Customer Service & Brand Involvement for Multifamily Marketers

Reputation is built on the stories we share, and customer service can be the make-or-break for your community’s success. If you exceed expectations you have the power to transform an ordinary renter experience into the extraordinary. The difference between an “I trusted the leasing office” and “they don’t really know what they’re doing here, therefore…this is an overpriced, underserved apartment building” comes down to ensuring the customer feels seen and heard. 

With competition rapidly growing in the multifamily sector, older communities are having to go head-to-head with new construction. 

Did you know that according to J Turner Research, if you boost your resident satisfaction by 5% your retention increases by 10-15%. So where do we begin? Now your property needs to strategize or refresh how to stand out from the rest, but not sure where to begin. It all starts with your brand. A brand identity goes far beyond the colors, fonts, and logo. That is just the beginning; how do your customers feel when they interact with your property?

 Think big about the definition of your customer; this applies to your prospects, your current renters up for renewal, your vendor partners, your coworkers, and beyond. Expand the brand involvement from the inside out, top to bottom—including customer service and you can bolster your reputation, financial success, etc. 

Bring Your People Into the Branding

Let’s dive into property branding! When it comes to this phase of strategy development, you will want to keep in mind the parent corporate branding. Defining a brand at both the corporate and property level will establish a clear identity that sets it apart within the industry. Create a strategy, while ensuring to get all key players involved throughout the process. By getting clear on your strategy it helps residents, partners, and employees understand its purpose, values, and impact. How are your customers going to feel when they interact with your brand? How are employees going to talk about their experience working on site? What are the touchpoints of the customer journey in the life cycle of renting, employment, and business collaboration? With a clear strategy,  every element of the brand contributes to a cohesive and recognizable presence.

For site level branding, we’re not necessarily talking about involving top management, though they’ll need to have buy-in later on. However, it is critical to clearly articulate the financial and occupancy goals of the property to marketing and site teams to ensure they understand the deeper results the brand is built to achieve. 

Think culture: a brand rooted in culture transforms function into purpose.  That purpose then informs the everyday customer experience. When we have a deeper connection to our work, it provides deeper meaning and motivation—resulting in elevated service.

In your strategy as you develop your brand, allow the on-site teams and regional folks into the conversation, early and often. Because of their proximity not only to the property, but also to competition, they’ll have some unique insight that will get your community better set apart. 

This serves (at least) two vital purposes:

1. Buy in from the inside out—starting with listening to the “boots on the ground” part of your staff
2. Unique differentiation to better set your community apart.

By building up a strong community identity, your apartments will look and feel different. This unique identity for each property is enhanced by a consistent brand voice and visual language – ‘connective tissue’ that ensures a cohesive experience across all your properties. Once you get your branding completely consistent by starting from the inside out, the resident experience is fully elevated.

Note: This will be easier with rebrands of existing communities rather than new construction, based on where hired personnel are located. But it’s always worth tapping into local insider knowledge and considering who on your team may have the best connection to the market. This is your negotiation discussion to have marketers involved early and often in the acquisitions discussion. The earlier your marketing team is involved, the earlier they can begin their market research to successfully determine the SWOT of the current branding. 

If you’re working on a lease-up and the brand is in development, but the building isn’t yet open for residents, send in someone to immerse in the market to fully understand competitors and local insight months, if not years in advance of opening. It is also essential for marketing to be involved early and often in development, as this can often make or break the success of a lease-up. 

Implementing the Brand

You’ve just spent a bunch of time strategizing and creating your brand guidelines. You’ve ensured you have a clearly defined brand positioning, verbal expression, visual expression, and have outlined sample applications in various mediums so various levels of the organization have a deep understanding to be empowered by the brand. Now the rubber meets the road—ensuring the brand persona is working across all channels by activating your apartment brand via staff training and brand guideline.

TRAINING STAFF

On-site, you’ll need to go deep into the resident persona. Knowing who you are vs who you are not within the branding guidelines is the perfect place to start, as it will get to the deeper level of the “why” and “who” behind the brand choices. It is helpful for your staff to embody the brand in their actions and communications with staff and full cycle renters alike. Training should include mock exercises of what good experiences look like vs poor experiences. This may seem obvious, but by taking the time to go over these scenarios allows you to hold your teams to high standards that will allow them to achieve superior customer satisfaction, which results in operational financial results. Not able to do this in person? No problem! This is a great time to utilize the tools you have for virtual leasing to build a library of video content to best train your staff of all positions onsite, so you can streamline your onboarding strategy. This is also a great way to prove 360 ROI on the video technology you have invested in for your marketing technology stack. With video you can empower teams to be inspired by how branding can come through in such everyday mock interactions. 

A bonus to training your staff on everything for your brand: team retention. Your people will feel like they have some semblance of ownership when the culture is crafted and the brand is maintained starting from the inside. Plus, ownership leads to consistency and loyalty. In addition, recognition is a powerful tool: consider recognizing team members who embody the organization’s culture. The team member won’t forget the approval, and the recognition validates the importance of the culture.

BRAND PERSONA GUT CHECK

Not sure if the branding is being used properly across the board? Ensure you’re not hitting the “one and done” on training your employees. Ensure they all have access to the brand guidelines and can easily access mock interaction video content so teams know how to use it, and are reinforcing it for themselves and for those around them.
Use Canva’s brand kit to maintain fonts and colors in quick graphic design items and ChatGPT to create social posts that work within your brand voice. And be sure to have everyone policing themselves and others with the brand guidelines in hand.

Selling the Brand Experience

In today’s market everyone loves a good deal. People value personalized moments where they feel seen and heard; this applies to your team members, prospects, and renters alike. It’s better in the long run to have a brand that works to connect on an emotional level with residents. If it’s done well and done consistently, it can have the greatest impact on your residents—more than the colors, more than the logos—the brand experience looks like:

• Staff taking on the brand personality in their interactions
• Responses to maintenance requests
• How resident disputes are handled
• Events and happenings in your community
• How changes to policies and technology on site are communicated

BEYOND CONCESSIONS AND ADS

When your brand experience is different and good, it can be more effective in signed leases and renewals—rather than just discounts. Getting the first month’s rent free is great—and advertising your latest deals is all part of marketing. But once those deals dry up and they’ve seen all your ads, what’s left? Your brand. If it’s good.

A strong brand cultivates a powerful reputation. Reputation is built on the stories we share, and our reputation is what consumers are sharing about us when we are not in the room. These stories, whether whispered amongst friends or shared publicly online, can lead to a long list of benefits. Resident referrals become a valuable source of new leads, positive online reviews enhance credibility, and a strong reputation attracts top talent to your team. A well-crafted brand acts as a silent salesperson, working tirelessly to build trust and attract loyal residents even when you’re not actively marketing.

ENGAGE RESIDENTS WITH BETTER BRANDING

If we are selling a dream-home lifestyle in our ads and digital marketing, we need to ensure we are delivering that same experience consistently and everywhere– from online to in person. If we build strong brands they will instill trust in the prospect before they ever step foot on site, which gives our site teams a big responsibility to maintain that trust through the experience they deliver.

Make sure your brand is ready to take on the weight of your residents’ expectations—this means outstanding customer service that aligns with your brand promise. Just like we want marketers involved early and often in development and acquisition timelines, ongoing communication throughout the renter cycle applies equally. Using the right words shapes perception and expectation, and your customer service is left to follow through. 

Build a Brand-Bought-In Team

Work to create a culture where staff feel fully integrated with the brand. The more trained around the “why” behind branding choices, the more likely they are to be bought-in to the brand. Which then leads to a shift in the culture of your team. 

By creating community appeal through branding, your team will be more cohesive, and your customer service will come more naturally.