Contextualised data, as the phrase suggests, is all about data generated by practical tenant actions that point to actionable insights.
In our experience, real estate analytics tend to be represented as walls of endless numbers, framed by lines of obtuse jargon. We want commercial landlords to look at a visualisation of data, know instantly what it means, and what it tells them to do next. We want to generate, first, causal links and strong correlations.
The following is an excerpt from the CRE Landlord's Guide to Tenant App Analytics. Download your copy here.
Tenant experience analytics are tied directly to the behaviours of tenants in your assets, as evidenced by interactions with your tenant experience technology suite. These analytics, combined, build a comprehensive historical picture of building and technology usage, and prescribe iterative improvements to building management teams.
Let's examine the overarching material benefits of investing in a combination smart data-analysis platform.
1. Better understand your tenant population
A crucial component of effective marketing is granular segmentation. To market your tenant app effectively to your diverse building population, you need to build comprehensive and accurate profiles of each customer group (or segment). Why? Consider Meredith Hill's time-honoured adage: "When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one."
A community is not built on boilerplate memos or generic e-handshakes — it is the sum of small, personalised engagements. This is, in part, what Dror Poleg means when he talks about the winning landlords of the future.
Your average CRM may give you demographic information on a company level (e.g., industry and size), but it is far more difficult (and extremely rare) for landlords to maintain veracious records of the customer groups that transcend company and industry. Equiem enables you to capture a virtually endless amount of customer properties, such as:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Role
- Level of seniority
- Interests
- Remote working habits
These personal properties can be combined with building-based details (such as floor, area, tower, etc) to form super-targeted customer segments. Once you know who in your building cycles to work, or which tenants specifically are concerned about COVID-19 safety measures, or even which tenants like to have their dry cleaning handled on-site, you can tailor your engagement programs specifically to those segments.
Accurate segmentation through regular data capture is one of the key functions of Equiem's tenant experience platform, and it gives building managers and customer success teams a dazzling list of opportunities to provide innovative and memorable customer service. Such service will inevitably come in handy when the time comes to discuss lease renewals with key tenants — more on this below.
Another simple pathway to better tenant understanding is qualitative feedback. By conducting regular polls and surveys using your tenant app, you can gauge tenant sentiment and gather useful insights to improve products, services, and engagement activities.
Polls are totally custom, giving you the freedom to ask your tenants whatever you like, over any time period you choose, in order to form your own asset or portfolio benchmarks. For example, during COVID-19, landlords were burning to know:
- Are you enjoying working from home?
- When are you planning on returning to the office?
- How can we improve your office experience when you do return?
And so on. During the pandemic, Equiem clients could ask these questions quickly and easily via their tenant apps, and have their insights delivered directly to their Analytics Dashboards. In doing so, they were able to improve their assets and customer engagement strategies based on the responses they received. To see what they learned, check out our 2020 Global Office Tenant Report.
2. Streamline operations
When it comes to everyday tenant management, property and customer success managers have a vast and complicated remit. The right tenant app digitizes and therefore simplifies traditional logistical processes, such as the signing of waivers or the booking of meetings or facilities. The data, captured after those actions have taken place, take you one step further: They illuminate inefficiencies and prescribe iterative fixes, optimising the front and back-end user experiences for your customers and team members, respectively.
Here's a common use case we encounter with our work orders system. The platform, which dovetails seamlessly with your base tenant app, enables tenants to submit work requests and hazard reports. Your team can then view orders, assign contractors, update the statuses of work orders, and more. After a while, the data often uncover areas for improvement, such as the average delay from job call-out to completion. Your analytics might also identify opportunities for preventative maintenance — a floor where lightbulbs regularly die, for example, may warrant the closer eye of an electrician and a larger-scale upgrade to infrastructure.
3. Build better leasing strategies
Leasing and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software solutions have helped landlords and leasing teams create and manage lease payments and renewals for a while now. But let's say you don't have a dedicated platform to help you strategically prioritise and chase renewals; or say, perhaps, that you are missing some of the key data points necessary to formulate comprehensive tenant profiles. Maybe you need new methods of personalising outreach in the wake of COVID-19.
The right tenant experience platform can strategically support leasing teams by:
- Simplifying the process of prioritising renewal targets
- Providing more of the critical data required to understand what specific tenants want, think, and do
- Helping to formulate and execute tailored retention plans
- Galvanising relationships with tenants based on personalisation and goodwill
We have a four-step retention action plan template built specially for leasing professionals — check it out here. The upshot is this: all of the information you need to build a renewal target for a specific tenant is produced and distilled for you by Equiem's Analytics Dashboards.
Let's be more specific: Using the Tenant Activity dashboard, for instance, you can compile a three-month summary of the behaviours and preferences of a specific tenant. In so doing, you will learn:
- The expiry date of the lease
- Total number of tenant app registrations for that company
- Quarterly (three-month) active usage rate
- Department spread of registered users (e.g. 20% admin, 50% marketing/sales, etc)
- Most-read content
- Favourite app engagement activities (e.g. comment-to-win contests)
- Most popular events
- Most-used services and amenities
- Any tenant-specific pieces of qualitative feedback (either from polls or surveys)
These metrics, if properly mined over time from across your tenant experience technology suite, can bolster your understanding of specific tenants (see benefit 1) and help you build tailored engagement campaigns based on what they do, like, and think.
4. Improve engagement programming
To be truly effective, your analytics solution must provide exhaustive and detailed metrics covering all customer touch points. Conversely, it must also distil those metrics into quick-glance visualisations and actions. This is for the benefit of diverse building management teams: Customer success managers or marketing professionals may need to examine newsletter results in great depth, in order to test hypotheses and improve readership rates; landlords, however, need only the broad strokes, the long-term trends, be they up or down.
Equiem's Analytics Dashboards offer you this flexibility. Let's look at the main engagement verticals, and the benefits of capturing meaningful data from each.
The 'Last 30 Days' and 'Overview' tabs are designed to give you a quick-glance report on the last month of activity across your platform and products. Here you can easily see active usage rates, new registrations, retention rates, and more. Compare recent activity with longer-term trends.
The Content tab gives you comprehensive results on your content strategy: post views, likes and comments; performance over time, readership habits across company, building, and time of day, and much more. Here is also where you can check on newsletter performance, including open and click-through rates. All of this helps you to optimize your content strategy so you can keep your tenants engaged.
The Events tab gives you instant feedback on the performance of your event engagement: RSVPs, attendees, the most popular events by time, date and season, and more. Optimize your onsite programming based on event attendance by company to maximize your event budgets or tailor your programming to your unique tenant mix.
Under the 'Services & Revenue' tab, you can see the performance of your e-commerce platform. Data on vendor revenue, Space bookings, popular store items, customer peak periods, and more all appear here. Understand the utilization of onsite amenities and the health of your onsite retailers, and develop strategies to generate revenue through onsite amenities and services.
Tracking these hard numbers is crucial because tenant feedback, of the kind mentioned in benefit 1, will only take you so far. Tenants will tell you what content they like (or don't like); they will recommend event ideas to you; and they may even point to elements of cumbersome design. These are all helpful insights, and are not to be discarded, but they are not likely in isolation to help you achieve new heights of usage and customer satisfaction.
UX researchers Nielsen Norman Group advise the same thing: "To design the best UX", they write, "pay attention to what users do, not what they say." This philosophy also applies to tenant engagement analytics — with the right data, you can uncover more about what your tenants want and do than they could ever tell you.
5. Inform capital improvements
In the post-COVID-19 world, it is all but certain that commercial office buildings will change drastically. New leasing deals will be struck, retail precincts will grow or shrink, tenancies will shift, floor space will be reallocated, a swathe of new We Work-styled flex space zones will crop up — and this forecast is by no means exhaustive. Hybrid-working individuals are wont to be fickle.
For landlords facing the prospect of refurbishment, remodelling, innovation, or tenancy downsizing, it can be hard to prioritise the allocation of capital. Market uncertainty adds an additional layer of complexity. What will my tenants want in three, six, 12, 24 months? Which tenants do I invest in, through improvements to infrastructure or service, in reasonable hope of a return via renewed leases?
The questions abound. Fortunately, tenant app data can provide minimum viable improvements, which are a good defence against the tumult of the future. Do the best smallest thing you can do, test, iterate, and repeat.
Consider the growing popularity of smart building tech, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. A platform like Smart can tell you how tenants navigate your building, where the traffic choke points are, which tenancies are underutilized or badly laid out, and more. With that information you can make informed decisions about capital improvements: For instance, you could plan a revitalisation to your onsite retail precinct by analyzing and rerouting lobby foot traffic.
6. Prove that working from the office can be more productive than remote working
In his recent Propmodo article De-Densification and the New Metrics of the Office, Antony Slumbers advances the idea that offices, if properly configured, can achieve new relevance and purpose in the hybrid-working world as hubs of measurable productivity. Employees will have their home offices, with all the attendant benefits, such as work-hour flexibility and the lack of commute — but the office can be more than a cumbersome like-for-like substitute, or a periodic meeting place.
If landlords can prove that their buildings are quantifiably better for productivity than the home office, then companies have a compelling reason to continue and renew their leases.
"No business actually wants an office," Slumbers writes. "What they want is the best outcome for the office. What they want is a productive workforce. They want a creative workforce. They want a happy and healthy workforce."
"...So what if you made improving the productivity of people the core value proposition within the office? What if we stopped thinking about space, and started thinking about improving the productivity of people?"
What makes people productive? The answer is simpler than we might think. According to Metrikus — our partner in providing Smart, our building occupancy and air quality tracking system — lower CO2 levels make for more productive humans. Citing research from the UK, they point out that high levels of CO2 cause a 23% impairment in decision making, and an 11% reduction in productivity.
Using Smart, you can track lobby traffic, building occupancy, air quality and more — across tenancies, common areas, elevators, buildings, and even your entire portfolio. Even better, all of this tracking data is fed to you in real time. This real-time data helps you to improve the health and wellbeing — and thus the productivity — of your tenants.
Equiem's Core tenant experience platform solution includes our Analytics Dashboards product, which provides you all of the analytics you need to access the benefits detailed above. If you want more data, or need ways to optimise your engagement strategy, we can help. Book a consultation with us today.
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