4 minute read
Greater Expectations
How community management has evolved from contract fulfillment to providing outstanding customer experience and engagement.
By Frank Jauregui, CCAM
Community management is going through a paradigm shift–we are moving away from simply managing our communities to providing concierge/hospitality-type service experiences to our clients.
It is not an overstatement to say that the association management industry has undergone a tectonic shift over this past decade in how we interact and fulfill the obligations of our management contracts.
For many years, association management companies seemed to have existed outside of the collective consciousness of the general populace. A profession that was often misunderstood and shrouded in mystery as simply an administrative obligation of the association to collect monthly assessments, create violation letters and help the board of directors’ function in their board duties.
And over those many years, community management firms have been happy to function and thrive under the confines of this classification–simply existing to fulfill their contractual obligations to their clients doing these very things listed above.
But as we all know, things can never stay the same–stuck as it were in a cryogenic freeze–but the irrefutable truth is that much like life itself, everything changes!
No created thing can ever stay the same. It either evolves by consistent progression or devolves into utter uselessness, ultimately being cast aside.
So too, the nature of our industry is always in the process of transformation. Gone are the days of typewriters, fax machines, carbon paper and large filing cabinets. Gone are the days of tape recorders, ‘white-out’ and cell phones the size of mason blocks. These tools are relegated to items of novelty and a by-gone era of nostalgia.
We now use cloud-based portals to connect immediately with clients. We use artificial intelligence to manage particular phone apps that can open and manage association work orders. We create web-based operating systems to collect, collate and categorize massive amounts of homeowner data, which can be accessed at a click/ swipe of the finger.
Our monumental technological advancements as an industry have expedited the manner in how communication and information steams back and forth between our homeowner clients and our firms.
And yet, with all of these advancements and our superior methods of transmission, the fact of the matter is that the constituent nature of humanity is that each of us wants to feel a real perceived connection. Whether that connection is a face-toface communication; or, a cyber interaction that has an authenticity that resembles the empathetic human touch.
The scope of our work still contains the skeletal structure of the scope of our contracts, but it is primarily driven now by the type of experience we are creating with our clients.
The success of our client interactions is now quantified by the amount of “likes” we garner on social media sites, the quantity of stars that we are given on review sites and the client reviews of what they experienced with us on that most recent phone or email correspondence they just finished by clicking on those hyper-links that are found on our signature lines.
Managers and their management companies are now in the business of creating an amazing experience that transcends above and beyond the scopes of our contracts.
The speed, efficiency and manner in how we perform our functions, as perceived by those persons we serve, determines our day-by-day success in an industry that has companies entering the market with their progressive brand of concierge services.
It is now time for us as an industry and professionals to realize that our vocation is to provide amazing, exceptional and profound human experiences.
From the moment our clients reach out to us, the experience begins. From the message we convey in our company branding, in the manner we deliver information, in the method we convey our empathetic gestures and concerns–even in the simple one-to-one interactions we conduct over emails and phone calls–these are all interwoven actions that create the tapestry of positive and friendly customer engagement.
Anyone can provide management services tethered to contractual obligations. The fact that we have automated systems and machines that can do just that and even more efficiently than even humans can is a testimony to our modern delivery systems.
But to have genuinely profound customer experiences, the kind of experiences that creates perceived relationships and interactions that transcend expectations—that will be the measure of a company’s success over the coming decades.
All of us want to be able to feel valued and experience a sense of appreciation for our very existence as community association management professionals.
We are the agents of change that will elevate client appreciation creating long lasting and loyal clients who conversely value and appreciate the services we so happily provide.
Frank Jauregui, CCAM is Senior Community Association Manager at The Management Trust – Southern California, ACMC.
