Disentangling Operations (from Customer Service)

My property management company (we manage about 700 units) is filled with highly capable “get it done” types. They move fast, they don’t take no for an answer, and they are creative problem-solvers who think rationally about problems.

And this has me worried. Very worried.

The “Operations People” Problem

Property management at scale is barely-contained chaos, and it attracts high-D people (let’s call them “operations people”) who love to get stuff done. Sounds great, so what’s the problem?

There are actually two problems:

1. Operations people are constantly being interrupted from their tasks by customers who have questions, concerns and complaints. This is destructive to productivity and morale.

2. Operations people are terrible at handling customer service. Their instinct is to quickly and factually respond to the customer’s question or complaint (even trending toward a defensive posture), when what the customer really wants to be heard & understood.

I believe we need to completely separate customer service from operations in residential property management.

Here’s how.

The Customer Service Function

Here is how I envision building out a customer service department at my company in 2023.

1. Funnel all customer (tenant & client) communications into a few shared inboxes with ticketing functionality (we’ve landed on LeadSimple Inbox). (This is already done at our company).

2. Carve off customer service activities from operations, and create a new job function to handle them.

3. Hire (or promote) dedicated Customer Service Reps (CSRs):

   • They should be high “I” and “S” - like this

   • Metric them on average response time and customer NPS

   • Train them to answer all tier-1 questions

   • Empower them to solve basic problems for customers

   • Give them access to all of our internal tools such as Property Meld, LeadSimple, and Airtable so they can view & discuss the status of any work order, maintenance request, property turn, lease renewal, etc.

4. Create (public) customer knowledgebases and fill them with frequently-asked questions, links, videos and resources. One for property owners and a separate one for residents. Similar to the “Help” section of a software company’s website. We’ve already started this, and of course we are using Notion (which makes a great tool for this use case).

Now the operations people can focus on what they do best - getting stuff done - and the CSRs can delight our customers with lightning-fast, empathetic responses to all incoming tickets. Beautiful!

I would love to hear from you if you have done something similar at your property management company.