Cockpit for Tenant Advisors

Professional tenant relationship management (or Customer Relationship Management - CRM) primarily means that the contracting party is quickly accessible to the tenant and competently supports him - whether it is a neighbourhood issue, which should be settled amicably, or damage that needs to be resolved quickly. Frequently the communication possibilities are limited, however, because only a few channels and limited opening hours are available. Data collection using the telephone system of housing companies show availability by telephone of only 50-60 percent, sometimes even less. This is confirmed by tenant surveys, which also express the displeasure of the tenant. In addition to the issue of providing just enough or inadequate capacity to respond at peak times these problems are also caused by the following:

• Because of the dependence on people, the administrators processing customer queries concerns are not equally utilised, or the telephone line for certain employees is engaged due to numerous calls.
• Around 70-80 percent of tenants’ requests represent "standard situations" which are usually processed together with concerns that demand higher requirements. As a result, the tenant faces engaged tones and wait times when trying to resolve complex matters.
• Due to the often different communication and processing media used, incoming messages can be inconsistently structured, which reduces the data quality and process transparency and complicates monitoring and quality assurance measures.


To significantly boost the communication process, it is necessary to solve the following questions: Is your business easily accessible? Or: How can contact persons be better utilised so that there are significant time savings? Are the concerns of your tenants processed in a structured and transparent way? Put another way: How can you optimise processing in order to obtain uniform documentation and have a clear overview?

The Datatrain Customer centre represents the technological backbone of professional tenant services. Here, the employee-related contact is replaced by corporate accessibility. The structuring of tenant contacts and processing thereof offers a number of advantages, which, apart from improving their customer image can lead to significant improvements in the related business processes.
By optimising the accessibility of your business, you can achieve a decisive increase in tenant satisfaction:

• Accelerate the response and processing times for customer issues.
• Professionalize telephone, web-based, personal support for tenants.
• Make it easy for your tenants to give you feedback.

By structuring the tenant contacts or recorded data you can optimise tenant-specific processes:

• Standardize the generation of information based on processes and damage catalogues in favour of generally understandable and valid terms and contents in the process - thus ensure the introduction of a complete, comprehensible process history for third parties (Electronic Tenant File).
• Automate the generation of subsequent processes where this is useful or saves time and money, for example when commissioning maintenance services.
• Develop a structured, indicator-based reporting system for regular analysis of your customers' concerns, for example, as the basis of a complaint management system in order to obtain a meaningful tool for corporate planning and control.
• You can add SLA reinforced agreements to this system with internal departments and external service providers.

Support the coordination through high process transparency:

• Give your employees and external service providers, the ability to retrieve indicator based information about the progress of their requests at any time or to receive automated information at fixed times and conditions from the ERP-system.
• Facilitate decision-making processes before escalation scenarios occur.
• Increase the transparency process with respect to your tenants, too: Create more confidence by giving comprehensive information on the status of a request and ideally inform the tenant in an automated way by ticket tracking, see below.

Datatrain’s CRM base application Customer centre is your direct line to the tenant. The SAP-based application is used for recording, logging and processing all data resulting from the receipt of tenant concerns.
The basis of the application is to link the property data with the partners involved (tenant, prospect tenants, employees, external third parties). Furthermore there is the provision of catalogues to qualify generation of messages or tickets.
The features at a glance:

• Transactions can be recorded via intuitively operable user interfaces.
• For every request, the system determines the relevant responsibility.
• When creating the tickets, the facts about hierarchical categories and code groups (catalogue-based processing) are identified, such as those in accordance with the message categories - fault reporting/rental property/service/feedback (e.g. complaints).
• The ticket is stored as a task in the responsible employee’s worklist - depending on workflow it can include an optional notification of the responsible person(s).
• Context sensitive information regarding the rent account, on operating expenses or contract history are available.
• For damage reports specific damage can trigger an automated order.
• A common dialogue control provides for the monitoring of triggered events. There is priority-driven scheduling, so that the measures about due dates are manageable.

The information catalogues for tenant concerns forms the basis of data processing: According to the implemented internal reporting categories specific catalogues are stored in the system in order to process the respective tenant concerns in a categorised way and enrich the internally generated ticket here in terms of quality/content. Therefore a qualified message of this kind, for example, in relation to a tenant complaint ("Feedback" message type), may include information on the following points:

• Which operating unit does the contact person belong to (internal division, external service provider...)?
• How did the contact person behave (for example with respect to punctuality, courtesy, quality of service...)?
• Who is responsible for the processing of this internal (complaint) message?

More information fields are conceivable, for example in accordance with company response profiles (Complaint Management), priority etc.

Successful communication relies not only on the statements made, but also on the corresponding feedback. A tenant who has raised a concern, would normally be happy if he/she receives feedback on the success of the application. To increase process transparency and the confidence of the tenant in the company's work even further, the introduction of ticket tracking is also recommended. It is a system that always automates messages by e-mail or SMS sent to the tenant, if important steps are taken or are pending when processing a request.
For example typical alerts include the following contents:

• Acknowledgment of receipt of the tenant request and information about the expected start of processing.
• Announcement of the impending contact from the participating internal or external processor.
• Reminder sent to the tenant relating to the appointments made with the participants.

The Customer centre forms the core of the Datatrain integral CRM system. It is optimally tailored to telephone and personal contact made by the tenant with the landlord. Currently the majority of the messages are usually made by telephone and to a lesser extent during personal visits on-site in the tenants’ office.
In addition, the tenants enjoy using all means of communication that are not tied to fixed office hours. In particular, contact via the internet should be mentioned here as well as the personal approach of mobile company employees at the property. The more communication channels available to the tenant regardless of the time available, the lower the probability that the tenant will fall back on the "classic" written form or write an email.

• Datatrain offers specifically developed applications for these communication channels for contact via the internet and the personal approach of the mobile workforce on site:
• The mobile online "My Ticket Centre" application allows on-site staff to receive all kinds of requests relating to tenant management and operational maintenance on internet-enabled devices and feed it into the central ERP system or retrieve information about existing tickets.
• Datatrain has developed the web portal "Tenant Services Online" to facilitate contact via the internet as well as a version of these web application for smartphones.

More information can be found in the separate module descriptions. It should be emphasised that no matter which communication channel is used to receive the tenant concerns, all applications or versions thereof are based on the same processes in the SAP backend. The objective is modularization of the recording of concerns on the one hand, compared with standardisation and structuring of processes on the other hand.

The Customer centre is the core application of Datatrain’s integral CRM solution system for professional tenant support and property maintenance. Customer support is crucial to the business process and therefore can be critically optimised as follows:

• Improvement of data quality: The standardised generation of information provides a new quality of decision-relevant data. It represents the approach in the "Electronic Tenant File" and enables targeted corporate control and planning.
• Acceleration of the processing period: During the acceptance of the information the qualitative content (catalogue item) and process-oriented (competence) appreciation of the message by the Customer centre takes place - this results in a significant acceleration of the processing period. Inquiries and orders initiated by the tenant are automatically delivered immediately to the responsible internal parties and external third parties after the information has been received. Documents are automatically generated.
• Improving tenant satisfaction: tenant surveys after the introduction of the Customer Centre bring the following to light: The requested topics on availability, call quality and the duration of the processing period were assessed as being generally better by the interviewed tenants in relation to previous surveys after the system went live.

Have we piqued your interest?

If you have any questions or need further information, we would be happy to help. We look forward to hearing from you!