During the Centralization & Optimization: Using Technology to Centralize & Optimize Operations Effectively session at RETCON this past week, Whitney Kidd asked a great question about potential reduction in customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores after centralization efforts.  Gigi  Giannoni shared that they only received 3 negative complaints across the entire portfolio, but one thing they had focused on was increasing the frequency of resident surveys and the timeliness of their response.

This, of course, reminded me of rabies.

Well, not directly, but definitely indirectly.

Over the past month we had a beautiful stray cat that started hanging out in the yard who my wife was convinced was pregnant.  I thought maybe she was just traveling from house to house, snacking all along the way, and so she was just very, very well fed.

Sure enough, I was wrong, and two little kittens were birthed in our back yard.  Well, in our efforts to contain the situation, we decided to try to trap the cat and her kittens.  My wife is an avid gardener, so she thought the best course of action was to don a pair of thick rose gloves, which are meant to stop thorns from stabbing, so why wouldn't it work on a wild animal?  Sounds reasonable, right?

Fast forward a few minutes and the cat has run off and my wife is bleeding.

Thinking my wife is going to start foaming at the mouth any minute, I convinced her to go to urgent care to get it checked out and see if my wife needed to be put down or not.  Turns out, the urgent care team wasn't concerned and were absolutely wonderful.  So later that day, on Easter Sunday of all days, she gets a request to give a rating for her experience.  Completely happy with how it turned out, she went to press "5", but at that very moment my daughter sprung into her lap, making her tap "1" instead.

Horrified, she tried to undo with no avail – the "1" was apparently set in stone.

Here is where our stories converge.  That very evening, someone from the urgent care clinic called up my wife, horribly sorry for her bad experience and offering to help.  My wife quickly apologized, explaining the inadvertent click, and soon the air was cleared.  Again, this was on Easter Sunday that very evening.

I was shocked.  The "1" wasn't just an internal metric to determine how to improve, but rather an urgent message that was immediately taken up by the team to see what could be done.

Of course I immediately thought back to apartments – We often talk about response times to leads or maintenance requests, but how many companies have a response time metric for review grades?  How quickly are they even pulled by most companies?

So while Whitney had heard of other companies suffering from dips in performance reviews after centralization, Gigi's team seems to have thwarted that fate through increased surveys and prompt review response times.

Definitely seems worth looking into on a more global level.