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A New Lease on Life with an Apartment Customer Survey

Couple speaking with an apartment leasing agent

An apartment customer survey allows business owners to get valuable insights about their residents. It’s an essential step when looking into your leasing process and how customers feel after a service is completed. Furthermore, this data helps you understand what you do well and can identify service gaps or other concerns.

Are you looking to stay up to date on your occupants’ needs? An apartment customer survey might be precisely what you’re looking for.

For example, taking a proactive approach can help you reduce turnover and improve lease renewals, which helps your reputation and profitability. Additionally, organizing a survey can foster better communication and trust, demonstrating to your residents their opinions matter. Ultimately, if your goal is to improve your resident experience and identify areas of improvement, an apartment customer survey can be your guide.

Ready to take to the polls and review the benefits of connecting with your residents?

The Details of an Apartment Customer Survey

Basically, a customer survey is a method of taking the temperature of your residents regarding an interaction or their experiences. The insights from your occupants can be used to refine your leasing processes, the property condition, and staff interactions.

To illustrate, once you discover missed steps or items that need addressing, you’ll be able to make your leasing process more efficient and straightforward. Conversely, you can also verify that occupants are satisfied with the staff conducting maintenance. This can easily be accomplished by defining your goals and creating a set of relevant questions that give you the necessary insights.

In short, by connecting with your residents and taking a genuine interest in their opinions, you’ll gather critical information for actionable business decisions. This can help you define your operational needs while building lasting relationships with your occupants.

5 Valuable Reasons to Conduct an Apartment Customer Survey

A well-designed apartment customer survey can reveal several benefits for your residents and yourself. So, taking this step not only helps address issues before they escalate but also shows residents that their opinions matter.

1 - Inform Decisions Based on Resident Preferences

The nature of an apartment customer survey provides valuable, data-driven insights that give business owners direction on what works and what needs refinement. Conducting a survey can help you understand their living experiences, behaviors, and preferences. With that said, this feedback allows you to make decisions that are truly informed by your residents rather than making assumptions. Not only will you feel validated in your strategy, but your customers will feel heard. Ultimately, this can help you build long-term relationships within and around your community.

2 - Uncover Resident Pain Points to Reduce Churn

Alternatively, the insights an apartment customer survey can provide will help you reduce resident turnover and encourage lease renewals. When you conduct a study with this in mind, you can learn what your customers are experiencing in real time. Uncovering minor concerns early on gives you the edge to address them before they become more prominent, costlier issues. So, consider a customer survey to help build your relationships and improve retention.

3 - Enhance Community Reputation with an Apartment Customer Survey

There are many benefits to your brand reputation if you involve your residents with a questionnaire. Not only will your occupants appreciate that you’re interested in hearing from them, but it can spark referrals. Additionally, this can boost your chances for positive reviews and brand reputation. Plus, this content can help create content for your marketing, further increasing your reach to potential residents.

4 - Reveal Maintenance Issues

There are several ways this benefit helps you—and it depends on your goals. Firstly, you can get an understanding of problems in your building and identify the severity and priority of tasks that need to be addressed. Additionally, you can poll your occupants on staff performance after completing a maintenance task. Either way, these insights can keep your building in ideal shape and foster positive relationships with residents.

5 - Improve Resident Satisfaction

Overall, these benefits accumulate and help your relationship with current and future residents. You’ll learn more about the people who lease from you, allowing you to make decisions based on their feedback. You can customize your services and amenities to meet their needs and improve your reputation with your community and surrounding area. Plus, this gives you a benchmark to track satisfaction rates over time and compare performance.

What Kind of Apartment Customer Survey Can You Create?

The sheer number of apartment customer surveys that you can conduct is relatively lengthy. As such, it can be overwhelming. Surprisingly, you can poll your residents on nearly anything that you provide to your community, depending on your goals. With that in mind, here are several subjects for your questionnaires to help get you in the right mindset.

Move-In Experience

With this apartment customer survey, you can gain insight into the new resident’s experience when they first moved in. Specifically, assessing how smooth the process was gives you an idea of how to refine your operations for future occupants. Plus, understanding their satisfaction gives you a frame of reference for prioritizing any suggestions or concerns.

Maintenance Satisfaction

The insights provided by this apartment customer survey can give you information on how your maintenance team provides service. In short, you can learn more about the quality, timeliness, and professionalism of your employees. Furthermore, you have the opportunity to see if you need to implement training or coaching services to improve the quality of your services.

Community Amenity Usage

This is a helpful apartment customer survey to give you insights regarding any amenities you provide your community. For example, gauge satisfaction for your indoor gym, swimming pool, or other community facilities. Learning about how your residents use them—and their expectations—can help you refine your offerings and boost satisfaction. 

Lease Renewal Decision

If you’re experiencing more frequent turnover, this apartment customer survey can provide beneficial information regarding renewal concerns. You’ll be able to understand what influences their decision to complete a new lease contract or move out. Also, there could be concerns you were unaware of that make your customers apprehensive about staying longer. 

Sustainability Initiatives

As more customers and businesses are looking toward eco-friendly options, you may have decided to take steps in the same direction. From recycling programs to energy efficiency measures, you can get insights from your residents on how satisfied they are with your efforts. This is especially helpful if it’s a deciding factor in a lease renewal or other factors.

Common Apartment Customer Survey Mistakes to Avoid

While there are certainly many benefits to conducting an apartment customer survey, there are a few things to keep in mind. 

  • Don’t skimp on the introduction. Establish the purpose of your survey straightaway. Otherwise, you’re risking your brand reputation and trust if the reasoning they are being asked to participate isn’t clear. In fact, participation increases if your residents know the purpose and that their opinion is valued.

  • Be mindful of your resident’s time by not overloading a questionnaire with too many questions. Not only does this risk non-participation, but it can also cause rushed or incomplete answers from participants who opt to continue.
  • Choose questions with clear answers to prevent vague and unhelpful responses. This allows you to effectively track the data. In addition, with nebulous surveys, you risk getting biased answers or lose the ability to get specific details about trends or preferences.

  • Pick clear questions without jargon and avoid overly complex language. It’s ideal to choose language that will be accessible to your audience. Otherwise, residents may opt out early—and those who do stay might be confused or give inaccurate responses.

  • Don’t fail to act on the results of your apartment customer survey. By not implementing change, you can cause frustration and trust issues with your residents. Similarly, not regularly conducting enough surveys can cause your occupants to feel like their voice is unheard.

While this isn’t a complete list of common mistakes, it gives you an idea of how important it is to carefully choose the formatting of your questions. In short, creating a straightforward and relatively quick apartment customer survey can increase participation and resident satisfaction.

DIY or Hire an Agency?

With a greater understanding of the benefits, it’s time to decide how to conduct your apartment customer survey. Choosing to hire an agency or take the do-it-yourself (DIY) approach depends on your particular needs and goals. An agency can provide you with expertise and comprehensive data while handling everything from start to finish. Alternatively, creating a DIY survey can give you complete control over the design and implementation, potentially saving you money.

Let’s see the details in these two options:

Create Your Own

Designing a custom survey can be accomplished in a few steps:

  1. Brainstorm your goals based on your specific needs.
  2. Write your questions and ensure they’re relevant to your goals.
  3. Choose how you will share the survey, whether it’s online, paper/mail-in, phone call, or text.
  4. Conduct your survey and send it with a cut-off date.
  5. Review the results of your survey as they come in.
  6. Implement changes or refinements based on feedback.

Finally, it’s also ideal to share with your residents what changes you’ll be implementing and thank them for their participation.

CX on Demand

Alternatively, you can hire CustomerOptix and customize your apartment customer survey with expert help.

  1. Pick a pre-configured, industry-specific template or upload your own survey.
  2. Choose your frequency, whether monthly or annual. 
  3. Add in your additional questions
  4. Input your locations (if applicable), including the phone number and email address for the report.
  5. Finalize your information and place your order.

Once completed, you’ll receive an email with access to a web link or QR code to implement your survey. These can be added to invoices, printed on signage for your property, or sent to your residents via text or email. You’ll receive an email with the results every time your survey is completed. It’s easy to use and takes as little as 10 minutes to set up.

Level Up Your Living with an Apartment Customer Survey

Conducting an apartment customer survey is a powerful tool for complex owners to gain valuable insights into their residents’ needs and experiences. It’s crucial for evaluating your leasing process and understanding how residents feel about your services. This feedback highlights what you're doing well and helps pinpoint any service gaps or concerns that need attention.

By staying attuned to your residents’ needs, you can reduce turnover and improve lease renewals, boosting your reputation and profitability. Furthermore, a well-organized survey fosters better communication and trust, showing residents that their voices matter. If your goal is to enhance the resident experience and address areas for improvement, an apartment customer survey is your roadmap to success.

Are you ready to connect with your residents and discover the benefits of better communication?