Survey says: new technologies enable property managers to transform their customer survey process.(neotech)

Advances in customer survey technology can help property managers harness customer feedback by capturing the right information at the right time. These technologies open up a whole new range of choices for real estate companies looking to collect valuable feedback from their customers.

Around the turn of the millennium, many companies introduced a new generation of very inexpensive, flexible and easy-to-use survey tools. In 1999, Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com) began offering a survey tool that enabled anyone to create their own custom online survey. The market was quickly flooded with other similar tools like Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com). These applications include tools that tabulate the user feedback, and with minimal "spreadsheet gymnastics," property managers can produce a fairly presentable summary.

Just a short while after these survey tools hit the market, property managers began adopting online service request systems that enabled tenants to submit service requests and receive electronic updates regarding the status of those requests.

Today, by simply placing a link to an online customer survey on the electronic notification of service request completion, property managers can collect valuable customer feedback regarding how the request was completed.

The same result can be achieved by adding links to e-mails to gather "point of service" information regarding any customer experience--from the quality of the food in the building cafe, to the level of satisfaction with a lease negotiation. Increasingly, companies are realizing that online surveys can actually be used to transform the customer survey process into a "real-time" customer feedback system.

One primary difference between the traditional customer survey process and a customer feedback system is timing. The feedback system gives the customer the opportunity to provide immediate feedback at any specified point of interaction with the property manager, whereas traditional tenant surveys only collect general data at given intervals.

Online surveys are not really new. The question is whether real estate managers are using them to their best advantage. Back when the surveys first became available, I made the classic mistake in how I used the online survey technology. I developed online surveys that mirrored my annual tenant survey, rather than seeing the online "customer satisfaction" survey as a separate tool to instantly measure customer satisfaction. At this early stage of implementing the two surveys, I sent an electronic version of the same survey at the same time of the year and distributed the results in the same way.

Here I had new technology available and yet I was basically using e-mail versus U.S. mail to manage the survey. If fact, I remember the cost-benefit analysis for this initiative was based on the fact that the amount saved on postage alone paid for the cost of software development.

Does this sound familiar? If you put technology in a "box" like this, you miss the value of the innovation. The value of the technology is greatly increased when you use it as an enabler for an improved business process. In the end, customers and managers alike benefit from this shared use of technology.

Larry Schwenker (lschwenker@corvidea.com), CPM, is the president of Corvidea Knowledge Solutions in Alpharetta, Ga.

by Larry Schwenker, CPM[R]

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