Tenant apps are not only designed to improve tenant communication and achieve a corresponding boost in customer satisfaction, but to optimize workflows as well. Deloitte uses a model calculation to examine whether tenant apps can increase process efficiency in housing companies. The results, which are based anonymized usage data from Allthings, reveal time savings of up to 70%.
Despite the fact that the digitization of the real estate industry has gotten off to a slow start, the number of housing companies that integrate tenant apps into their processes has been on the rise since 2016. This trend has prompted Deloitte to examine whether it might be possible to quantify the amount of time saved by housing company employees when using a tenant app.
The results of the study, which was carried out on the basis of data provided by Allthings (www.allthings.me), reveal: If communication between tenants and administrators takes place via the service center of the tenant app, an operational employee’s workload can be reduced to one third of the normal time required per incident involving a craftsman. Processing time decreases from an average of 94 minutes to 30 minutes. Projected over the course of a year, this translates to savings of around 2,500 working days for a housing company with 30,000 apartments. What’s more, all tenants can be informed proactively and in real time of any damage affecting them or other news. That not only reduces the amount of time required for communication-related activities but also has a particularly positive impact on customer satisfaction.
“The results of the model calculation show: ideally, the amount of time an employee spends processing a reported activity can be reduced by around 70% through the use of a mobile service center. For housing companies, this means considerable savings in terms of resources and freed-up staff capacity, which can then be used to address issues that offer real added value for customers,” says Dr. Tobias Scheinert, Head of Finance and Analytics at Allthings.
According to Jörg von Ditfurth, Lead Partner Real Estate Consulting at Deloitte, “Allthings’ data on the topics communicated via the tenant app suggests that the features currently available on well-used tenant apps are already achieving appreciable increases in process efficiency. This is just one of the advantages, along with increased customer satisfaction, greater transparency and the possibility of adding additional digital services.”