When you think of customer service, what comes to mind first? Likely it’s an interaction with a shop or a restaurant, but what about customer service for your community? While a community isn’t a “business” necessarily, you are serving the public of your community as a community management team. When serving the public, there is a certain rapport to be built, and this rapport lies largely on the back of your approach to customer, or resident, service. What does great community customer service look like? There are a few examples:

•  First impressions matter – The impression that prospective residents will make of your community management team happens within seconds of your first meeting. This is where your approach to customer service starts. Keep first meetings, interactions, and tours friendly, engaged, and enthusiastic about the community experience you can provide. Be attentive to prospect questions or concerns, and make sure any tours or meetings are timely and efficient.

•  Be transparent and proactive – Customer service skills will be used most in communication with community residents, so it’s important to keep things transparent and proactive in all interactions. Your community management team will need to address various “customer” (or resident) concerns and complaints and they’ll need to do so with empathy and in a timely manner. If certain complaints cannot be remedied, great customer service uses transparency to provide the why of the situation while remaining empathetic and understanding.

•  Take resident criticism into consideration – If a certain number of residents all come to your team with the same problem, it’s a real problem. Whether this is an upgrade needed within residences or the community, or the way your management team operates, the most valuable tool your customer service team can use is the opinion of your community.

Customer service within your community will have a direct effect on resident retention, creating a community feel, and resident rapport. To learn more about improving how your team interacts with your community, contact us at OccupancySolutions.com today.