Are resident portals effective?
The internet is full of articles on the benefits of onboarding a resident portal. All publicly available content about the effectiveness of resident portals is either published by the SEO teams of providers of resident apps like Zego, Yardi, RealPage or articles in the industry press again including the quotes from the vendors themselves. If you search “are resident portals effective’, there is no answer to the question. Just pages and pages about the benefits of a resident portal. The adoption rate on resident portals is at an all-time high. Yet, the industry continues to have one of the lowest customer satisfaction scores and employee turnover for onsite staff is consistently high. The correlation between the adoption of technology and better resident and employee experience is not yet proven.
Capturing Nuance in a Portal
The main issue with the limitations of the resident portal is that it is envisioned as a hub for self-service. The goal is for the residents to log in and complete a transaction without a phone call or a visit to the onsite office. In the most rudimentary portal, this includes the ability to pay rent and to create a service request. The more sophisticated and ‘feature-rich portals include additional automation like bookings, package notifications, and community news. However, when Adam engages in a conversation with a resident over time, we learn that these self-service items make up a very small proportion of resident goals. The greatest challenge for operators is the very long tail of the nature of resident interactions. This means that residents need help with a large variety of things but in relatively small numbers. This makes it very difficult to break down the self-service options in a way that can have a material impact on the support volumes. Ironically, after leasing and maintenance-related interactions, the most popular topic of conversation is technical support.
Losing frontline intelligence
The adoption of resident portals has also added a barrier to direct customer feedback. While most operators look to reduce the interactions between their residents and onsite staff, they also risk losing the front-line intelligence that resident interactions generate. The restricted screens of a portal don’t allow for exception handling and lose the nuance that human interactions pick up in day-to-day operations. Similarly, the codified FAQ section often results in boilerplate assistance which only adds to their frustration. The business case for onboarding resident portals lies in the hope that self-service options reduce the demand for man-hours on the onsite staff. But resident portals work mostly as landing pages to a handful of tasks and are often bypassed for another medium of least resistance without logins. In the situation where a resident is offered multiple channels of communication, 7 out of 10 residents choose to bypass the resident portals because they believe that it can’t support the exception to the situations designed into the portal.
Solving the Problem
This does not mean that technology does not have a place in multifamily operations. In fact, it builds a case that the residential operator needs not just technology but cutting-edge solutions that may not have the same applications in other industries. Behind all the screens and user-friendly UX of the portals and apps, lies a database that is populated through workflows. The operators need to focus on triggering these operations with a more suited technology of Natural Language interaction where residents are able to communicate nuance and at the same time employees are able to focus on the tickets that represent true exceptions. Resident portals are an excellent placeholder to direct basic workflows but in order to truly get value from technology, you need solutions that can account for and react to the complexity of managing properties.