Community Association Management Companies (CAMs) play an important role in managing administrative, accounting, financial, and maintenance tasks for the communities that have hired them. However, when servicing clients, CAMs face various challenges, such as resident dissatisfaction, overburdened managers, and dissatisfied boards. These issues often arise from a lack of forming and maintaining strong connections with their communities. That’s where a CRM comes in.  

This blog post will look at the top challenges management companies face, how a CRM can address these challenges, and why implementing a CRM is vital. Thus, we will equip you with the correct tools and knowledge to improve resident happiness, board connections, and management efficiency.

Challenges that management companies are currently struggling with

Low Retention Rate 

Community Association Management companies often struggle with low retention rates. This issue primarily manifests as most HOA communities leave their current management company within two years, opting to either self-manage their community or sign on with a competing management company.  

This revolving door phenomenon forces CAM companies to seek new clients to replace the clients they have lost. This adds extra strain to management companies because they spend more time acquiring new sales. Moreover, high turnover in community management can undermine the trust and satisfaction of existing clients, who may perceive it as instability or lack of value in the services provided.  Focusing your efforts on retention becomes vital through strong client relationships, proactive communication, and demonstrating value to ensure long-term satisfaction. 

Eroding Resident Trust 

Many management company interactions center around payment requests, invoicing, collections, and handling violations. Over time, the transactional nature of these relationships can make residents feel less valued, unheard, and unsatisfied. As trust erodes, residents may become more hesitant to participate in community activities, resulting in strained relationships and possible disputes.

Board Doubt and Oversight

Board members may often raise concerns about the value they’re getting from your management services. They want to be certain that services are efficient, jobs are completed on time, and communication is clear. Thus, a lack of proper management of community issues or communications can strain the board-management relationship. 

Operational Inefficiencies

Community Association Management companies frequently face inefficiencies, such as manual processes, data in different places, and communication gaps. These inefficiencies can result in delays when responding to resident issues and inconsistent or poor service, all leading to increased workloads for managers. Additionally, operational efficiencies lead to more unpredictable schedules and stress for managers.

Limited Resident Engagement 

Creating a sense of community and encouraging resident participation is important for a well-functioning community. However, management companies often struggle to keep residents informed. Limited communication channels and a lack of personalized interactions can all hinder building an engaged community.

Outdated Technology

Leveraging the latest technology is important for delivering exceptional customer service.  However, several management companies are tethered to outdated systems. Being stuck in the past technologically can throw a wrench into your communication, data management, and operational efficiency.  This ultimately diminishes the quality of services you provide to communities.

How CRM can help CAMs build better connections

By leveraging an industry-specific CRM, management companies can streamline operations, build resident trust, and improve board relationships. Let\’s discuss how CRM built specifically for the CAM industry can help your company.  

1. Track resident interactions and provide support

With a CRM system, management companies can easily track resident interactions and provide efficient assistance. Here\’s a deeper look at how CRM may solve these key concerns:

Centralized Data Management

CRM enables management companies to keep all resident-related information in one unified platform. This includes residents’ contact information, communication choices, service requests, support requests, payment history, and unit information.  

Centralizing data has many benefits. It enables your staff to access up-to-date resident information, reducing response times and increasing overall efficiency. It also improves data quality and consistency, decreasing mistakes and redundancies in resident records. Furthermore, having a centralized database allows team members to collaborate more effectively since everyone can access the same data source. 

On-Demand Support through a Knowledge Base

One significant benefit of adopting a CRM system built for the community management industry is the ability to provide on-demand help through a searchable knowledge base. A knowledge base stores important community information, such as frequently asked questions, troubleshooting tips, and community policies and procedures.

Residents have 24/7 access to the knowledge base, allowing them to solve common problems at their own convenience. This eliminates the need for support teams to handle common questions, allowing them to focus on more meaningful or urgent tasks. A well-maintained knowledge base also improves resident satisfaction by delivering prompt and correct answers to their questions, resulting in a more efficient and streamlined support experience.

Efficient Handling of Support Tickets

CRM systems help management companies handle support issues more efficiently. When a resident submits a question or request, the CRM simplifies the process by enabling them to contact the right managers quickly. 

With a CRM, you can keep residents informed about the progress of their requests, and they can communicate back with you, which creates a two-way feedback loop. This approach streamlines support processes by maintaining regular updates and keeping residents informed throughout the resolution process.

2. Communicate with residents

Effective communication lies at the heart of successful HOA management. A CRM system can revolutionize how HOA managers interact with residents, fostering efficient and personalized communication.

Proactive, Multichannel Communication

CRM solutions built for the community management industry enables you to engage with residents proactively through many channels. These channels include phone calls, emails, text messages, postal mail, website notifications, and resident portals. This proactive strategy ensures that residents receive updates, announcements, and notifications in the format that best meets their needs. Moreover, by embracing multichannel communication capabilities, management companies can improve the efficacy of their outreach initiatives, increase resident participation, and establish better community relationships. 

Tailored Messages with Dynamic Distribution Group

CRM systems with communication capabilities provide dynamic distribution group functions, allowing management companies to segment residents according to locations. This segmentation allows management companies to provide relevant and targeted communications to certain groups of residents. For example, management companies can form distribution groups for homeowners, renters, and board members in a specific area for emergencies. Dynamic distribution groups help to enhance engagement, responsiveness, and resident happiness by personalizing communications to the interests and needs of each demographic.

3. Increase transparency and collaboration

Management companies must update board members regularly on the status of community tasks and projects.  Here’s how a CRM improves transparency and communication with your board.  

Collaborative Task Management

A task management system within your CRM allows management companies to collaborate with board members on community-related tasks. Each task can be categorized, prioritized, and assigned to a particular team or board member to ensure everyone knows their responsibilities.  

Email Notifications and Updates

Task management features within a CRM can automate email alerts to board members for task assignments, changes, and updates. This proactive communication keeps board members informed and engaged with community initiatives, projects, and ongoing duties. Email notifications also function as reminders to take action and follow up.

Document Management and Sharing

Within a CRM, document management tools can help management companies store, organize, and exchange key documents, including contracts, rules, meeting minutes, and reports, with the HOA board. Authorized board members may securely view these documents, guaranteeing transparency and quick access to critical information. Additionally, document versioning and permission management improve security and governance.

Reporting and Analytics

CRM systems have extensive reporting and analytics capabilities that provide information on task progress, completion rates, resource allocation, and overall performance. Management companies can generate reports and view information on dashboards to share with the HOA board, highlighting critical data, trends, and successes. These reports provide transparency by offering information about operational efficiency, resident satisfaction, and community initiatives.

5 Features Your CRM should have

Here are the 5 features your CRM should have:

1. Communication

CRM systems should have powerful communication capabilities.  Communication is vital for building connections, resolving issues quickly, and keeping stakeholders informed. CRM\’s communication component offers seamless engagement with residents and board members through several channels like email, phone, text, and portals.

With Pilera’s communication technologies, CAM benefits from seamless contact with homeowners, stakeholders, and the HOA board through many channels. This enables people to select their preferred communication channel, ensuring that timely and relevant communications reach them.

2. Customer Support

CRM systems should enable customer support teams to effectively respond to resident queries, complaints, and service requests. A CRM system with extensive customer support capabilities automates ticket administration, tracks support interactions, and guarantees that issues are resolved on time.

Pilera’s help desk function simplifies customer service for management teams. It enables managers to provide superior customer assistance by leveraging automated processes and knowledge base, increasing resident satisfaction.

3. Operations

A CRM system with strong operations management capabilities simplifies work assignment, scheduling, and tracking. It allows management companies to handle maintenance requests and track repair progress quickly.

Pilera’s operations management tool helps Community Association Management (CAM) improve task management, maintenance, ACRs, violations, and more.   It also empowers collaboration with tools such as ticket assignment, automatic email notifications, and automatic audit logs.

4. Resident Engagement

Engaging residents is critical to creating a lively community and encouraging involvement in events, projects, and decision-making processes. Your HOA CRM should incorporate resident engagement features like community portals, event management, and surveys.

Pilera’s resident engagement portal offers residents a unified platform for accessing community information, participating in debates, and learning about future activities.

5. Board Collaboration

A powerful CRM should have comprehensive board collaboration tools to promote effective governance and decision-making. It allows CAM businesses to create, allocate, and monitor jobs, handle architectural modification requests, and provide reports demonstrating workload and work completion progress.

With Pilera’s board collaboration tools, CAM companies can enhance transparency, improve collaboration, and streamline operations, leading to better governance, informed decision-making, and a more cohesive community environment.

From Transactions to People-First, with CRM designed for CAMs

In conclusion, a CRM system is critical for Community Association Management organizations to manage challenges. An HOA CRM system streamlines communication, provides efficient customer assistance, optimizes operations, increases resident participation, and allows for smooth board cooperation. These capabilities enable CAM businesses to strengthen resident connections, increase transparency and confidence with HOA boards, streamline operational procedures, and provide superior services to their communities. CAM businesses can overcome barriers, increase efficiency, and achieve long-term success by utilizing a CRM system like Pilera while maintaining a flourishing and connected community.

About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management software that has helped thousands of community managers enhance communications, operations, client support, engagement, and voting.  Book a personalized demo to learn how Pilera can help improve efficiency and reduce costs. 

As a community manager or board member, you’re just beginning to create a budget to plan expenses for the community next year.  However, creating a budget that saves money for your community can be a challenging job.  You have to take into account how to forecast expenses for utilities, insurance, vendors, reserves, maintenance, legal fees, and more.  With many expenses to consider, how do you effectively save money on your HOA budget?  

There are many ways to save on a community\’s budget – energy efficiency, vendors, reserves planning, etc. However, a surprising and often understated way is to include HOA Software into your budget as a way to save money.  Although HOA Software requires an investment in time and money, it can reduce the cost of many daily administrative tasks and unforeseen expenses.  Studies show that automating business processes can reduce labor costs by up to 50%. In this article, we’ll explore the five different areas where HOA software can help you save on your community\’s budget. 

Resident Communications

Communicating with residents on a frequent basis is key to running a successful community. However, you need to send a wide variety of messages to residents. You frequently send messages about maintenance, events, payments, support requests, and emergencies. Mailing these letters in-house means that you are paying for paper, ink, envelopes, stamps, and employee labor. Depending on how many units are in the community and how frequently you communicate with residents, these mailing costs can chew up a significant amount of the budget. That\’s where automated email comes in.

Automated email saves your community money

Email is a great way to save on your community\’s budget. Let\’s say that you manage a community of 100 units. You send notices to each unit three times a month. The community does all the mailing in-house. A staff member spends 2 hours to put the mailing together and they are paid $20/hour. Let\’s break down the costs:

If you send 3 mailings to each unit per month (36 per year), the annual cost is $3,996. ($1.11/unit x 100 units x 36 notices = $3,996).

An HOA software with emailing features does the automating for you, so your community can save thousands of dollars each year. For example, Pilera\’s email communication tool costs $0.05/unit/month. With Pilera, you\’ll spend only $80.40 per year sending emails to a community with 100 units ($0.067 x 100 x 12). That means each community can save more than $3,800 on the budget. With Pilera\’s fast and reliable communication platform, you can send any type of email notification for less than the cost of a stamp. Every email saves you money.

Online documents and electronic forms save even more

You also need to share important documents like CC&R\’s and resident satisfaction surveys with your residents. Imagine printing lengthy CC&R documents every time a new resident joins the community. Mailing contact forms or resident satisfaction surveys are costly not only to the community but to your residents as well. An HOA software provides incredible cost savings for your community by storing an unlimited number of documents and organizing them so your residents can find what they need. You can also email the resident whenever you post a new document to keep them informed. When you send residents an electronic form to fill out, they will appreciate the ability to submit their responses online and not have to spend money on postage to mail the survey back.

Maintenance

Maintenance is an integral part of any community\’s operations; however, communities often encounter unexpected costs. A community may end up spending thousands of dollars if equipment breaks unexpectedly. To keep residents safe and the equipment functioning, it\’s essential that the community conducts preventative maintenance on a regular basis. Preventative maintenance helps to identify issues with the unit or common area equipment before it becomes an emergency.

An HOA software provides you with the ability to create and assign work orders so you can quickly identify and fix issues. The software should also allow you to set and track work orders by priority and due dates. By tracking maintenance items on a regular basis, you\’ll know how much to budget for repairs or replacements. In that way, the community lessens the risk of depleting its reserves fund. Your residents also won\’t be surprised or disappointed with an expensive special assessment fee.

You also need a system that can easily adapt to emergency maintenance situations. Through Pilera\’s work order system, you can post an alert directly in the ticket to instruct residents on what to do when there is an emergency. For example, you can direct residents to call the maintenance hotline instead of submitting a work order if their basement is flooding.

Administrative Tasks

Have you ever taken a long phone call from a resident trying to find their payment balance? You didn\’t expect the call to take hours long and so you ended up delaying an important project you were working on. This is a hidden cost that many managers face on a daily basis.

Promoting self-service within your communities is a great way for your residents to access essential community information on their own time. Residents can view documents, events, and past communications so they are informed. They can look up their financial balance and make a payment online. When residents are more informed and engaged, the community runs a lot smoother. You are more productive as a result. Instead of dealing with daily questions on payment balances, you can work toward improving the community experience for residents.

HOA software can also help free up the time it would otherwise take to manually perform tasks. These include sending messages, responding to customer support tickets, streamlining maintenance, and more.

HOA Fees

Collecting and processing HOA dues is another challenge that many communities face. Communities often have to set aside a budget to account for homeowner delinquency. How HOA Software helps is that it brings more predictability into the community\’s budget. A resident portal provides residents with an easy way to make their payments online. This is a faster, more convenient way for the community to collect dues. No more delayed or lost mail.

Another hidden cost of managing communities is processing checks that residents mail in for their dues. With the ease and convenience of online payments, managers or the board treasurer can save a trip to the bank, cutting down administrative costs.

With Pilera\’s integration with Authorize.net and Paylease, residents can pay their HOA dues online, hassle-free.

Vendor Services

Hiring the right vendor is critical to keeping residents safe and improving property values. To save the association money, board members might be tempted to hire a vendor who presents a lower bid. However, if the vendor is not insured and an employee or resident is injured on the property, the HOA can face legal issues. Additionally, if an employee of the contractor files for workers\’ compensation, it could come at the cost of the residents. It is worth more to the association in the long run to hire a vendor who is insured.

Your HOA software should allow you to track vendor contact information, license expiration dates, and your rating of their service. Keeping track of vendor license expirations ensures that you are not sending a vendor who is uninsured to perform work on a property. In Pilera, managers and board members can track each vendor\’s license expirations and receive automated notifications so they are informed.

Software – A unique way to save on your HOA budget

When identifying ways to save on your community\’s budget, many consider technology to be an added cost. However, there are surprising ways in which the right technology can actually help your community save money as you budget for the next year. When considering new HOA software, ask the following questions:

• Communications – Can you automate sending emails to the community? How much more will automated communication save the community compared to manually mailing out notices? As a bonus, think about how you can save money for the residents too.
• Maintenance – Can you create and assign work orders, set priority and due dates, and track progress so nothing falls through the cracks?
• Administrative Tasks – How can the software save time, rather than spending more time? Can residents easily access important information on their own, so managers can save time?
• HOA Dues Payments – Does the software automate online payments so delinquency is reduced and managers don\’t have to manually process checks?
• Vendor Services – Does the vendor management solution allow you to keep track of key information like license expiration notifications?

With the right technology, communities can save money on next year\’s budget by reducing mailing expenses, emergency maintenance costs, and hidden administrative costs. Pilera\’s HOA software solution has helped thousands of communities save money by automating many community tasks, increasing efficiency, and keeping residents informed. If you\’d like to learn how Pilera can work for you, contact us at [email protected].

Streamlining maintenance is one of the most critical activities in community management.  Managers aim to increase the public appeal of the community and ensure the safety of its staff and residents.  The right technology can help managers not only achieve but optimize those goals. As you research HOA maintenance software options for your community, ask vendors these 5 questions.

1. Can residents submit maintenance requests?

Providing residents with a way to self-service and be notified about important things relating to their unit and the community increases engagement and builds trust.  When a resident identifies a maintenance issue in their unit or within an area that lies within the HOA or condo’s responsibility to fulfill, they need a way to inform management of it.  

[icon name=\”check-square\” class=\”\” unprefixed_class=\”\”] Can your residents…

• Submit work order tickets about their unit or common areas
• Add pertinent details about the issue
• Select access preference – Does the resident want to be at the property when the maintenance personnel arrives?
• Receive updates on when the issue was resolved
• View a history of all the tickets they have submitted & the status of each.

2. Can you manage maintenance tickets from start to finish?

A robust work order management system should not only provide managers with the ability to create tickets but to streamline them from start to end.  Managers should be able to triage tickets when they come in or are created, know the status of each ticket, and collaborate with staff members.

[icon name=\”check-square\” class=\”\” unprefixed_class=\”\”] Can your staff…

• Create unit level or common area tickets
• Add pertinent details and attachments
• Categorize and prioritize the ticket
• Assign a ticket to another manager, staff member, vendor, or yourself
• Automatically notify the assignee of the new ticket
• Change status or comment on the ticket.

3. Can you gain high-level insights on maintenance operations?

Community managers need access to high-level and granular data to understand their operations and make better-informed decisions.  Through the HOA maintenance software, managers should be able to easily identify the number of tickets open/closed per month, their staff’s workload, the tickets that have not been worked on for a long time, and how many tickets each vendor is working on.  Managers should be able to easily capture this information for a specific community or across their entire portfolio. In Pilera’s maintenance system, managers receive an automated report with all the tickets that haven’t been touched for 30 days. This insight is essential for managers to handle the workload of their staff and vendors, prioritize work, and ensure that nothing falls off their radar.

4. Can you search for resident data quickly?

When a resident calls, emails, or walks into the management office to report a maintenance issue for their unit, you need to quickly search through your resident listing to create the ticket.  An HOA maintenance software should have a robust search capability. Searching by partial names or addresses, a resident’s unit, email, or phone number will save managers and staff members time if they are managing hundreds of tickets.

5. Can you maintain a vendor database effectively?

Building good relations with your vendors is crucial to the upkeep of your community or apartment complex.  As a manager, you need to know which vendors are approved to work for certain communities, the services they can provide, when their COIs are expiring, how you’ve rated their services, and how to keep in touch with them for new projects.  

[icon name=\”check-square\” class=\”\” unprefixed_class=\”\”] Can managers…

• Track contact information, addresses, and maintenance personnel information
• Assign vendors to categories such as entry management, landscaping, plumbing, and more
• Automatically notify vendors of the new maintenance tickets assigned to them
• Assign vendors to work for multiple communities at once
• Rate vendors so you know who your preferred contractors are

Using the right technology when it comes to managing maintenance projects can make all the difference in contributing to communities that are well-run, safe, happy, and look good.  It\’s essential to ask these five major questions when researching maintenance software options so that you can give your staff the best tools.

About Pilera

Pilera Software is the premier community and property management suite that has helped thousands of community managers and back-office personnel enhance communications, improve customer service, and manage compliance and operations.  May we help your community achieve these success stories?  Book a demo to see how Pilera’s community management suite can help your company.