Why Managers Should Track Interactions with Residents

Note: The Pilera team revised this blog post in August 2022 with new information and best practices.

Quality customer service is essential to any community’s operations. To deliver quality customer service, it’s important to track interactions with residents, no matter how small or big. Whether it’s an in-person visit, an email, or a phone call, tracking resident interactions gives you important insights to improve employee productivity and deliver better service. Take a look at 5 reasons why it’s important to track interactions with residents and how you can leverage modern technology.

1) Improve internal knowledge

Tracking resident interactions helps managers to be more knowledgeable about issues. Managers will get a better understanding of the types of issues residents encounter, questions they have, and how the problem was resolved. This also ensures that as staff or board members change, knowledge still stays in the organization. Keeping a detailed record of the interaction will assist the following team members:

• After hours staff
• New staff members during training
• New board members
• Substitute managers who do not usually manage a specific community are stepping in to help.

How to improve internal staff knowledge with technology:

A ticketing system that is built for the HOA management industry helps you keep track of resident requests and interactions. Pilera’s collaborative CRM platform enables you to track any kind of ticket – work order, activity log, support, ACR, and tasks. With comments and audit tracking built in, you can boost internal communication with staff and know how each ticket was handled.

2) Manage employee workload

Setting a priority for each resident request helps staff manage their workload better.  Staff members can easily judge how much time they need to spend on each request, while they are working on other long-term projects. If you have many high-priority projects that you are working on, priorities make it easier for managers to delegate tasks.

How to effectively manage employee workload with technology:

When creating tickets to track a resident request or log an activity, you can assign the task to another manager, prioritize the task, and set a due date. To manage employee workload, Pilera’s ticketing system provides comprehensive reporting for you to identify if staff is overwhelmed with work.

3) Analyze customer service efforts

As a manager, it’s important to know how your team is performing and what impact is it having on overall operations. If your staff members are tracking resident interactions on a regular basis, then it’s much easier to analyze performance. Here are some of the questions you should ask:

• What kind of success are you seeing with your customer service efforts?
• Are residents satisfied with the response they receive?
• How long did it take for their issues to be resolved?
• Does a specific type of interaction, such as email versus website inquiry, take longer to resolve? Are you getting too many inquiries from a specific source?
• Did any issue fall through the cracks and how?

Analyzing your customer efforts with technology:

Many features in a ticketing system can help you to understand your customer service efforts better and where you can improve. In Pilera, you can create custom categories for resident issues you encounter and run reports to analyze recurring issues. Additionally, business analytics reports on open versus completed tasks across your portfolio give you insights into the progress of tasks.

4) Improve operations

Tracking interactions can help identify patterns that can help your team make more informed decisions to improve processes and reduce costs in your community. For example, if residents are complaining about long response times on their maintenance requests, you can re-evaluate and streamline your process accordingly. Residents appreciate knowing that you value their opinion and are considering making improvements.

5) Win new business & retain clients

We often hear that board members struggle to understand the value that their management company provides them. Because they cannot see what tasks their managers are performing for them, it often results in dissatisfaction and the boards’ moving their business elsewhere. Our clients say that when they track resident interactions, it helps increase accountability and build trust with the board. In turn, they are able to retain clients in the long run and win new business going forward.

How technology can help you win new business:

An analytics-focused ticketing system will provide insights into the work that you are completing for your boards. With Pilera’s business analytics report and dashboards, you can show all completed and in-progress tickets to help you build trust with the boards. That way, you can easily convey the value that you provide to them and retain their business in the long run. Learn how Professional Association Services, Inc. improved relations with the boards and increased growth with Pilera.

Conclusion

Keeping track of all interactions with residents is vital to your management company’s success. On an operational level, it improves staff knowledge and gives them the information they need to handle interactions with residents efficiently. Strategically, keeping track of resident interactions has many long-term benefits. It can help to improve operations by understanding what type of issues you receive the most and how you can improve the process to reduce those issues. Boards are also happier with the level of reporting and accountability you can provide by tracking important issues, which leads to them retaining your services in the long-run.

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About Pilera

Pilera Software is a Customer Relations and Portfolio Management software for HOA’s, condo associations, co-ops, property management companies, and apartment management companies.  Our web portal includes communications, activity tracking, work order management, vendor tracking, resident data management, knowledge base, and more.  Can we help you achieve these success stories?  Contact us to learn more or sign up for a demo and see our software live in action!