The One Method You Need To Get New, Happy Tenants.

Customers are no longer racing to the bottom of the barrel in terms of price but instead are choosing housing options that provide an overall positive experiences To that end, the experience you can provide to customers and potential tenants will be permanently associated with your brand and housing offers. Te experience you provide has to be as comprehensive and comfortable as possible. How do you accomplish that? People who consider leasing an apartment need to feel as relaxed as possible when making such a monumental decision. By offering an exciting and comfortable experience each time someone walks through your doors; you can help them make the decision to lease with you rather than another place that offers more perks.

Although offering perks for tenants is nothing new to the leasing world, these perks and amenities have become more important over the years. While you may not consider the amenities you offer a part of the “customer experience” - it’s actually exactly that! Your tenants, or future tenants are your customers, and they expect a great customer experience just like you might expect from your internet provider, local furniture store or moving service provider.

It might be easy to brush off this sort of thinking, considering it’s the actual apartment, condo or room you’re looking to rent rather than the amenities you offer outside of it. However, studies show that customer experience is on its way to becoming the key brand differentiator, which means if you want your company to stand out going forward you have to focus on customer experience. Otherwise, you might just get left behind.

What is Customer Experience, exactly?

Customer experience is the perception customers have of how you treat them. This perception can impact their behavior, their feelings toward remaining loyal to you and how likely they are to purchase from you. In effect, if they like you and have a good experience they will continue doing business with you, and continue to spend more which will increase your profit. Happy customers will also recommend you to friends and family, also improving your profits and brand image.

This is important! Customers are not only willing to stay with you, but they are willing to spend more money with you. For example, studies show that customers will spend, on average, 18% more on services if that customer has a good experience during their interaction with the company/brand.

But don’t think you can just bulk everything together and end up with happy customers each time. Customers need to know that you care about them individually. You can do this by offering personalized experiences throughout each interaction. A perfect example of providing a personalized experience is what you offer in the waiting room when a customer shows up. Each time a customer is in your office you have to give them something personalized. You have to learn about what they like and don't like and then use that valuable customer data to improve the customer experience. Knowing that someone's religion or dietary needs prohibits them from consuming coffee, and therefore going above and beyond to offer a wide range of non-caffeinated beverages is one way to demonstrate that you care. Along the same vein, knowing that someone is diabetic and worried about their sugar intake and therefore offering them a range of sugar-free natural drinks will do the same. Considering free beverages and/or snacks is such a popular perk offered by leasing offices during tours, this is a good place to start.

Improving customer experience proactively will improve customer retention by 42%, improve customer satisfaction by 33%, and increase your cross-selling and your upselling by 32%!

In order to keep your customers loyal, you have to invest in the customer experience. In 2019 alone more than 50% of organizations redirected their investments to focus on customer experience innovations. Companies that Implement projects focused on customer experience can tangentially benefit from collecting customer feedback early on. Talk to customers and have them fill out surveys about the experience they had in the waiting room, or during a tour, and compare it to previous experiences. Ask them about what things they would change or how you can better meet their expectations.

And what happens if your customer experience is bad?

13% of unsatisfied customers will tell at least 15 people about the experience. Don’t miss this! Can you imagine the impact of someone who toured your apartment or condo complex going out and telling 15 people (each of whom is probably within your target audience) that your customer experience is horrible?

On the other hand, if they have a positive experience, 72% of customers will share their joy with at least 6 people. Statistically this means that for every 3 customers who have a great experience, it takes just 1 unhappy customer to ruin all of the marketing efforts that were gained.

But, only 1 out of 26 customers who have a bad experience will openly complain about it before they switch to another company. This means that just because you aren't hearing negative feedback doesn't mean that your customers are happy or that you can avoid investing in a positive customer experience. Indifference in customers can cause them to leave just as quickly as a negative experience. 

In a survey of 15,000 consumers, 1 in 3 said they left a brand they had previously loved after a single bad experience. This means loyal tenants who have been renting from you and spreading word to their friends and family can lose their love of your company in a single day. 

Even if you are able to give a positive customer experience 9 out of 10 times, that one remaining time could be the person who complains to at least 15 people or it could be the person who complains to no one but still ends their lease or decides not to lease with you. Either way it's not worth the risk!

Investing in Lavit

Overall businesses will soon be competing almost exclusively on customer experience, or at least, customer experience will continue to be one of the top deciding factors that consumers and renters use to determine what company they are going to purchase from. Brands that put customer experience first or going to stand above the rest and win loyalty. Delivering an excellent customer experience means knowing customers intimately, having customer profiles and really understanding what it is they need when they you come to the office. With that information you can personalize the interactions and give customers more power and more choice when they walked through the door.

One of the easiest ways to do that in an apartment, condo or hose rental business is by using the Lavit Drink system.

Lavit is an on-demand drink cooler that uses patented Ecocaps to craft delicious beverages at the touch of a button. Not unlike offering free coffee or cans of sparkling water for potential and current tenants, Lavit is there to show your customers that you care by providing a pick-me up. The Lavit cooler is much more than just a drink dispenser, though! Lavit not only provides 25+ delicious drinks, still or sparkling, but using Lavit means ditching plastic and providing healthy options for your customers.

With over 25 drink options, customers can choose from a wide variety of preservative-free drinks that use natural ingredients and filtered water. Customers aren't left with nothing but canned soda, energy drinks, or artificial juices. Instead they can choose healthy drinks, most of which have zero sugar and always have fewer than 10 calories.

There are plenty of ways to ramp up your customer experience for current and potential tenants, but choosing to have a Lavit water cooler in your clubhouse, waiting room or touring office is just about the simplest solution around.

In fact, you can even try Lavit for a full week at no cost to you!

Get Lavit FREE for an entire week - https://try.drinklavit.com/free-offer/