The system is intended to manage projects and relationships with applicants and residents.
Yardi announced a new product, RentCafe CRM IQ, for multifamily operators to manage relationships with customers and prospects. Working with Yardi Voyager and RentCafe, CRM IQ enables management of “prospects, applicants and residents through every stage of the leasing and resident lifecycle.”
“CRM IQ allows property owners and managers to reduce operational costs through centralization of their leasing offices with CLO-friendly features that streamline lead management, lease conversion and resident services,” the company wrote. “Leasing agents can take advantage of a user-friendly dashboard that prioritizes customer-oriented data and provides a consolidated view of the customer journey across a portfolio.”
CRM, standing for customer relationship management, is a category of software that companies use to centrally manage how they interact with customers. Typically, the major part is a data repository so everyone who might communicate with a customer or prospect has access to all previous history and a place to document things for others going forward. Salesforce is an example of a massive business built on being a cloud-based CRM vendor.
“The new features give site teams more benefits including segmented prospect stages, making it easier to strategically target higher-quality leads without extensive training, and tools for managing lease renewals, resident services, maintenance requests and more,” Yardi says. “CRM IQ includes a new Communication Hub, providing a single aggregate view of all customer interactions and engagement capabilities. It also has a tenant advocacy feature to create more opportunities for resident referrals and testimonial engagement.”
The new CRM component also works with RentCafe Chat IQ, a “natural language automated attendant that answers customer questions via email, chat, text and voice, and provides seamless live-agent handoffs.” That sort of integration would be critical to avoid one system doing things the other couldn’t know about.
All CRM-type data is extremely valuable. One question to ask, though, when using cloud-based software is how easily you can obtain the data if you wish. The concept of ownership can get complex if vendors’ systems keep data locked up and not easily accessible to operators other than through that software. When considering any sort of data system, a good question to ask is whether you can download the data to your own computers when you want and if the data can be read by other software.
