Ep17: Customer loyalty management for better business outcomes — with Casey Corrigan

Join Kate Sunol and Casey Corrigan in this PropertyMe podcast episode as they explore how AskNicely integrates with PropertyMe to enhance customer loyalty and retention through strategic feedback management.

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 Hi, and welcome to Property Management and Me, a series from PropertyMe bringing quick tips and insights to support your everyday practice. I'm your host, Kate Sunol, and today I'm joined by Casey Corrigan. He is Head of Strategic Accounts at Ask Nicely, who are a relatively new integrator of Property Me.

We're really excited to have them on board and have you here today. So welcome Casey.  

Casey: Thank you, Kate. Happy to be here. 

Kate: So Ask Nicely is a loyalty management platform. So predominantly around, NPS scoring and customer loyalty surveys. Can you tell us a little bit about how that works with the property management space and what sorts of things you offer? 

Casey: Yeah. So as you said, AskNicely is an experienced management platform. We are purpose built to help multi-location service businesses measure and improve loyalty. We talk a lot about net promoter score or NPS, which is a measure of loyalty. And we'll talk a little bit about a little bit of that a little bit today. But when we think about the problems that we help our customers solve for, it's really three critical problems. And that is we are losing customers and we find out late about it. And so when it's typically a little bit too late to do anything about it, we maybe have a. Issues with reputation or word of mouth, which ultimately impacts new customer acquisition and causes an over reliance on paid marketing.

So we definitely have some solutions there. And then the third, which is really critical, and it's the starting point for great experiences, is on the frontline staff side, say, call it the property manager side and so we, we can really help organizations to solve for staff disengagement or staff turnover. 

Kate: Okay, and that varies from the NPS. You've got different metrics within your software to sort of measure that and, and address that? 

Casey: Yeah, that's right. And NPS as a score or any other metric is as a score, you know, it's of course not going to do a whole lot with it, but there's a lot of versatility of what can we then do with the feedback, not just the score itself, but the quantified feedback, and the various themes and the things that we can learn from our customers can be used quite versatilely to elevate the staff experience through motivation, through coaching, through recognition, and then ultimately to lead to behavior improvement or service improvement, so that we can make more happy customers in the onset.

We'll also do some really important things like closing the loop. So to identify who you're happy or frustrated customers are, let's say on the, the landlord owner side. So you can take action for proactive retention and then driving things like referral growth. So there's a lot that you can do with it. The score itself is, it is a measure of loyalty and growth, but measuring it will not drive loyalty and growth. It's the systematising and taking action on improving service culture, and engaging with your customers ultimately, which really moves the needle.

Kate: Absolutely a huge part of that customer loyalty management process is either making some changes or just acknowledging that feedback and restoring that relationship from there. So the goal, of course, making that process super easy for property managers, how does that integration work with AskNicely and PropertyMe? What sorts of things are we connecting? What would that look like from a day-to-day basis? 

Casey: Yeah. And, first of all, I'll say that our customers who are using the PropertyMe integration to AskNicely are so happy. We're getting some great reports, because what it's doing is automating the onboarding of landlord and tenant data from, and property manager data from PropertyMe into AskNicely and then in real time bringing in information such as when does a new management start? When does it end? What's the move in date move out date for your tenants maintenance dates things like that. 

So we're not simply just sending a survey randomly, we're able to align with the client journey at key points of truth of those moments of truth So we can get feedback and in times that are very contextual, when those experiences are, are quite influenced.

So if it is positive and we create a great sense of advocacy, we can act on it in the moment. If it is negative, we can learn about it in the moment and drive service recovery for retention. So yeah, ultimately it's aligning to those key moments in the landlord and tenant journey from PropertyMe into AskNicely.

So the whole system is, I like to call it a customer operating system. It's not, let's go in to AskNicely and start programming surveys and manually doing it. It's automated. It's real time, and quite seamless for our mutual customers. 

Kate: And the thing that I love about when you start collecting data and you start having those multiple touch points is you really see the trends change. So if you're introducing a new process or a new experience for customers and all of a sudden your baseline drops, that's a really clear indicator that you can make some changes before that trend continues. You know, at that point in the journey, say you have a new leasing process or a new application form and customer satisfaction drops, you can immediately make those changes and pick it back up again. 

Casey: Yeah, that's right. In fact, one of our shared customers before working with AskNicely and PropertyMe, but before AskNicely, what they shared with us is that they had to guess. What are the primary areas that we need to invest in customer development? And once they started getting feedback with AskNicely, they realized that a lot of the guesses were, were incorrect.

In fact so much so that they coined the phrase and shared with me. “If the customer doesn't say it, it never happened.” And AskNicely is now their source of truth to know what their customers are saying at scale. And what they also shared that based on the feedback they learned in their particular example that there was a tremendous friction in their tenant move out process that they did not know about. And when they were able to identify it through AskNicely and then understand what the context was, they were able to solve it in a relatively quick fashion. In their case, they reported back that the points of friction or the overall issue was reduced by two-thirds through identifying it, taking that action and improving on it.

Kate: Yeah. Wow. When you can stop and reflect and see that writing in data, it actually changes the way that you think about what you're doing and how you are making a difference to customers' lives and to the business. I think sometimes it's easy to feel like you're doing all of these initiatives and they're not really helping and you can get quite deflated. But actually seeing that tangible benefit, putting numbers to it, and really being able to identify what you're doing and where it's making an improvement to be able to, move that needle and adjust your practice as you go to really better your practice and your service is such a great opportunity to have for career development and for team development as well. 

Casey: Yeah, that's right. One of the things that we're seeing more and more in the services space is the demand from the customer base and the articulation of value. And, you know, in a services space, we can really compete on the basis of price, or on the basis of service quality and competing on price is a really slippery slope, flattens margins, and those customers are not loyal.

They came to you because of a low, maybe a little management rate, low price and when they find a cheaper one, they're more likely to switch, go to that. But when we can really learn from our customers. What is going well, where do we need to take issues and invest in the right areas? Both I would say kind of operationally or programmatically and at individual customer levels, through our property managers, then we see tremendous transformation. Service quality gets better, becomes more consistently delivered such that, that differentiated experience, that articulated value for the landlords and tenants, is ultimately what's going to allow you to fetch a higher margin and capture that loyalty.

And when we think of loyalty, it's not a score. Loyalty means our customers are doing business for us longer or doing business with us longer and they're bringing their friends. They're telling their friends, whether that's word of mouth or what we're seeing in a lot of our property management customers is structured referrals. 

Meaning send out a survey to the customers at a key point, maybe it's three months in or six months in or nine months into a management. Find out who's really happy and then have a very structured approach for then feeding that information to your property managers so they can ask for a referral to that landlord's one of their friends. Is there somebody, another investor, another owner who has some properties that they might want to bring to, to that agency? And in fact. This approach, we recently heard from one of our shared customers, help them to achieve a net increase in properties under management of around 12 percent year over year.

So, and it's really healthy and healthy meaning it's earned growth versus paid marketing driven growth. So the way I like to phrase it is with this approach, when you learn from customers, you engage them, improve the service. Your customers will become so happy that they will pay you to do marketing for you because they stick around and are loyal customers, but then they bring new, new customers to you.

So it's a really healthy, really healthy flywheel.  

Kate: I actually really love, love that, that 12 percent increase, because not only is there the measurable stats on, you know, being able to track that across what has influenced it, but I'm super, super passionate about property managers, Proving their worth as professionals and, you know, remuneration and compensation that rewards that.

And this just fits in so nicely because not only if you are someone who has those intangible assets, like your customers love you and that long-term loyalty, they stay with you, but you can now actually attribute that to a number. So we say it's not about the number a hundred percent. It's not about the number, but if you're a, you're a PM who is a particularly good at that, if you can say, Hey, I do have this number and take pride in that and actually go, look, I've got these customer satisfaction rating, or, you know, how can we filter that down to coach and improve that customer satisfaction rating, that professional development tool, that number.  It speaks huge amounts as far as measuring the intangibles like loyalty, in a short-term space, rather than waiting five years to see if the customer sticks around.

So, I love it from that perspective. And then also, just that, ability to take those proactive measures. I think it can be very, very challenging in PM from a day-to-day basis to think about the proactive things that you're doing. It's so much reactive work. It's so much on the back foot, but if you've, you know, got part of your week or part of your month that actually sits down and goes, I can, I'm taking ground with my portfolio, these are the customers that we've got those great things that I can actually go out and get these referrals.

I can call them up and just say, Hey, thanks so much for that. Review. I really appreciate your feedback and have those nice connection moments. So from a larger perspective, huge amount of value in, you know, the data and the insights on that customer loyalty, but even just filtering down to that day-to-day and that job satisfaction and career development for PMs, it sort of has so much value throughout the whole process. 

Casey: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I'd like to unpack the score and the number a little bit just so people know exactly what we're talking about, but first I would say you know, everybody's busy and if we can use data to help us prioritize then and to make our jobs, existing jobs to be done easier and more efficient than that, then that's a win.

And that's one of the things that we see here is, you know, if I have a certain number of properties under management and I feel really time-constrained, then the voice of the customer through the feedback can really help you to know when and where to focus. And so rather than simply just making kind of a nondescript or just kind of undefined calls and checking in, I know exactly which, which owners I need to make a phone call or visit to either through, either for that advocacy and referral request, if they're super happy, or, you know, let me identify those that, are VIP, you know, high value owners and landlords that I'm working with that, you know, need some outreach and some service recovery if they get that negative feedback.

So, again, it's with which customers to focus at what point in time, what actions to take with them. But then also more generally across the agencies is what, what are the themes?  You know, so many of the property management firms I work with. Are very values driven, very purpose driven, and they have defined what their organizational values are.

And when we can know back from our customers, where we're hitting and missing the mark against those values, against those standards, then it allows us to very specifically focus, invest in the right program development and invest in the right people development. Which people are doing great, who needs some help.

So, it really is clarifying because then we, we can you know, in the same, same number of hours in a day, really focus on the things that are most impactful and most important. 

Kate: Yeah, push the dial where it's needed. 

Casey: That's right. That's right. Kate, real quick, in terms of what is this number when we say net promoter score for those who may not be familiar with it and I'll be the first to say, it's not about the score. It's not about the number. It's about what can be done with it to drive revenue growth and to enrich people's lives. And those are really two, I would say the sides of the coin. So when we say NPS, net promoter score was founded by a gentleman named Fred Reicheld from Bain company, consulting company.

And he created it because he realized that all the other metrics were completely insufficient and did not correlate to loyalty and growth, which was the practice at Bain Consulting that he led. And so he created it and he really wanted to call it net lives enriched because that was his heart to help organizations live out their purpose, live out their values and their standards to so enrich the lives that they're serving.  The lives of their employees, the life of their customer and to drive growth, but he called it net promoter score because he thought it would,  it would catch on a little bit more, sound a little bit more economic.

And the reality is that when organisations align around this and consistently use feedback to improve the service they deliver, the economic outcomes are phenomenal. What they have determined this is from the London School of Economics that for every seven points of a net promoter score increases, on average, an organization increases their revenue by 1%.  

And based on the company type, it can vary. Well, what does that mean? But typically it manifests in terms of higher client retention. So your customers are sticking around longer and higher advocacy or earned growth for referrals and reviews, which ultimately is what you're, what you're really trying to do is keep customers and have them bring new customers to you.

 So for those who are not familiar, net promoter score, you may not have seen kind of the system, but you have seen the question. The ultimate question is it's called, which is, for example, Kate on a zero to 10, how likely are you to recommend PropertyMe to a friend or colleague? And I know your answer is a 10. So that makes you in the promoter bucket, those nines and tens, those seven and eights are your passives. And those passives are those that may be at risk and you need to understand what can tip them over to a higher level of advocacy. 

However, your zero to sixes are your detractors. They are not likely to continue business with you and when given the opportunity, they will damage your brand. And so the score is ultimately then calculated as the percent of promoters, your nines and tens, minus your percent of, a percent of detractors, your zero to sixes.

So if you're kind of like some of the telecom providers here in the States, you have a very negative score. And if everybody hated you, you're a minus 100. However, if you're the most beloved brand on the planet and everybody loves you, your score is a hundred. So it's a 200 point range which then creates that calculation.

Like we said, it's just a score, but operationalize feedback to recognize and coach our staff to then improve experience, that's where the needle shifts. And that's where we see some really interesting things.  

Kate: Yeah. Great, as far as utilising this in property management, what sorts of things have you seen in companies? So you've been operating in New Zealand for quite some time. You've been working with some of our really key clients in Australia, which was how we actually came across the integration is they came to us and said, we really want this. We'd love to see it connected with our clients so we can use it at a larger level, which I love when, you know, these innovations come from our clients. We know it's what our industry wants and needs. How is that, how's that going? What sorts of things could you see, from a property management team, as far as implementation? 

Casey: Yeah, for sure. Well, ultimately, like we said, we're working backwards. The goal is. To increase properties under management through that retention, through that referral growth.

And the way that we do that, first of all, from the survey itself is in surveys, I used to work at survey monkey and everybody hated when I quoted taking a survey is not my idea of a good time because it's not who wants to take a survey. , but when we can make it, when we can ask in a way that is nice, hence our name, it's short, it's simple.

And in our best practice survey is an NPS question that's zero to 10. I like the recommend followed by a service standard or a theme question. What is it about our experience that we are aspiring to hit the mark for our customers every single time? What is it about the experience that's influencing your score?

And it might be things around communication or responsiveness or professionalism or friendliness. Ultimately, what is really living out our purpose? And so we can capture that structure. Now we are collecting feedback on an automated basis, and so when we do get that negative feedback, which invariably will happen from time to time, we can automate messaging to the property manager so they know instantly which property, which landlord, which tenant is frustrated.

They can take that action, they don't have to find out late, particularly when it comes to retaining clients, if you find out late. They've done their research and they found an alternative by them. So if we can find out really early, close that loop, alert the property manager and potentially automate messaging back to the customer.

So they know that they're heard and that we're going to be taking action to serve them. That, that is tremendously helpful. Secondarily, like we talked about is let's also automate and enable that referral generation. And when we say referrals, you know, there, there can be word of mouth referrals. It can be, you know, organic, or it even could be manifest in terms of a nice Google review.

One of our, I should say several of our customers are seeing dramatic increases to both referrals and Google review production. In fact, one of them that we you know, did a snapshot for in about a six to seven month period, they had a 300 percent increase in the number of Google reviews and about 90 plus percent of them were positive. 

So it was a huge transformation in terms of that positivity and their score went up from like a. I think it was a 3. 5 to I think a 4. 7 or so, both higher quantity, better quality. 

Kate: And the thing about Google reviews that people often forget is the review is nice. And you know, take a screenshot and share that on socials is really nice. But the other thing is that it actually makes you higher in SEO. So if people are Googling, you know, property managers in Sydney or wherever it is that they're searching, you're going to sit higher on that list, so you are just naturally going to capture more organic leads that way, rather than sitting on page two or page three of the search. So, great SEO boost there.  

Casey: Helps you get better, more discovered, increases credibility and trust, and the other thing, it can really reduce the number of negative reviews in the first place.

Because when we can ask for feedback and catch it early. You know, nature and people abhor a vacuum. And so if they're not being heard, if there's not some kind of resolution, that's why they end up in Google in the first place. So if we can catch it early, address it, then a lot of those, those nasty grams that would have ended up on a Google review never show up. And you know, when they're out there, the damage is done. So we try to catch it early, create more positivity, amplify that positivity.  

So, Kate, one of the additional things I would share in terms of where we're seeing some great upticks and improvements with our property management customers is really about that frontline engagement with their property managers in the first place.

And too many experience management feedback platforms kind of historically are they're built for the back office alone. Let's collect data. Let's give it to an analyst. And that's going to be how we win. Not a terrible idea if you're trying to do some decision making improvement. However, great customer experiences that generate loyalty are not created by analysts.

They're delivered by your frontline property management, customer facing teams. So imagine, we like to tell a tennis analogy around here. So let's imagine they're at the Australian open, the total purse money, 88 million Australian dollars, the players are coming to play to win, they've trained for this and winning matters and there will be winners and there'll be losers.

So let's imagine next year at the Australian Open , just like normal, there's going to be winners and losers. However, the line judges are not going to announce if the servos enter out. They, the players are not going to be told how well they're performing and if they're hitting and missing the mark. 

It's a guess. This is what happens when, when we operate our businesses and the data is only going to the back office and our frontline staff don't know how well they're doing.  If there's improvement to make they don't know that feedback in terms of course correction of what their customers think with there are areas that they're doing fabulously well, then they also don't necessarily know that.

And so there's missed encouragement opportunities and reinforcement of great positive behavior. Ultimately experience transformation is a matter of frontline behavior change. And we know that people do their absolute best work when they're in cultures of appreciation. And they're caught doing things well that align with those corporate or those company service standards and those themes and values.

So that's absolutely critical, and that's really the heart of AskNicely is to elevate the frontline work experience, because we know that is what translates to amazing service experience for our customers. And then translates to that revenue growth, the ability to compete on experience, have higher profit margins, and ultimately grow a very durable business. 

Kate: I love that. That is a phenomenal analogy. And it really leads back into that, you know, net lives enriched methodology, not just for the customers, but for PMs as well. It just carries the whole thing through. Thank you so much for joining us today. Casey, if our customers would like to know more, if they want to get started with AskNicely, ask some questions, what can they do to take action?

Casey: Sure. You can always reach out to me. I'm casey@asknicely.com 

That's C A S E Y at asknicely. com. And you can find Ask Nicely in the PropertyMe integration directory online or at asknicely.com. Happy to help. 

Kate: Great. Thanks so much for joining us again. 

Casey: Thanks, Kate.