Measuring the hard return on a tenant experience platform, purely in terms of profitability, is not easy. Nor is it simple to benchmark the overall "happiness" of your community. Thankfully, there are many ways to measure success — metrics and objectives that, if reached, demonstrate a positive impact on the lives of customers in your buildings.
This content series is designed to help you set achievable and measurable goals for your tenant experience platform and engagement activities — whether you use Equiem, or another provider.
These first three metrics — you might also call them goals, or objectives — should ideally be captured and calculated using tools built right into your tenant experience platform. Some tools work better to measure hard ROI, while others combine to better prove soft ROI. For instance, you would consult your analytics product to determine an increase in user registrations (hard); but to gauge the improvement of brand reputation, you might use an in-built polling tool (soft).
1. New registrations per month
Type: Hard ROI
Measurement tool: Your in-built analytics product
How to set your building target:
NR/M = (building pop x desired % total registrations) / 12
This target is usually determined as a small proportion of total building population, if that number is known. So, if your building pop is 3,500, and you aim to have at least 50% of your building registered to the platform within its first year of operation, you might set a new registrations-per-month target of 145 users. This monthly target will help direct and refine the activities of your marketing and customer success teams, all in service of the yearly goal.
Going deeper:
This metric may seem obvious, but it is a helpful jumping-off point for deeper, more contextual analysis. If your registration rate continues steadily over time — or even increases — outside of major launch events or activations, this commonly means that you have a healthy community based, at least in part, on peer referrals. You might supplement that hypothesis with an NPS survey — if the majority of your users would recommend the platform, and their recommendations are actually resulting in conversions, your ROI is all but proven.
What if your rate of new registrations spikes during onsite activations, but otherwise falls below targets? This does not mean your platform is not attractive to new users, and is therefore not providing the desired return. Instead, it proves that your experiential marketing strategies are particularly effective in securing ROI — that is, new users can be easily convinced of the value of your platform when it is demonstrated to them, in person. Based on this knowledge, you can alter your marketing strategy accordingly. You might, for instance, run a campaign wherein you hire product ambassadors to engage and demonstrate the product to tenants moving through high-traffic lobby areas.
2. Increase in MAU (Monthly Active Users)
Type: Hard ROI
Measurement tool: Your in-built analytics product
How to set your building target:
First, you have to set your baseline MAU target. An MAU of 30-50% is most typical for a healthy, well-engaged community. So, in the first year operating your platform, you might set a baseline MAU target of 30%, or 300 users out of the 1,000 registered to your platform.
From this, you might set as your target an MAU increase of 10% (of total registrations) for year two. That means you're striving for an additional 100 active users per month (unless your total building population changes).
Going deeper:
MAU is perhaps the most commonly-referenced metric in the tenant experience industry. If you set a goal of 40% MAU (that is, 40% of users registered to your platform use the platform in a given month), and hit that 40% goal every month, you have achieved your desired ROI.
A better, more ambitious objective is an upward trend. If your MAU increases, over time, you can be even more certain that your community is responding to the usefulness of your technology and the appeal of your engagement activities. Targeting trends also motivates your customer success teams to innovate, to provide additional points of interaction and value, rather than rely on the same seasonal activations and competitions every year.
For instance, we find that a comprehensive content strategy is a slow-burning method of elevating MAU over the long term. You might build a daily and weekly schedule filled with informative blog articles, industry news pieces, partner offers, and more. You might not see high engagement with that stream for several months (and sometimes, even a year or more). However, there is a point of critical mass, a point at which users become familiar with your schedule and begin to interact more with the content — comment on it, like it, share it with other users. As they do, MAU slowly increases, because a greater proportion of users have more reason to interact with your platform on a more regular basis. The result is a stronger, healthier, and more engaging offering.
Tracking an uptrend in MAU is also an effective way of measuring the success of new products added to your platform. For instance, you might launch an access control integration with HID, enabling users to enter their building and office using your tenant experience platform on their smartphone instead of plastic access cards.
Let's say that product update launched in March: That's what we call an event, for data purposes. When measuring your change in MAU, as normal, you would signpost the month of March and look out for anomalous rises in the months following (April, May, and so on). This will help you to see if/how the introduction of access control has changed usage behaviour. Has it:
- Encouraged more users to sign up to the platform (or is the idea of not needing a plastic card not compelling enough?)
- Encouraged users to do more on the platform, given they are using it more regularly? (Do people read their building news more, now that they open the app reliably at a certain time, each day?)
And so on.
3. Increase in employee productivity
Type: Hard and soft
Measurement tool: Your built-in polling system, and/or your air quality measurement system
How to set your building target:
Soft: Simply ask your tenants, via regular polls or a survey, whether they are more productive as a result of the introduction of your tenant experience platform and/or associated features. You could conduct this poll quarterly, bi-yearly, or yearly, to track changes in sentiments.
Hard: Measure and adjust CO2 levels in your building using a smart building measurement platform or plug-in.
Going deeper:
Thanks to COVID-19 and the great shift to remote working, it has never been more important to monitor attitudes toward the office environment. Has your tenant experience platform improved employee output, by simplifying the everyday functions of the workplace? Will it be an ongoing factor in tenant leasing decisions? These are big questions, but the answers can be easily and non-invasively sought, directly from your customers, using a polling function (or a survey).
If you suspect your e-commerce platform empowers productivity, for instance, you might look at hard adoption metrics first. An analytics dashboard visualisation might tell you that users prefer desk delivery over click and collect, because it is less disruptive. But hard numbers will not always tell you how productivity might be further improved. For that, you need direct feedback from those who use it.
Want something more quantitative? Measure CO2. Plentiful is the scientific evidence which states that fresh air is essential for optimal working conditions. Carbon dioxide has been found to cause a 23% impairment to decision making, and an 11% reduction in productivity. By using an air quality monitoring system, you can track all the key areas in your building at once, in real time, and react quickly to increase oxygen levels if needed. Well-managed CO2, therefore, is a well-keyed investment into a high-functioning office building.
Stay tuned for more helpful ways to measure the ROI of your tenant experience platform — our methods aim to serve you, whichever provider you're with. Meanwhile, if you want to know more about your very own Equiem solution, book a consultation with us today.
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