Property Management – Improving Customer Satisfaction

Are you a real estate agency or property management company? Would you like to improve your customer experience for owners who entrust you with their property?

Optimising the customer journey is key to strengthening your existing clients’ loyalty, improving your brand image and acquiring new clients.

How? The simplest and most effective solution is to measure customer satisfaction at every key stage of their journey. Collecting customer feedback will help you identify areas for improvement and build an action plan.

This article includes dozens of sample questions to ask your clients, in order to assess their satisfaction level at every stage of their journey.

Step 1 – First Contact

The customer journey varies from one company to the next. It depends on your business, what you sell, your positioning, and customer typologies. But in property management, there are some key steps that exist in all customer-company relationships.

The first being the initial contact with the owner, who is just a lead at this point. They may have reached out to you or responded to one of your marketing actions. Either way, this exchange will enable you to qualify their profile and expectations.

This moment is crucial, and it is important you make a good impression. If you improve this first stage of your relationship, you will increase your lead to customer conversion rates, and improve your sales performance.

This article provides a few sample questions to ask your leads and (we hope) future clients, in order to measure their satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. But first, here are a few things to remember.

A Few Clarifications about our Sample Questions

It might seem obvious, but these questions are examples that should be used as inspiration. They are not necessarily models to copy. We recommend rephrasing the questions if necessary to adapt them to your company, rhetoric, and words.

We also recommend creating one survey for each step and to deploy them at the relevant stages of the customer journey. Keep your surveys short, with 4 to 5 questions at the most, to obtain the best response rates. If you send a survey at each step, it will be easy to be concise.

Another thing to remember is that you can include two types of questions in your surveys:

• Questions that measure satisfaction directly. For example: “Are you satisfied with X?”. Or: “How would you rate X?“.
• Questions that measure satisfaction indirectly. For example: “Were you kept informed of the progress of your file?”. If the respondent answers no, then you can indirectly infer that this step caused dissatisfaction. Measuring the perceived quality of a step is an indirect way of measuring satisfaction. This kind of question allows to identify frictions and irritants on the customer journey. These questions are particularly useful for identifying areas for improvement.

Finally, it’s often a good idea to add an introduction to your survey. Here is an example for your “first contact” survey:

“Following your first exchange with our broker, we would like to rate your level of satisfaction. This survey will take no more than 3 minutes. Thank you in advance for completing it. Your answers will help us improve your experience and our service.”

Questions to Ask Leads After Your First Exchange

Let’s get to the heart of the matter. Here are 8 examples of interesting questions to ask after your first interaction with a potential client:

• Did you find it easy to get in touch with our agency?
• How would you rate the quality of your phone conversation with our agent?
• Are you satisfied with your first exchange with the broker?
• How would you rate our agent’s listening skills?
• Did you receive enough information about our services?
• How well did the agent answer your questions?
• How would you rate the agent’s presentation of our services?
• How would you rate the broker’s level of competence?

Step 2 – Management of Property

Let’s move on to the second step. You lead has now become a client. They have signed a contract allowing you to manage their property. Here are a few questions to qualify your new client’s experience after entrusting you with their property:

• Are you satisfied with how long it took to process your request?
• Have you been kept informed of the progress of your file?
• Were you able to easily access the customer account created for you on our website?
• Why did you choose our real estate agency over one of our competitors?
• Are you satisfied with the way our offer was communicated and the conditions of our services?
• Would you recommend our company/agency to others? This is the NPS question. To find out more about this key question, discover our comprehensive guide to the Net Promoter Score.

Step 3 – Transition between 2 tenants

In rental management, the transition between 2 tenants is key. We therefore suggest a few more sample questions to assess how your client/landlord feels about the way you handle the transition between two tenants:

• Are you satisfied with how our agency handled the transition?
• How would you rate the transition period between two tenants?
• How would you rate the level of information you were provided with during this stage?
• How would you rate our agency’s management of your rental property?
• How would you rate our agency’s responsiveness?
• Are you satisfied with the quality of our services?

Step 4 – Post-Contact with the Agency

The idea here is to rate the quality of the real estate’s handling of customer requests. The quality of customer service is a determining factor in the perceived quality of the customer relationship and customer experience.

Here are 6 sample questions to ask:

• Were you able to get in touch with your agent easily?
• How would you rate the agent’s handling of your request?
• Are you satisfied with the handling of your request?
• Was the agent able to give a satisfactory answer to your call?
• Are you satisfied with how long it took to process your request?
• How would you rate the quality of our real estate agency’s service? You can also add overall customer satisfaction questions to your survey. Measuring a specific interaction is not incompatible with measuring overall satisfaction. Quite the contrary!

Step 5 – Losing a Client

A client informs you that they want to terminate their contract. It is in your interest to understand what led them to this decision. This will help you identify areas for improvement.

Here a few sample questions to include in your survey for clients you are in the process of losing:

• Why have you decided to end our collaboration?
• What do you think we could improve?
• Would you have liked more support? If so, at which points? You can ask nested question like this with solutions such as MyFeelBack.

We’re coming to the end of this article. You now have a lot of sample questions to measure customer satisfaction in property management. We hope that these examples will inspire you and help you build your future surveys!