It is amazing how much communication we are required to review, manage, respond to and maintain on a daily basis. Most of us have at least two email addresses (personal & work), two to three telephones (home, cell & work), two Facebook page (personal & work), two Twitter accounts (personal & work), two Instagram accounts (personal & work) ... that is potentially 11 accounts to maintain daily, all with multiple avenues of messaging. And there are still hundreds more should you choose to have them, these are only the top utilized. How do we keep up?
Unfortunately the answer is, we don't! Or, we prioritize which to follow up on and which to ignore.
As a marketing professional, I am constantly looking at - "Cost per Lead" & "Cost per Lease". There are tons of tracking programs available to our industry (especially telephone tracking) and well worth their weight in gold ... provided once you enroll in them, you actually log on and utilize them.
Recently, I was considering purchasing some stock of in a newer REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust). As part of my due diligence to see how effective their assets were being run, I emailed each asset, pretending to be interested in renting at their community. I did receive back auto responses from 100% of the communities, which meant nothing to me (or to the potential resident) but only received back 17.6% personal responses addressing the questions I asked during my initial contact. More alarming, in the emails, I provided all of my contact information including my phone number, and I only received 1 phone call.
One would hope that these statistics are isolated to this specific company, unfortunately that would not be the case. I have done this exercise many times, including with the companies I have worked for, and they tend to consistently come in under 25%.
These percentages give cause to ask 3 important questions as managers:
1) Are our employees prioritizing communications correctly? Business communications before personal? I am tired of seeing employees' texting during work hours on personal cell phones.
2) Do our employees have a thorough understanding that each piece of communication generated has a cost related to it? Are you reviewing your total marketing costs divided by your leads and informing them of a per lead cost?
3) As managers, are we utilizing all of the programs we have at our finger tips to make sure that our leasing/customer service teams are truly following up?
Sometimes I don't think we personally realize the levity of our position. As Community Manager we have been awarded the career honor of watching over a multi-million dollar asset, this is a huge and noteworthy assignment. Each day we come to work, our eyes need to be wide open, our ears alert and our brains using every cell to asses for success.
We need to "Inspect for What We Expect" ... and we need to expect FAR MORE than what industry personnel is presently delivering.
Call Them, Text Them, Tweet Them, Email Them, Instagram Them ... BUT DON'T IGNORE THEM!
