The Prospects Journey Through Experiences with Karen Gladney
In this Podcast Summary we review an episode of Apartments on the Go, featuring Karen Gladney. Karen is a multifamily leasing and marketing consultant, and the founder of Power Pro iPad Leasing Systems, a tool to help leasing teams with their prospect experience.
Karen starts out by explaining how “Prospect Journey” is a bit of a buzz-word, or buzz-phrase, but is a useful concept for helping to analyze a leasing process. Anybody who has walked the leasing floor for years, or gone through the leasing funnel themselves as a resident, understands how impactful each step of the journey is.
Multifamily Technology at the Service of Experience
Nowadays with all the different technologies and systems you can use to support that journey, you really need a roadmap. It is so crucial to plan out the experience you want customers to have, then incorporate tools to help realize that reality. From the top down you decide what customer experience you want your organization to have. And you trickle that down into all elements of the leasing journey, and all touch points.
One big consideration is: Does your service approach set you apart?
Karen goes on to say technology services are flooding the market right now. AI is on the tip of everyones tongue, and is a marketing buzzword. She positions herself a little differently. At her service, “we utilize technology, we promote technology, but we are a human powered service, built for exceptional customer experience, and we fit in with organzations that have the same mentality."
Onsite teams shoulder so much and need support. They handle many questions and concerns from home office teams. They are also expected to have an smile on, be in a good mood all the time, and spend time with prospects selling. When the team on the front lines is fueled, supported, and has what they need (systems, training, problem resolution, etc) it makes all of this more possible.
Make every prospect feel special in the moment they visit a property.
The biggest miss in training leasing consultants, and taking SOP (Standard Operation Procedures) – everything is a segment. Each step is compartmentalized and not created to consider the entire experience and customer impact.
- Specific Greetings
- Specific Discovery Questions
- Etc
What happens outside of these interactions? What happens from the time you greet someone to the time you’re in the apartment doing a tour? How is the picture painted? How is the connection? How is the interaction with the customer when there isn’t a SOP outlining the exact setps?
Karen closes by highlighting what is the central theme of the podcast. She urges managers and marketers to think hard about the experience they want to deliver, and the brand they want to build.*** “This is our signature experience, and this is how we are going to deliver it.”***
CONCLUSIONS
We were excited to listen to this podcast because Karen not only has such a great fun attitude and enjoyable way of speaking, but she has countless hours of experience in the leasing world and is an expert at identifying all the little details that matter. She also echos many of the concepts we try to highlight here in our blog - that customer experience is paramount, and it’s more than a set of parameters, it’s more than giving customers the details they are asking about, it’s a wholistic approach to the leasing experience and encompases the totality of leasing journey.
At Leasing Chat we help Multifamily Leasing Offices deliver on these signature experiences, and we aid in a continual improvement process for our clients.