By Kirk Layton, President & Co-Founder, The Tenex Group
I’m a BIG fan of measuring customer satisfaction. At Marathon, Cadillac Fairview, eServus and now The Tenex Group, collecting customer feedback in the form of tenant surveys was – and is – an important part of the tenant experience equation. While there are lots of ways to measure tenant satisfaction, from interviewing key decision-makers to surveying all of your building’s occupants, one metric that I think everyone should be measuring is their Net Promoter Score.
The Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a simple and effective way to measure customer satisfaction by asking one question: How likely would you recommend [company or building] to your friends and colleagues?” (For more information on the methodology behind NPS, click here.) As it turns out, there’s a strong correlation between high NPS scores and profitability. One prominent real estate company to make use of the Net Promoter Score is Colliers, which, according to their website, is “the only Canadian commercial real estate firm that uses the Net Promoter Score (NPS) system to solicit feedback from our clients after every transaction.” Colliers uses the NPS to measure clients’ satisfaction with their dealings with Colliers employees, and employees with the highest scores, like Patrick McGillis in Calgary, are acknowledged on the company’s website.
The Tenex Group makes a point of including the NPS in the tenant surveys we do on behalf of our property manager clients. Not only does it allow our clients to get a quick read on tenant satisfaction, it allows them to quickly and easily compare scores between buildings across their portfolio; it’s also easy to see improvements (or reductions!) in your scores across multiple surveys. In addition to including “the ultimate question” on your tenant survey, it’s considered best practice to ask one open-ended question, along the lines of “What is the main reason for your score?” That way, your property management team has actionable feedback that they can use, in addition to the score itself, to help build their action plans in response to the survey results.
So if you’re looking for a powerful metric to include in your tenant surveys, take a look at the Net Promoter Score. Of course, focusing on other key metrics outside of surveys, such as occupancy and retention rates, will always be important. But knowing that your tenants recommend you as a landlord … or not! … can help guide your tenant experience strategy and increase tenant retention, which, as we know, goes straight to the bottom line.
