Podcast Description

Savvy marketers step into The Marketing Spotlight to tell their stories of successful interactive marketing campaigns.

This week in The Marketing Spotlight:

Mark Juleen, VP of Marketing, J.C. Hart
Automated customer survey campaign improves customer experience.
Time: 11:14

Download the PodcastDownload the PDF

Podcast Transcript

From Right On Interactive, this is The Marketing Spotlight – a look at how marketing leaders are producing meaningful business results through innovative marketing communications.
Mark Juleen: From what we’ve heard, from a statistics standpoint anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of a response rate to a customer survey is pretty good. We’re actually experiencing 35% response rates to surveys we’ve sent out.

Narrator: Today, we’re talking about systematically gathering customer feedback through automated interactive surveys as a means to improve customer satisfaction.

MJ: So we feel like what we’ve done in the way we’ve designed the messages the way that we’re sending them out is maybe a little more unique than what other survey companies have done in the past when sending out and soliciting for surveys and customer feedback. And we feel like we’re pretty successful in getting that feedback at the level we are.

Narrator: This week in The Marketing Spotlight.

MJ: My name is Mark Juleen. I’m the vice president of marketing for the J.C. Hart Company. I’m responsible for basically all of the online communications as well as any marketing and print literature that we deal with the communities.

Narrator: The J.C. Hart Company was founded over 30 years ago by John Hart Senior who was a builder-developer back in the 1950’s and 60’s. When his son, John Hart Junior followed in his father’s footsteps, he decided to take a new approach.

MJ: We are a builder and developer of luxury apartment communities based out of the Indianapolis market. We do have a couple of other communities, one in Ohio as well as two in Bloomington, Indiana. But we’re primarily a builder and developer. We also manage the apartment communities after we’ve built them.

What really makes us different is that while we continue to grow, we have a family feel for our organization in which if one person hurts kind of everybody hurts. We really try to rely on the core values of the company to push us in the direction that we have and then also have every associate beyond John Hart who is such a great core to the business, but beyond that, really have a focus on the day to day basis for what we need to do for our customers. We have the whole purpose of the company to make your home an enjoyable living experience. And that idea of enjoying your living experience, and making it fun or inviting, that’s really what we cater to day-to-day. It’s not necessarily about just the bottom line, but it is about the customer experience.

Narrator: The two have a direct relationship. In the luxury apartment market, the customer living experience is job one because it directly affects the bottom line. J.C. Hart relies on referrals, perhaps more than many other businesses.

MJ: If you go online and you see general comments and reviews, we continually have properties that are at the upper end of the spectrum when it comes to recommendations and approvals. Those are things to us when we can get that feedback directly from the customer saying that they appreciate what we do that we really feel that helps set us apart as well.

Narrator: While the overall goal is to make the living experience enjoyable, JC Hart employs a number of strategies on a daily basis to make sure nothing falls through the cracks.

MJ: Not only do we have different surveys that we provide at different stages within the customer lifecycle, but we also have one-on-one interactions with our customers in that they live where they’re buying their product.

It’s kind of a unique experience versus other products where you buy it and then you move on. And it requires someone to go out and solicit feedback from customers. Well, they’re coming in on a monthly basis or a weekly basis to either use our clubhouse facilities or maybe just to pay their rent. During that period of time, we really take that as an opportunity to make sure that we’re shining, asking if we’re doing everything we can do to make sure they are having an enjoyable experience.

On top of that, we maintain these assets, we maintain these communities. When we need to go in and check out a dripping faucet or replace a light bulb or something like that, it’s another opportunity for us to get a pulse on what the customer thinks of what’s going on.

So, we have a lot of touch points in which we interact with our customers, maybe more than some other businesses, and we try to embrace those opportunities and make sure that we’re doing the best job we can.

Narrator: The results of doing the best job they can go directly to the bottom line. Occupancy rates are a key performance indicator.

MJ: If we can sustain a high occupancy in the mid-90 percentile range we feel like we’re doing a pretty good job.

Narrator: Beyond the occupancy rate measure, this industry also looks at price per square foot.

MJ: In our business, kind of like the automotive business prices can fluctuate based on demand. One of the things we can definitely tell if we’re being successful, if we’re creating demand beyond the market, we’ll measure ourselves against some of our competitors, we can measure ourselves on a price per square foot compared to them. And we can determine that, hey, we’re a market leader. Or, we are able to surpass what we’ve been able to collect in rent from the years prior.

Narrator: JC Hart deploys a number of customer communications to improve the resident experience. They implemented the customer lifecycle marketing automation solution from Right On Interactive. JC Hart divides the resident lifecycle into different stages. They created an automated survey campaign to solicit feedback at each step.

MJ: That’s really been the most interesting campaign we’ve launch so far in that what we’re really trying to do is take the customer lifecycle and during certain periods of time during the lifecycle of a resident, we want to ask them and solicit feedback from them on how are we doing.

So we have what we call our first impression survey, which asks for feedback on how was their move-in experience, how was their leasing experience.

We also have a service survey. Anytime a service request is completed on a particular apartment, they’ll get a feedback survey then as well asking, did we complete this properly on a timely basis.

And then we have what we call our relationship survey. That’s our mid-cycle or mid-point of the lease period survey in which we ask our customers, how are things going so far as a whole.

We’ve been able to use these three touch points to really dial in on what our customers are thinking, and if during that lifecycle are there things we can do to maybe change that customer’s experience and change their mind about the experience they’ve had, especially if maybe it hasn’t been going perfectly.

So, it’s been really interesting to be able to follow that and to be able to track what’s been going on there.

Narrator: To accomplish this sophisticated campaign, JC Hart needed to tie together multiple sales and marketing technologies.

MJ: We’ve integrated a program that ties into our management software through RealPage. They have a management software tool called One Site where we can manage the lifecycle of our customer being from the moment that we contact them so it can be a CRM-type of a system to the point when they move in and they are an actual resident and we are processing their rent, it becomes an accounting tool for us as well, as well as when we process these service requests and we can show that we’ve completed them within that system.

We’re using a tool with ROI that integrates with this system, and depending on the customer touch point, whether it be 30-days after they moved in, or it be the mid-point of their lease, or it be after a service request is required, because of the integration with ROI, it can automatically determine what type of survey need to be sent.

We’ve also integrated with Walker Communications [Walker Information] for this survey system, and then we push it out through a dynamic email provider so that we can even track the click-thrus on the emails, who is opening them, and get any kind of send-backs, bounce type of messages so that we can improve that process.

What we really like about it is that as I was saying, one of our pain points or one of our biggest challenges is people and the check list of items that we continue to give them, especially as technology evolves and things grow. What we really enjoy is that now since this is all essentially an automated process, the only thing that we have to do now is as human beings is study that data and truly try to improve the customer relationship and the customer experience.

Narrator: The key performance indicator for this campaign is the survey response rates.

MJ: Our customers want to talk to us. They want to share their experience, and that has been just gratifying to see that we’re doing such a good job. And they want to tell us that we’re doing a good job. I think that a lot of businesses in a lot of industries are nervous to get customer feedback. They’re nervous to hear what’s going wrong with their product.

And, we do get our fair share of that, of course. We’re going to get our fair share of the guy who is not happy with the price of his apartment, or he’s not happy with the experience he’s had with service, but we have an opportunity to fix that. What’s really fantastic for me is to see that out of a five point scale, we get a four on average of people that would recommend us; having people that are very likely to recommend us, to me, is just fantastic.

Narrator: The strategic marketing initiatives being implemented at JC Hart will shape the company over the next three to five years.

MJ: One of the things that we are doing that is going to shape is that we can help use tools, whether it is ROI or automating some other things that can keep the brand of J.C. Hart or the brand of the community at the top of mind of people and really feel that we have a different level of engagement with our customers. I think what is going to shape us is that the fact that, hey, we want to communicate with you, we want to solicit feedback from you, and we want to share all of that information out there and be a little more open as a company when it comes to communicating.

Narrator: The Marketing Spotlight is a production of Right On Interactive. Information about our customer lifecycle marketing automation products, as well as our latest whitepapers, podcasts, and other resources are available at rightoninteractive.com

Audio production and voice-over services provided by Rich Cunningham Voiceover