Customer immersion days

We think that living and breathing the day-to-day routine of our future customers is key to designing relevant products that humans love to use. We’d like to thank Stockland Wetherill Park (Retail) and McDonald Upton Moonee Ponds (Residential) for showing us your world.

During April we got a taste for what life as a Property Manager and Facility Manager is like. In both Retail and Residential, we came across dedicated hardworking professionals who are achieving great outcomes for their tenants and landlords.

It’s a tough job; your time to shine is when things go wrong. You’re often handling emotional customers, coordinating between multiple stakeholders and working with imperfect information.  

We had the opportunity to view many systems, tools and processes that Property and Facility Managers use on a day-to-day basis. In terms of systems and processes, we found:

• Paper forms and folders

• Excel being used to capture jobs and data

• Multiple disconnected legacy “on-prem” systems

• No end-to-end tracking of workflows

• Very little formal customer feedback

• No formal “continuous improvement” tracking

Property Managers know there is a better way of working

Everyone we spoke to had innovative ideas to improve their ways of working; migration to the Cloud, app-based notification systems, reports to track workflows and prioritisation tools. We think that a key challenge is that everyone is so busy in “the business of today”, there is little time remaining to work on innovation.

Our key learning is that our solutions need to seamlessly integrate and be intuitive to use. Property Managers don’t need, or want, another clunky system.