Garden Communities Improves Customer Engagement and Drives Review Volumes Up by 427%

Finding the ideal rental place takes a significant investment of time and effort. Prospective renters need guidance and unbiased feedback and are increasingly turning to review and social media sites to research individual properties. According to a survey conducted by Kingsley Associates, 89% of apartment seekers are more likely to consider a community that has almost exclusively positive reviews. Learn how a property management company listened to their residents and improved customer engagement with online reputation success.

The Challenge: Tracking Feedback and Responding

So when Garden Communities reached out to Reputation.com, they were already aware of the importance of resident feedback and the impact of maintaining their overall online reputation. The team at Garden Communities takes pride in actively listening to residents and strives to continually address their concerns.

But with an increasingly expanding set of communities to manage across New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Florida, and California, the marketing team found it difficult to keep a pulse on online tenant sentiment across the multiple third-party review sites. They needed a single robust solution that would allow them to effectively gather feedback in a timely manner. And also to respond directly to residents and manage what current residents were saying about their properties.

“Managing reviews end-to-end was a manual process” Maria wanted to stay on top of the various properties’ online reputation. But tedious tasks, including manually monitoring and responding, soon became overwhelming for one person to handle. Maria had used other tools that fell short when it came to managing the full reputation lifecycle and calling across their communities.

What she needed was an easy solution that was scalable and would enable her team to automatically solicit and monitor reviews on third-party review sites. Ideally, she would receive alerts about new review postings. And gain actionable insights that would help her best address resident concerns or issues.

“Reviews are becoming more and more popular. We were having a hard time effectively managing engagement with residents who were reaching out to us through online reviews with a growing portfolio of properties. We wanted a solution that would help us monitor and manage feedback, stay on top of issues and ultimately provide the best possible experience to our residents”

~ Maria Friscia, Advertising
Coordinator at Garden
Communities

The Search: To Automate a Manual Review Management Process

As Garden Communities began their search for an online reputation management solution, they established the following goals:

• Improve review volume and ratings
• Gather tenant feedback
• Address issues in a timely manner
• Gain actionable insights

The Solution: “One Tool for All Our Online Reputation Management Needs”

Reputation.com worked closely with Garden Communities to help take their online reputation to the next level. Within a few months, they were quickly able to grow their overall review volume, increase their star average and drive up their Reputation Score.

Engaging Current Residents

Garden Communities gathered feedback from their residents. They leveraged Reputation. com’s “Bulk Uploader” feature to send out request review emails. Their goal was to create a five star experience for their residents and a community they are proud to call home.

The team chose to focus on a few crucial third-party review sites, and encouraged residents to share their positive living, leasing and move-in experience on the review sites, as well as share any negative reviews directly with Garden Communities through the website. This process allowed them to take control of their online reputation. It also ensured that all negative reviews were followed up with in a timely manner.

Easy Monitoring and Responding to Third-Party Reviews

The review alerts made it easy for Maria (review manager across all properties) to stay on top of all the new reviews. And also to forward alerts to the right leasing agent when corrective action was needed. She was able to identify recurring issues and worked closely with the leasing agents to resolve them. The agents would address issues by talking to the individual reviewer personally. This frequently resulted in tenants going back to the review sites and changing their negative review to a positive one.

The Reputation.com Dashboard provides visibility and detailed insights about review volume, customer sentiment, review site information and responses.

Gathering Actionable Insights to Make Operational Changes

Garden Communities uses Reputation.com’s robust reporting tools to glean operational insights from all of the reviews that are posted across a variety of sites. The monthly Executive Summary report allowed Maria and her team to track overall star rating, review volume and their Reputation Score. It also provided greater visibility for the executive team into the online reputation performance of individual properties.

“I like the fact that the response lives on the dashboard, so I can always go back and look at all of the response history in one place. This saves me a lot of time and lets me stay on top of every review across multiple sites”

~ Maria Friscia, Advertising
Coordinator at Garden
Communities

The Results:

The Garden Communities Reputation Score Increased by 50%

Reputation.com’s ORM platform helped Garden Communities achieve incredible results:

• Increased Reputation Score by 50%
• Increased Monthly Positive Review Volume by 427%
• Decreased Negative Reviews by 10%
• Increased Average Star Rating by 26%

“Working with Reputation.com helps us listen and respond to our residents and exceed our objective of providing a superior living experience, which ultimately leads to higher star ratings and a better online presence.”

~  Jonathan Goetz, Marketing Manager,
Garden Communities

If you want to learn how you can improve your online reputation, contact us at Reputation.com. We’ll be happy to assist you.