We live in an age where clients value the overall user experience (UX) a brand offers more than they ever have in the past because of the plethora of options readily available to them. What’s more, each one is trying to do better than the other when it comes to attracting the customer’s attention.
According to UXCam.com, “every $1 invested in user experience results in a return of $100 (ROI = 9,900%).” Therefore, if your property management platform isn’t optimized for UX, it’s a surefire sign that you need to upgrade your software to make it more intuitive and easy to use for all your end-user groups.
To help you out, here’s a list of a few essential features you should include in your property management platform when trying to furnish an optimal user experience.
1. Streamlined communications
One of the most important UX-focused property management platform features is streamlined communications. It helps you furnish an exceptional customer experience.
After all, good communication is the key when it comes to fostering a healthy relationship — whether it’s a professional one, familial or between property owners and managers.
The right communication channels can also help landlords find responsible renters, and tenants find the perfect rental home within no time.
To achieve this, your platform should, at the very least, have features such as customizable templates, an embedded chatbot, message automation, tenant access and owner access so that your clients can easily log in whenever they want to see a real-time view of their financial data, statistical growth data and other business-focused statistics as a whole.
This way, everybody using the platform gets to spend less time looking for information — and more time fostering meaningful relationships in the long run.
2. Cloud integration
Integrating the property management platform with a cloud solution can go a long way in ensuring that a landlord’s clients’ data stays secure and is backed up at regular intervals. This further enhances user experience, especially because it’s an easy-to-use and practical technique.
You can easily employ security controls such as multifactor authentication (MFA), access controls and compliance functionalities in the cloud environment to furnish a higher sense of security and satisfaction for your clients.
The cloud also helps make data more interoperable, which means that all authorized individuals across the organization and outside of it can view all this data at any given point in time — even from a remote location.
This can be especially useful if you’ve got a lot of clients who take the BRRRR (buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat) route since they require you to manage a lot of different types of properties (e.g. hotels, residential projects, commercial projects) all at once.
3. An easily accessible customer service option
Customer service is important when wanting to enhance the user’s experience with your platform because it keeps them engaged and in turn, helps you extract more value from them.
By offering exceptional customer service, your business can easily cultivate a loyal consumer base that boosts referrals, and provides positive reviews and testimonials, allowing you to recover customer acquisition costs within no time.
You can easily include a responsive customer support option or a chatbot that’s accessible around-the-clock on your property management platform with the help of which your clients can reach out to you at any given point of time.
This will enhance accessibility and leave them feeling highly satisfied and wanting to come back for more. It’s a win-win situation for both you and your clients.
4. Responsive design
Fundamentally, responsive design is nothing but a way to put together a website or app so it automatically scales its elements and content to match the screen size of the device it’s being viewed on (e.g. smartphones, desktop computers, tablets).
The end goal of employing such a design within your platform is to avoid the unnecessary scrolling, resizing, panning or zooming that occurs when sites haven’t been optimized for different devices. It is usually quite troublesome for customers to navigate these websites, and it may even cost your business potential clients who become frustrated with trying to figure out how to do something.
A responsive interface can be one of your best tools when it comes to delivering an optimal user experience. It can help you solve a lot of problems for your clients.
It will improve the way your platform looks on devices with both large and small screens, make it mobile-friendly, and increase the amount of time that visitors spend on your website/app. It can also help you improve your rankings in search engines and attract more leads over time.
The bottom line?
All in all, optimizing your platform’s user experience has more to do with designing things with your clients in mind than it is about simply following industry best practices and what has worked for others.
Choosing the right property management platform can make all the difference and put you ahead of your industry counterparts while helping you foster more meaningful relationships with your clients in the long run.
With property management running on autopilot, landlords can focus on delivering better customer service to their tenants, who get treated like clients, while concurrently saving time and money.
Sachin Latawa is the founder and CEO of Tirios. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
