For Michael Storey, Chief Experience Officer at RentSpree, customer experience (CX) is intertwined with processes that can be simplified, a bevy of user experience metrics and teams across the company that realize strong CX equates to strong business results.
Storey, an AX100 member, is a speaker at Constellation Research's Ambient Experience Summit. I caught up with Storey to talk customer experience and RentSpree's approach.
RentSpree's role. RentSpree is a rental property management software company that started out as a service for screening applications. Today, RentSpree has evolved to be more of a suite for rental property management. "We really target the smaller mom and pop type landlords for property management," said Storey.
Use cases. "When you're looking for a tenant as a landlord and you have a few properties you really want to save yourself time," said Storey. "We hone in on people who want to work with an agent. There's a lot of complexity and compliance that needs to be considered. The agent will help the landlord market the property, screen those tenants and ensure they're reliable. They also set up leases, security deposits and rent payments."
Storey added that RentSpree is designed to make sure the agent is connected to landlords and over time, the landlords can become customers too. "We can really maximize the opportunity for the agent and help landlords maintain a good reputation as well," said Storey.
The end customer. RentSpree has four main cohorts. First is the partner organizations such as MLS and brokerages and their agents. Storey said RentSpree services are traditionally for agents. More recently, RentSpree has ben bringing landlords on to collaborate and create centralized tools. Applicants and renters are also target audiences, but aren't a marketing focus.
CX and process. "Agents have a lot of admin, paperwork and tasks they have to do," said Storey. "We do a lot of generative research to find out where the problems in the process are and how we can help them." He added that the rental market lacks automation and RentSpree is focusing on how it can simplify processes for agents with automation and AI.
CX and AI. Storey noted that even though AI has a lot of potential human centric design principles are still critical. "I think AI is going to help us be much more fluid in how we personalize experiences with contextual information," said Storey. "If we understand what the customer has been doing and what needs to be done, we can automate the experience."
AI plans. RentSpree is still early in its AI journey, but has integrated AI into its chat support and knowledge base. Storey added that genAI is also writing listing descriptions based on agent details. "We're starting to explore how we integrate AI across different features to take away tasks," he said. "We want to create a connected journey so we can take somebody through what they need to do without focusing on the perfect happy path. AI is helping us have a deeper understanding of the individual customer and where they are in their journey."
Measuring CX success. Storey said traditionally Net Promoter Scores and customer satisfaction rating have gauged CX success, but they are lacking. "I've changed my perspective on whether those things are actually useful. Storey said:
"I think giving the user a chance to give you some comments or tell you their thoughts is great, but when asking them to rate something you tend to get very extreme perspectives. You get very happy people or very unhappy people and we miss a lot of the people in between who are getting on with it, but don't feel compelled to write anything or to rate anything. I tend to look at UX success metrics as being things like task success rate, time on task, error rates, daily active users and monthly active users to tell us how sticky the product is really. I'm also looking at things that that lead to potentially lost revenue, support costs and time spent fixing issues. The churn rate is really one of the big ones."
CX as a team sport. Storey said RentSpree has been infusing a customer focused approach that includes the product team and other business teams as well as research and operations. "You want these teams to have a strong voice and seat at the table when we talk about roadmaps," said Storey. "We want people to understand that good customer experience leads to a thriving business. You can't really have a successful business if you don't do something your customer loves."
