Great ideas that don't work (Part I): adding a tenant experience platform to your properties.

Stefan Zanetti, Founder of Allthings:

I'm starting a new series on our blog called 'Great ideas that don't work'.

In the past years we have encountered many ideas in the Proptech environment -and also developed some of them ourselves - which, in retrospect, turned out not to be very effective. And still today, we continue to be approached by customers and interested parties with the same ideas. Of course, we want to avoid repeating our mistakes. Ideally, we even learn something from them and decide to do things differently next time. Or even better: to do it right from the start. That's what this series is all about.

Today, part one: adding a tenant experience platform to your properties.

Of course it is a good idea to put the tenant experience at the centre. The possible solutions to improve this tenant experience - from concierge services to smart building components and bookable resources - are practically exploding at the moment. And if you then translate it into English, you can practically see a new world opening up in front of you: TX - Tenant Experience. Who could say no to that?

Only, the whole concept is not new at all. Twenty years ago, other industries already began to systematically design their services from the customer's perspective under the label 'Customer Experience' (CX). In fact, by now we have all experienced ourselves what leading providers understand to be an outstanding customer experience. For example, I myself have seen very well thought-out customer processes at banks like DKB in Germany or insurance companies like smile in Switzerland - not to mention completely new providers like revolut or N26. However, these companies are not aiming for outstanding customer experiences for purely altruistic reasons. There is enough data available to show that impressed customers tend to stay longer, are more accommodating in the event of a hiccup, buy faster or buy again more often, and are also much more likely to recommend the service to others compared to customers whose experiences are bad. All this has a high impact on profitability. So far so good.

But there is also much to learn from these industries: First of all, you have to get the basics - what I like to call the 'duty' part of the customer experience - right before you can graduate any the additional or special offering. By 'duty', I mean the basic processes that exist in every industry. In insurance, for example, it would be things like picking up the phone, making damage reports easy for customers, not treating them like an enemy or a fool, knowing the current status of their claims processing, etc. In the real estate industry, from the tenant's point of view, it would be everything to do with contract processing, onboarding, and daily interaction on the ongoing issue of repairs, or other day-to-day incidents.

Additional offers, such as the above mentioned concierge services, are of course on the rise but their effects will only start to unfold once the duties are fulfilled and these basics are in place.

Anyone who ignores this order of things will fail. This applies to the residential as well as the commercial market but also to all other asset types. The tenants will rightly complain that they do not need a concierge, but would have finally liked an answer to what they consider to be a simple enquiry, which was lost somewhere in the tangle of numerous communication channels and service providers.

Therefore: If you want to introduce a tenant experience platform, it would be a good idea to first map out the basic processes clearly and to align the work processes with existing service providers accordingly.Especially if the service providers are still inclined to cause disappointed tenants instead of an outstanding tenant experience.

Once that has been achieved, you will be successful. So the truly great idea is to focus on the tenant experience itself and align everything else with this goal as a first step. Then, where needed, use a platform to meet these goals.

It seems clear that this is the only way to do it, does it not?