Customer Satisfaction and the Net Promoter Score: What Property Managers Need to Know

Do you know how loyal your current client base is?

Without a system in place to track client satisfaction, answering that question is something you do entirely based on feelings. No matter how well we think we know our business, basing future confidence on "feelings" is a risk many property management companies can't afford to take.

So, how do you learn how happy your clients are with your services? You ask them!

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

We are all aware of multi-question customer satisfaction surveys. These in-depth surveys are usually sent annually at most because of the nature of the survey. It takes time to complete, and if you are constantly interrupting your clients for their feedback, you're going to have a bad time.

• Something in-depth like a Kingsley survey is very helpful for learning about your strengths and weaknesses across departments—but it is expensive and time-consuming.
• DIY options such as running a customer satisfaction survey through a platform like SurveyMonkey is a less expensive option—but one you need to administer yourself.
• You can even build surveys through landing pages in HubSpot! The benefit from this is the answers from your survey will then live in your client contact record in the CRM for future reference.

Unfortunately, customer satisfaction surveys usually come with a relatively low response rate—under 30%.

The pros:

• In-depth, detailed data that tells you where to focus on for results.

• If launched through HubSpot, survey data is attached to your CRM.

The cons:

• Expensive to run through a third party.

• Time-consuming to run yourself.

• Surprisingly low response rates, given the cost.

The Customer Satisfaction Score

The much simpler customer satisfaction score uses question, "How satisfied are you with our service?" Users can rate their satisfaction on a scale that is usually from one to five. To get your customer satisfaction score (CSAT), you find the average of your responses. 

The customer satisfaction score is similar to the star rating you see in online reviews, with the difference being the results are not available to the public. When your client base is not happy with you, this is definitely for the best. We all know how damaging negative Google reviews can be for a business.

If your client base is happy, however, it's worth funneling those good reviews! Using a review management program to filter bad reviews to your inbox and good reviews to your Google reviews is a smart strategy when you know your client base is mostly pleased with your services.

The pros:

• You can get this score and reviews at the same time.
• Quick; has a far higher response rate.
• A single question that can be deployed in multiple places to catch users as they are interacting with you.

The cons:

• There's far less data to play with.
• This survey is extremely subjective: "happy" means different things to different people.

The Net Promoter Score

The net promoter score (NPS) is very similar to the customer satisfaction score. It is also a single question—but on a scale from zero to ten, with space for commentary below. The key difference is in the question, "how likely are you to recommend our services to a friend?" This distinction in questions is important; it's not as ambiguous as the customer satisfaction measurement of happiness. This is a question that a person can answer pretty quickly based on behavior.

• Detractors encompass scores ranging from 0-6. These are customers who are seriously dissatisfied—and are the most likely to cause churn as well as convince others not to use your business (your 1 star Google and Yelp reviewers are in this range).

• Passives are clients who answer 7 or 8. They aren't thrilled, but also aren't angry; you could lose them to a competitor.
• Promoters are what we strive for all clients to be, those rating us at a 9 or 10. Promoters are the clients leaving 5-star reviews and recommending your services to other investors they meet.

Your net promoter score is found by finding your percentage of promoters and subtracting your percentage of detractors from it. Monitoring this score over time will give you an idea of overall client satisfaction—as well as predict when it is time to look into your customer service or operations to determine why your score is dropping.

If your net promoter score is dropping, it's a good time to pay close attention to your commentary box as well for an indication from your clients as to why. The best thing is, regular NPS surveys are internal—so you can address upset clients before they head to online reviews to air their grievances.

Are you interested in rolling out NPS surveys for your clients? Contact Geekly Media! We can help you build an NPS survey program in your HubSpot portal so you can easily track client sentiment—and stay on top of client satisfaction.

If you would like to learn more about this and the other marketing automation services that we offer, schedule a simple discovery call with the experts! We'll get to know you and your business to see if our services can help you. We look forward to helping you grow!