“The rise of the ‘experience economy,’ has resulted in the business-critical need to understand customers and use that data to design a real-time personal experience.” – Intel.
Indulged in convenience and accustomed to instant access of information at the touch of a button, modern tenants expect buildings to follow suit. They are driving the growth of experience-first CREs but without a unified experience strategy in place, owners are falling short of delivering unmatched tenant experiences.
Fortunately, buildings can leverage their operational data to rise up to this challenge.
Data holds the key to bind occupier behavior with building operations so that you can draw insightful usage patterns and create hassle-free experiences, in real-time.
Tenant engagement is the most impactful method to meet tenant expectations. Interestingly, it’s a two-way lane and it also helps you enhance YOUR offerings with feedback – a win-win for the tenants and the property owners alike. When data drives tenant engagement, it can unleash independent control and enhance transparency in building operations to occupiers. To top it off, there’s quicker data-driven resolution to issues.
A ramped-up portfolio efficiency is a direct outcome that paves the way for exquisite experiences.
So how exactly can you tap into your automation data to gain the mindshare of tenants in your commercial portfolios? Here are 7 simple ways to get a headstart –
- Give them personalized control of comfort
A report from Mordor Intelligence confirms that the smart office market is expected to be valued around USD 55.62 billion by 2025. Your smartphone-adept tenants are steering this growth and so, what’s better than gifting your smartphone-adept tenants an intuitive app to remotely control their comfort? Your millennial tenants prioritize indoor comfort and wellness, like Indoor Air Quality, as Karen Oh, director of energy at Vornado(a leading real estate trust in NY), observes. So when a tenant raises a service request for an exceedingly cold meeting room, it can directly notify the most suited facilities team. No routed communication, no follow-up reminders. And also, the flow of response can be monitored up-close by all relevant stakeholders including the tenant. So you address tenant pain points faster, and also your equipment upkeep is taken care of (even before the next maintenance activity takes stock of it)!
1. Impart contextual visibility into building conditions
Is your tenant kept in the dark after he brings to light a disruption? This is a precious chance for you to win their confidence that their involvement with the building is appreciated! According to a recent PWC report, nearly 80% of global tenants value knowledgeable service to develop a positive brand association. Pull up the legacy curtains for them to ingest insider information on the status of their work requests, space-specific maintenance activities, etc. With a central data reservoir, you can enable them to access the service catalog, contacts, and other building-specific information.
2. Offer them a sense of ownership
When you empower tenants to become shareholders of your building’s operations, you strongly indicate their convenience is your priority.
Aiding your tenants to become self-sufficient to carve individual repositories to manage important data about contractors, lease, etc. goes a long way in strengthening their property affiliation. When you can ramp that up with controlled(role-based) access of resources, you’ve delighted them by placing privacy control in their hands.
3. Provide multiple channels to strengthen tenant communication
Do you strive to show your tenants you prize their feedback? Rolling out numerous avenues to log complaints is an excellent way of showing you are committed to involving them to enhance your services. Facilitate multi-channel support – web, mobile, in-app or cloud phone calls, chatbots – for them to easily provide assessment or avail maintenance services. Data can spin out a variety of options so all your tenants meet their preferences for sure. Such a data-driven process can not only streamline the communication but also help you accurately scrutinize what works and what doesn’t with each of your tenants, or change tenant-specific SLAs if required.
4. Make them feel inclusive and render a unified experience
Anyone can check their residential utility consumption details, but what if one can do the same at his workplace too? Jon Glass, 40 Under 40 Rising Stars in Real Estate, observes that “tenants are willing to pay a premium for office space that allows for less resources devoted to building out and activating space”. So when you offer them a data platform that disperses slices of insights pertaining to say, energy and water usage, you have already saved them significant time and effort, and they end up feeling integral to your building’s sustainability.
With a layer of data in place, you can help them stay on the same page as the management about the status of repair works, information on SLA adherence, etc.. And that goes a long way in shaping a wholesome tenant experience invariably!
5. Give them a taste of automation
Cutting-edge technology solutions harness AI and ML to instantly act on asset performance deviations. These solutions primarily entice property owners for their ability to give recommendations, amplify decision-making, and enhance experience. Imagine the sheer scale of efficiency when you could predict and fix a comfort disruption seamlessly behind the scene, and your tenant has no inkling of it at all! That’s a step ahead of prompt corrective actions, where you nip anomalies in the bud! And that’s what truly proactive customer service is all about. For example, a component of the HVAC unit could be consuming more energy than usual. This can be right-away detected, root cause uncovered, and a predetermined fix mapped to it can be applied.
AI-enabled automation expedites execution and eliminates chaos from the routine activities.
6. Help them with frictionless interaction with workspace
At the end of the day, what’s the basic need of any tenant? They ask for the right tools for hassle-free interactions with your property. Why not indulge them with ease of storing private or public digital documents? Another approach is to offer them a free hand with managing safety and security, and hygiene of their space. For example, building owners can use data to alert facilities for some broken equipment on the leased space, restroom hygiene, or mobilize the security teams when a suspicious visitor lands at the facility.
Data facilitates the intelligent interoperability of your support teams and can result in resource optimization and highly efficient customer-facing infrastructure.
The new decade is a reminder of accelerated efforts to satisfy the evolving expectation of tenants. Data can function as the seamless enabler that synergizes the activities of your building and helps occupiers pursue their business interests better.
A thrilling revelation – All those swatches of data under your buildings’ belt are a huge opportunity for you to reinvent operations like clockwork.
Maximize the value of your building intelligence by transforming it from a data-churning tower to a bridge that connects contextual insights to the end user.
It’s proven to clinch faster normalization, promote desirability and retain customers long-time!
