Customer Satisfaction

For commercial real estate

By Paul Rosta on Mar 19, 2013 in News

Keeping tabs on customer satisfaction at an office building, retail center or apartment community is a never-ending task. Almost any encounter with a tenant or resident presents an opportunity to find out where the room for improvement exists. And there is no substitute for face-to-face contact when it comes to finding out what is on the customer’s mind. Whether the methods are highly structured or informal, gathering and assessing feedback has a single purpose at the core: attracting and keeping customers.

To foster a systematic approach to evaluating customer satisfaction, many owners use surveys that are administered by the Kingsley Associates research firm. Tenants are asked to grade the property and its management team on a wide variety of topics, ranging from response time to service requests and quality of building maintenance to overall satisfaction and intentions to renew. Most owners and managers use about 80 percent of the standard survey template, but requests for customized questions are common, according to Kingsley.

Owners and managers say that a standardized format allows them to review how properties in their own portfolios stack up against one another. If the scores for an individual property or a geographic area indicate tenant discontent, owners and third-party service providers expect the manager to devise and carry out a plan for improvement. Moreover, survey results frequently figure into the property manager’s performance review, providing an added incentive to raise the bar.

Using a standardized, nationally distributed questionnaire also provides property owners and managers with a broader perspective on their performance. Once the decision is made to survey tenants or multi-family residents, getting maximum value from them is an art in itself. The first and probably most important step is identifying the appropriate person to complete the survey, which may be the office manager, the CEO or someone in between. Then there is the matter of making sure that the representative actually completes the survey and returns it, an outcome that may require some cajoling from the manager.

How often to survey tenants is another big question with no one correct answer. Sometimes it needs to be done annually; at other times, every other year may be enough.

And tenant satisfaction surveys can be modified to reflect changing industry practices, or to gauge tenant interest in new ideas. For instance, in recent years, Kingsley has expanded its questions on sustainability.

The art and science of measuring customer satisfaction will continue to evolve along with technology, tenant priorities and market trends. But the ultimate goal—retaining customers’ business—will remain constant. In pursuit of that mission, the property manager must bear in mind that three related but distinct categories are in the mix: the owner, the tenants and the management team. Skillfully used, tenant outreach and surveys help meet the needs of each constituency.

Paul Rosta is a senior editor at Commercial Property Executive. More information on property management surveys appeared in the March 2013 issue of CPE. Rosta writes about property management matters monthly for the digital magazine.