Five Minute Friday #60: Ten Best Practices for Relationship Management

Property Management Brainstorm

Property Management Brainstorm host, Bob Preston, wrote an article for the December issue of NARPM’s Residential Resource Magazine, titled Ten Best Practices in Relationship Management. We thought it would be good to spend todays FMF on a quick review of those 10 best practices:

1. Online Presence – This is where a cand interacting with your company digitally through your website or social media.
2. CRM Software – Everything related to staying connected with that individual customer can be found in one place – names, addresses, numbers, contact info, and notes on the history of the relationship.
3. Responsiveness – If you don’t respond quickly, either too a new prospective customer or an established one, it will be impossible to forge a positive relationship.
4. Building Trust – There is no silver bullet for this one, just using common courtesy – show up on time, respond when you say you will, bring solutions and not problems, be an expert not an instigator.
5. Regular Communication – Staying in touch with your customers and keeping an open line of communication is of course critical to positive relationships.
6. Reviews – While you have no control about what a customer may say, it stokes the relationship when you let them know how they can leave a review.
7. Customer Appreciation – Your customers are more than a profit center and number on a spreadsheet. The are a living/breathing source of your good fortune to have paying clients and deserve to have a relationship with you.
8. Giving Back – Showing customers you are a socially responsible company goes a long way toward indirectly improving what customers think of you.
9. Dispute Resolution – It is highly likely that we all will face occasional conflict with a customer which provides an amazing opportunities to change the narrative, do the right thing, and show your ability to listen toward a mutually beneficial solution.
10. Staying Ahead of the Curve – Embracing ways to improve your customer service by staying up on trends and adapting them to your company will go a long way to improve your relationship management.

Relationship management is not always about the bottom line. Creating a company culture to treat others with respect will be the ultimate foundation for a great relationship management program, and you bonus, you will likely get new customers in the process!
Connect with Bob Preston
https://www.propertymanagementbrainstorm.com/
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