CASE STUDIES

BH: National Property Management Group Leads Industry with Centralized Reputation Strategy

BH Management Services (BH), a top-ten National Multifamily Housing Council property management group and a leader in the multifamily housing industry, partnered with Widewail in July 2021 to improve its online reputation as part of larger centralization efforts, supporting all 330 residential properties under BH management.

Boosting their reputation and resident engagement, BH’s properties have found success with Widewail’s Engage, Engage Plus and Invite products, which offer a managed review response service and SMS-powered, automated, review solicitation software. These products help local businesses respond to and get more reviews.

"We were excited to explore partnerships outside of multifamily because we knew we couldn’t keep using the same tools as others in the multifamily space and expect a different outcome. The tools we used in the past were all about reporting review data, but Widewail allows us to act on that data."

—Stephanie Robicheau, Manager of Lifecycle Marketing

Since launching Widewail, the hundreds of properties managed by BH have increased review volume, improved overall ratings and decreased negative sentiment. The Widewail team has authored 17,289 review responses on behalf of BH, averaging two business hours between review submission and response, in a coordinated effort led by Widewail staff with support from BH community managers. Not only has the BH team been able to activate the voice of happy residents, but they’ve been able to better assist residents, conducting business in line with BH’s service standards and core values.

“Widewail has allowed us to do business more transparently and more authentically in a way that all our previous reputation management platform providers haven’t been able to.”

—Kelly Kutach, VP of Marketing

Reputation management and review scores mean more to BH than just a number out of five. Rather, its reviews are a reflection of its health and operations as a whole. This perspective complements Widewail’s review platform, which acts as a window into the resident and prospective resident experiences.

According to Kutach, this holistic view offered by Widewail was inaccessible under their previous reputation management tool and has been a key step forward in the company’s wider effort to improve the resident experience, making it better, faster and more personalized. BH teams, with help from Widewail, are able to respond with more speed and consistency, while also learning from resident feedback, identifying opportunities for improvement. Not limited to a group-level perspective, BH found Widewail’s balance of group-level and property-level review content useful in various applications.

“By partnering with Widewail we've been able to streamline our process. Now, our on-site teams save the time previously spent monitoring and responding to reviews on multiple platforms, focusing their efforts on high-touch interactions, and making improvements based on feedback from review content. As a result, our residents are happier and our ratings have improved over time.”

—Stephanie Robicheau, Manager of Lifecycle Marketing

The Results: 

With help of Invite, BH properties celebrate increase in reviews, drop in negative sentiment 

BH launched its use of Widewail’s review solicitation software, Invite, in January 2022.

Invite integrates with PMS software like Yardi, Entrata, Appfolio, RentManager and others to send review requests via SMS to residents and prospective residents at relevant touchpoints during their resident lifecycle. 

The results have been nothing short of impressive. 

These statistics can be further filtered by the original trigger event for each review. BH launched three Campaigns to get more reviews, focusing trigger points on: after a prospective resident’s tour, upon move-in, and after renewing a lease. 

Tour requests accounted for 61% of requests sent, followed by 26% renewal and 11% move-in. Generally, tour and move-in sentiments were highest, with tours averaging 4.8/5-stars and move-ins 4.6. Renewals rated an average of 4.5.

“Unlike higher volume industries, our communities have a fixed number of units and renting periods of multiple months or years. Because of this, to increase review volume we have had to get creative, expanding our thinking around creating more review opportunities. We focused on tours, move-ins, and renewals, which as a result has significantly expanded our total review opportunities - around 60%. With the help of Widewail's integrations and SMS automation the process runs itself and the results have been fantastic.”

—Brynna Nugent, Marketing Strategist, Social Media & Reputation Management

After some experimentation, it became clear that asking residents for a review at the tour and move-in stages consistently produced the highest ratings and drastically increased the available number of review request opportunities.

Somewhat counter to recent industry trends, reviews from residents renewing their leases averaged a 4.4 rating, a reflection of BH’s centralized renewal team which has shortened the overall renewal process by 19 days.

“In a time when negative sentiment is up across the industry, we've decreased negative sentiment 22%. We are proud of this performance and its the result of our group-wide centralization efforts along with the addition of Widewail's technology and services.”

—Stephanie Robicheau, Manager of Lifecycle Marketing

Visits to BH community websites directly from Google Business Profile pages increased 13%, suggesting that BH pages not only became more visible to prospective residents during Google searches but also that great review content is more desirable to prospective residents, leading to an increase in conversion.

The Widewail Platform: Customizable Categories and Brand Tags Help Identify Opportunities for Improvement

The team of responders at Widewail monitors and replies to every review carefully, using customizable tags to categorize reviews based on the content. As a result, the BH executive team has access to property reputation data at the group-level and community-level, concurrently. The team can filter reviews by tag or category and determine how their properties are performing on a per-tag basis. For example, in the Widewail app, it’s possible to filter all reviews by “Maintenance” to see the number of reviews and average rating of maintenance experiences across the BH portfolio or individual properties. 

According to Robicheau, BH’s customer lifecycle team has been able to glean operational insights from these tags. “The platform is easy to navigate. It's easy to monitor performance both at the group level and the individual community level. In particular, analyzing our performance by tags, such as "common areas" "in-unit condition" or "representative" provides us with actionable insights that we did not have with our previous provider.” With this data at its fingertips, BH can be proactive about addressing improvement opportunities more effectively and efficiently. 

The dashboard provides important insights to property management marketers. They can learn the answers to key questions: Why do prospective residents tour? Why do renters move in? Why do they stay? 

Gaining this feedback via public forums like review sites is a relatively new idea in property management and multifamily marketing. It’s always been important for onsite teams to improve the resident experience, but the industry historically receives this feedback through internal polls and customer feedback forms. 

BH is an early pioneer of trust marketing in the property management vertical, meaning that it embraces resident reviews as a pillar of its marketing strategy. 

Increased engagement necessitates an active review response strategy, as it’s inevitable that negative feedback will be posted. Enter: Widewail’s Engage. 

Engage – Widewail team responded to 17,000+ reviews on behalf of BH with speedy response time

BH partnered with Widewail to manage all review responses and social media engagements across an entire ecosystem of review sites and social media platforms. 

While alleviating the daily stress of monitoring and replying to reviews, Widewail ensures a consistent response approach and high level of service while freeing up on-site teams to focus on improving community experiences based upon feedback generated through Widewail Invite and internal surveying methods. 

According to the property manager of Maryland-based property Terrapin Row, managed by B.HOM Student Living (a BH subsidiary):

“[Widewail] is one of the most helpful review platforms we have used at Terrapin Row. We are able to connect with residents quickly with assistance and pinpoint the critical individuals that require more personal contact from us.”

In the first year of the partnership, Widewail responded to 17,289 reviews for BH properties. Its average response time during business hours: 2 hours. All reviews are replied to by Widewail’s in-house team of responders. No templates, no bots. 100% people-powered.

To manage negative reviews Widewail review responders work directly with BH community managers through the Widewail application. Upon receipt of a negative review, the Widewail team will author a suggested response and send it to the appropriate BH representative for review, approval, or internal feedback. The workflow has been optimized to ensure a high-quality, relevant response in a timely manner.