Konnexsion Property Manager

What is customer relationship management (CRM)?

Customer relationship management, or CRM for short, is a tool that’s often mentioned when discussing sales functions. As a means to stay in contact with, follow up, and keep a record of your interactions with both current and potential prospects or customers, it’s one of the best methods to ultimately convert the business and manage a sale.

It is for this reason that companies are now using CRM as a post-sales customer retention solution as it also strengthens business relationships, by recording customers’ and prospects’ history, driving both sales growth and strong customer retention. 

How does CRM improve customer retention for property managers?

I’ve also found that CRM solutions aren’t just useful to push an initial sale over the line, but as a mechanism for effectively and efficiently managing your customers well beyond the sale.

By being responsive and proactive to your customer's needs, and keeping a good record of your discussions, you can improve your customer satisfaction and ultimately retain them for far longer with ongoing business interaction. 

Having implemented Global CRM solutions as part of my day job prior to my days as a full-time property manager, I used it to manage corporate operations and in doing so significantly reduced the cost of running the function, whilst dramatically improving the satisfaction of customers and business partners.

How does CRM apply to managing a rental portfolio?

It is these benefits that I saw that CRM could be applied to managing a rental portfolio. Konnexsion takes these CRM concepts and uses them to support the effective management of the property manager’s rental portfolio.

It was envisioned that Konnexsion would provide a single hub that captured all the interaction you and your team have with your tenants, agents, and maintenance providers. It is a CRM solution to manage your rental portfolio and more.

The messaging medium wouldn’t matter either, as you could choose to communicate via email, SMS, or within the tool itself. Konnexsion would always retain a full audit of everything that was communicated, and store all of it in the cloud.

What are the benefits of CRM for your business?

The benefits of CRM are multi-faceted and help organise areas you may never have thought of.

Some of these include:

• Tracking your properties: Ensure all your certificates are maintained, record and track repairs and renewals, and store manuals and procedures. The complexity of this will only grow if you manage a co-living or shared accommodation. 
• Managing tenancies: CRM helps you follow your own processes: from marketing and referencing, through to contracting, a tenant’s first day, inspections, and finally the exit process at the end of a contract.
• Prioritising your duties: We all know that it is impossible to define ‘business as usual’ for a property manager. Each and every day can feel unique based on the order of your priority list. However, with a solution that manages expiring licenses, tenant queries, scheduled cleaning, and emergency problems, your day can be readily prioritised and then well delegated amongst your team. Having everything in a single location will allow you to ensure that the right team member is working on the activities they were employed to perform. Plus, with Konnexsion’s CRM system, you can use the platform to assign tasks to different members of your team instantly. 
• Calculating finances: As property professionals, we all know how quickly spending can spiral. Whether it’s the monthly rent or costs on your end, you should be able to track a P&L (Profit & Loss) right down to the property level.  Plus, with Make Tax Digital coming into force soon, having real-time finances will be essential.

Transparency between you, your tenants, and maintenance teams will also ensure goodwill:

• Everyone involved will have access to information: this includes manuals, policies, and other information
• Opening communication channels: never underestimate the value of your team or tenants being able to raise a concern, and then having the confidence that it will be dealt with.
• Finance visibility: the knowledge that payments are being received and recorded
• A feeling of community within an HMO or development