A monthly hour of "Quality Time" with every resident? easily...
Posted on Sat, Sep 05, 2009
Every so often I get inspired, and this week it happened again. And out of all places, the context was a sales meeting, in which we were pitching our service to a prospect partner. A young smart lady (let's call her K for the purpose of this post), asked us questions that we were not prepared for. But aside from the fact that apparently we were not prepared enough for the meeting, the questions were excellent and inspiring. And so I would like to share those questions with you, and provide the answers while I'm at it.
We make it our job to service residents; we measure our success by the value and benefit residents derive from the ActiveBuilding Resident Portal. We constantly add value for residents on the Resident Portal because our basic belief is that a Resident Portal can only be successful if it is consumer-based and provides real and concrete value to residents (and onsite teams). This short preface is to give context to the questions we were asked, and more so to the answers (that were not given in time, but are now).
Question 1: How many times do registered users (of the Resident Portal) visit the portal a week
Answer:
* Source: Over 5000 residents from 25 properties (High-rise, mid-rise, Garden-style) in OR, CA, WA
Question 2: how long do they stay on the portal per visit
Answer:
* Source: Over 5000 residents from 25 properties (High-rise, mid-rise, Garden-style) in OR, CA, WA
Question 3: what are the trends over time (time per visit and number of visits a week)
Answer:
The trends are interesting; obviously resident registration rate flattens around a constant number (close to zero) as saturation is achieved (usually around the 70%-80% of residents of the property registered to the Portal). With regards to number of visits a week, the trend is somewhat flat too, where the current average is a little over 3 visits a week. With regards to average minutes per visit, the trend is slowly increasing, with residents spending in average a little over 7 minutes per visit on the portal. The reason for this constant growth is that as more residents register with the Resident Portal and more user-generated content is created, there is more to do on the portal per visit and more value for the residents as a whole.
The bottom line is that in average a resident that is registered to the Resident Portal is exposed to the brand, the services and the community of the property (3 times a week X 7 minutes X 4 weeks = 84 minutes a month). I am sure there are few to no other ways to get residents to spend that long (an hour and 24 minutes) with aspects of the Property (Brand/service/community) every month.