Community Association Management Perspectives: Business Analytics

 5 Ways Community Association Management Companies Can Leverage Business Intelligence for Less Stress and Better Performance

In community management, you have never-ending ‘to-do’ lists and lots of people to please. Due to the busyness of the day-to-day, it can be challenging to really know where you stand, as a company and as an employee. Are you being effective in the services you offer? How quickly are you responding to homeowner and board requests? Are you allocating your people to the right tasks and to the right amount of work?

Business intelligence (BI) can help you as a community management company answer these questions – and many more! Business intelligence is a way to analyze your data and deliver actionable insights to help you and your team make informed business decisions.

At the end of the day, you need to know the metrics behind your company so that you can focus on the right things, make informed decisions, and improve how you operate.

Business intelligence can help you understand and improve employee productivity and happiness, customer satisfaction, response times, resource allocation, and profitability.

In this article, I’ll dive into the 5 ways community association management companies can leverage business intelligence for less stress and better performance.

1. Employee productivity and happiness

Employee happiness and employee retention is a big and important topic in the industry right now. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 33,000 jobs in community association, real estate, and property management could be open every year, many stemming from workers who leave their jobs.

Now more than ever, it's critical that community management companies have a pulse on their employees. It may mean keeping them longer!

You can use business intelligence to monitor what your employees are doing, which tasks are taking the longest to complete, and even flag the employees and departments that need more resources. In community association management, you could measure things like the number of requests handled per employee, average response time, and customer satisfaction scores. Having this data can help your management identify whether your people are allocated to the right tasks and have the right amount of work. BI can also provide your employees with real-time feedback on their performance, which can increase their morale and motivation.

2. Customer satisfaction and retention

You can also use BI to measure satisfaction from your board members and homeowners. It’s easy to get discouraged when your team fields so many more complaints than thanks every day. But looking at the actual data may show your team a brighter picture.

You can collect customer interactions, feedback surveys, and complaints to track customer satisfaction levels. You can also track total tasks completed for an association and timely financials production. Not only can you identify areas for improvement, but you also have metrics to bring back to your customers that prove your value.

By improving customer satisfaction and proving the value delivered, community management companies like you can increase retention and reduce turnover rates.

3. Improve your response times to homeowners and board members

How fast do you respond to your homeowners and board members when they send you requests? Business intelligence can help you see and improve your response times for specific requests, specific associations, and over your entire portfolio. You can also track the volume and type of requests received by your team at any given time.

If you analyze requests and response times, your team can identify areas for improvement and develop processes to improve performance.

For example, you may be able to automate common requests, enabling your employees to focus on more complex issues. Improving response times will ultimately help you build trust and loyalty with your homeowners and board members.

4. Better resource allocation across communities and HOAs

When you manage multiple communities, it’s easy to lose track of the entire picture of your portfolio. Do you know which areas are over or underutilized? You can use BI to analyze and optimize how resources are allocated across your managed communities. BI tools can help you track the performance of each community by using metrics like maintenance costs, revenue, and employee time allocation. When you analyze this data, you can identify which properties are draining your resources, which ones are performing well, and how to allocate resources more effectively.

5. Profitability analysis for each community

Further, once you have performance data for each community in your portfolio, you can perform margin and profitability analyses for each one. A BI tool can help you track revenue and expenses for each community and calculate your profit margins. Armed with this data, you can identify where costs can be reduced, profits can be increased, and margins can be improved. This can help you make informed and strategic decisions that maximize profitability and ensure the long-term viability of your business.

Business intelligence offers community management companies huge capability to improve performance with data-driven insights. By leveraging a BI tool, you can improve employee productivity and satisfaction, customer satisfaction and retention, response times, resource allocation, and profitability.

With the right data and insights, you can deliver high-quality services to your homeowners and board members while keeping your employees happy and maintaining a profitable business.

In a competitive industry, being able to make fast, proactive decisions is a competitive advantage. At Vantaca, we're committed to empowering management companies to be on the leading edge of business intelligence. Our goal is to help you make informed decisions that will improve employee happiness, customer retention, response times, resource allocation, and profitability.

Stay tuned for more content and perspectives from Vantaca on business intelligence over the coming weeks!