduct some instructions to the concierge at the lobby with no need to walk to the intercom on the wall of the apartment. Moreover, residents have an access to the system no matter if they’re at home, work or spending their holidays on the other side of the globe.
Smart home integration
An important element of a modern apartment is the availability of power consumption and energy efficiency control systems. Integration of the mobile application with the smart home system will allow a connection of all the sensors and devices installed in the house to a single system for the centralized control . By entering into partnership agreements with suppliers of smart home systems, you can increase the demand for the application by residents without involving additional development resources.
Partners services
Partnership agreements are not limited to the supply of smart home. Integrating partnering household services will expand the possibilities of servicing the residents. Offerings for cleaning, child care, home repair, delivery and many more are the possible types of services, which integration will improve residents’ satisfaction and generate additional sources of income for the management company. Tracking orders and their processing can be done directly in the administrative panel with no need for third-party solutions.
Admin panel for management company
Given integrated resident and property service consisting of a vast range of components, it is important to have an effective system for its management. Such a system supports decisions related to day to day operations, marketing, quality management and development of new services and products for the residents. Administrative interfaces serve as a part of that Decision Support System.
The key requirement for administrative interfaces is a promise of flexibility and conformity to the organisational structure of the management company. The former is guaranteed by the customizable set of specific interfaces such as administrator’s office, operator interface, analytical module and service management section, to name a few. The latter is guaranteed by providing different access levels for different roles to the interfaces listed above.
Administrator’s office
The Administrator’s office is the main tool for monitoring the operation of the entire system. Commonly, administrator’s office enables to manage:
– users of the administrative panel (operators, supervisors, managers);
– user roles and permissions;
– residents among all the client interfaces;
– service providers and service conditions.
Important part of such interfaces is logging activity of all the users of a system which guarantees responsibility.
Operator Interface
An operator interface provides all means for a real-time communication with the residents. In a single interface, operators can conduct both live communication and respond to offline user requests. The same interface can be used to conduct surveys in order to get feedback from residents. It is important to note that communication with the operator is not only about receiving information from residents but a powerful direct selling tool. Given the operator interface is integrated with CRM subsystems, operators can have resident profile and relevant offerings at hand, hence, effectively respond to their requests and sell by targeting on their hidden needs.
Analytical module
Collecting and making insights from data which residents generate by using property services and interacting with digital systems of a management company is very important in determining and improving the effectiveness of the services provided. Two important statistics subsets are application usage data and operator interface data.
Application usage statistics includes:
– the number of orders per service type and order details;
– the amount of payments made through the application;
– average bill per resident;
– number of visits to application sections;
– the duration of users’ sessions in the application.
The task is to understand which services and sections of the application are most popular among residents and patterns in which income is distributed among the services.
Operator statistics provide insights into the quality of services perceived by users and which of their needs are not included in the application. For this, information is collected on:
– topics and texts of the dialogues;
– users’ satisfaction by the answer;
– duration of the dialogue.
With this information, you can understand what changes are needed to make user consume more services.
Services section
The provision of services is a way to monetize your system. To ensure the highest quality of the services provided, the administration tool should provide the ability to quickly process the ordered services, as well as be able to edit existing services and create new ones.
Since many services are provided by third-party partner companies, it is important to be able to quickly integrate with their systems in order to quickly launch services. To do this, the system should have meansfor quick integration with third-party systems through the API.
Working with services also involves interacting with service providers and monitoring their performance. Chatbots are a lightweight and convenient tool for that. The main advantage of chatbot is its portability for various platforms: Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Viber. Performers are able to receive tasks and report on the execution on the go. Developing and maintaining chatbot is much cheaper and faster than having a separate application for service providers. Chatbot integration into the administrative panel provides the following information:
– number of performers per shift;
– the number of services in the work;
– the number of completed services;
– the number of services to be done.
Combined with quality surveys, this data can be a basis for insights on the satisfaction of residents and the effectiveness of each performer.
Functions described through this article are just the main bricks of the digital system for management company which can and should be expanded and refined depending on the scope of the company’s services. Good approach for a start is to launch the system early with some basic features and services, gather feedbacks and expand functionality based on the insights. The key to an effective system is to gain an understanding on what features are in the highest demand. Management companies should keep in mind the need of integration of all the systems into a single ecosystem. Gradually expanding the functionality and analyzing the expansion process using the described set of tools can increase the loyalty of the residents and, therefore, let the management company to maximize its profits.
