Why consistent customer experience requires better systems, smarter automation, and AI that helps every employee deliver your brand’s standard of excellence.
Providing a consistent customer experience of the type that you want to present from your company is extremely important, but also extremely difficult. There is one big reason that makes it so difficult: people. Employees are just people, not robots who rigidly adhere to exactly what you want them to do.
At the NARPM Broker/Owner Conference a couple of weeks ago, keynote speaker John DiJulius spoke of what he calls “employee roulette,” which is basically the idea that a customer may have a great experience or a terrible experience, all depending on which employee they happen to interact with that day.
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It’s important to remember that while this is an obvious insight when you think about it, the average customer isn’t really thinking about it. They’re just having an emotional reaction to whatever they happen to encounter that day. If they just happen to get a helpful, empathetic, solution-oriented employee who is having a great day, then they’re likely to have a fantastic impression of your company. But if they just happen to get a rushed, uninformed, rude employee who is having a bad day, then they’re going to walk away from your business thinking that it is an absolute trainwreck that they never want to interact with again. Both experiences can happen at the exact same company. And this is what we need to solve for.
Why Employee Roulette Is So Dangerous
Customers look for a predictable experience. Let’s look at McDonald’s. I don’t think there is anyone on Earth who will tell you that McDonald’s makes the best burger and they go there because the quality of the food is so fantastic. No, people go to McDonald’s because it’s predictable and reliable. They can be on the other side of the country (or even the planet) and get roughly the same experience at any McDonald’s they visit. Will it be great? No. Will it be adequate? Yep. And the truth is, they just don’t know if visiting the local place they’ve never heard of will even be adequate. So they can reliably go to the McDonald’s knowing that it’s going to be “fine.”
When service quality varies too widely, customers don’t have this kind of comfort of predictability. When they call in or email, they don’t know whether they’re going to get a helpful response, or a worthless response that doesn’t do anything to solve their problem. Crazily enough, this can even be worse than just reliably providing a subpar experience. At least then, if you’re the cheapest option in the market, they know what they’re getting and the tradeoff they’re making. But when sometimes it’s great and sometimes it sucks, people get whiplash and turn away from your brand.
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On top of that, employee roulette actually punishes your best employees. Top performers end up becoming the “go-to” people who fix every issue and have to pick up the slack for the underperformers. Customers start requesting them when calling in, loading up that employee with extra workload while the underperformers get rewarded with less work.
The crazy thing is, this actually helps to mask the problems. Company leadership assumes everything is just fine, because the best employees are carrying the load and making sure that the company delivers an acceptable level of service, while meanwhile those employees are running ragged because the bad employees have selected themselves out of customer interactions.
What we need to recognize here is that this isn’t sustainable, and the goal needs to be elimination of unnecessary variation in how your customers and clients experience your brand.
Great Customer Experience Must be Designed Intentionally
It isn’t enough to simply tell employees “provide great service.” For one thing, that definition varies widely. But for another thing, that doesn’t really come across as a real priority for employees. Something that general provides no true guidance and doesn’t give the impression to your employees that you actually care about this.
You need to actually define what your idea of a great customer experience is. For example:
How quickly do you expect customers and clients to get a response?
Do you only want to respond when the situation has been fully resolved, or do you want an initial response to let the customer know you’re working on it?
What sort of tone do you want in communications? Some companies have a “fun and lighthearted” vibe, while others like to keep it professional. If you don’t define it, each employee will go a different direction.
What gets escalated and who does it get escalated to?
When you’ve made a mistake, what are you supposed to do?
What information do you provide, and what information are you not able to provide?
These are just a few examples. You’ll need to define a lot more than that, but hopefully that gets the wheels turning for you. But the bottom line is that if you aren’t thoroughly documenting what your desired customer experience is, you’re not training for it both initially and recurrently, you aren’t measuring it, and you aren’t reinforcing it, then you are going to end up with employee roulette.
Systems Matter
Systematization of your business is the foundation for all of this. Again, nobody goes to McDonald’s because it’s the best food. They go to McDonald’s because all the way back to the original McDonald brothers in their single store, everything was perfectly choreographed into an amazing system that delivered the exact same product every single time. In fact, in those early days, you couldn’t even customize your burger. The same product came off the assembly line every single time.
But not every system needs to be a McDonald’s system. They’re vying for the cheap fast food segment of the market. Just like McDonald’s has a system, so does Jimmy John’s. If you’ve never been to a Jimmy John’s, you should give it a try. I’ve never seen anybody make a sub sandwich so fast before in my life. And the food is really good! They have sub assembly down to a science, and that’s not by accident. That’s intentional systematization.
Systems aren’t a cure-all, though. For one thing, systems won’t make up for a lack of empathy. If you have a sociopath working your client support hotline, all of the systems in the world aren’t going to make them deliver a good customer experience. You still need the right people in the right seats. But the right people thrive only under the right systems.
You also want to make sure that your systems don’t make your employees robotic. Employees need a little leeway in order to solve problems. We’ve talked about this in prior articles. You need to give your employees some latitude to solve problems, even if it sometimes means spending your money. My Client Success Manager can just hand out months of free management as she sees fit in order to solve problems and make owners happy. If I just told her she has to rigidly stick to policy and never give anyone anything if we followed our policy, then our churn would skyrocket, because the nicest, most empathetic employee on earth can’t solve problems under that environment.
Ultimately, the right systems are put in place to make it easier for employees to consistently deliver an empathetic experience to your clients and residents. Keep that in mind when designing your systems.
Remove Friction From the Experience with Automation
I know some people out there are already bristling at the idea that automation has anything to do with an excellent customer experience, but those people are living in the past. I have been shopping on Amazon since it was nothing but an online bookstore, and I don’t believe I’ve ever once spoken to a real live human being at Amazon. But you know what? Amazon has a net promoter score (NPS) of 49. This places it second in their industry, behind only Costco which has an intensely loyal fanbase. Clearly they’re doing something right with their automation-first approach.
The reason automation is important is that it reduces friction in the customer/client experience. What they really care about is getting their problems solved. If they can do that talking to a human, fine. But if they can do that without talking to a human, also fine (and even better in the minds of most younger people). So you want to create self-service options for customers and clients at every opportunity to reduce any friction and help people solve problems in the quickest way possible.
The biggest thing I can point out here is that a great deal of customer experience failures have nothing to do with your employees not caring. A lot of it is simply a failure of follow-through. The employee takes the initial call, they truly care about the customer and want to solve their problem, but right after getting off the call they get another call or email, and now they’re distracted and have already forgotten about the original problem that they needed to solve. We want to make sure that we set up systems in a way that doesn’t rely upon imperfect humans remembering to do things manually.
This can mean a number of different things:
Automated status updates built into your systems
Follow-up tasks that automatically pop up in your system for your team
Automated ticket routing so that things get to the right department
Automated appointment reminders
Automated satisfaction and NPS surveys
Automated tasks for things like lease renewals, move-outs, annual inspections, etc.
Automated escalation triggers when tickets aren’t solved within a set period of time
The best customer experience isn’t the one that involves the most human interaction; it’s the one that solves their problem with the least friction. That can sometimes be automated, and sometimes human-to-human. You just need to figure out for your brand and your ideal customer, which things should be automated and which things should involve your frontline employees.
AI Elevates the Customer Experience
Contrary to popular belief, AI is not the death of a great customer experience. To the contrary, AI is making the customer experience better. At least where it’s used properly.
First and foremost, using AI for routine work frees up your customer-facing employees to spend more time on bigger issues that need escalation to a person. When your employees no longer need to do busy work like preparing lease renewals and scheduling inspections, they have a lot more time to actually interact with customers and solve their bigger problems.
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But it goes beyond that. The other day we had an owner who was thoroughly confused about why they got a low balance warning for their portfolio. I went to their ledger in Rentvine and started reading it line-by-line, and I couldn’t figure it out, either. It looked to me like he had maintained a positive balance the whole time. So I asked Claude, which is connected to our Rentvine account through the API. I watched as Claude Opus dug into every corner of Rentvine systematically to figure out what was going on. It ended up being a super simple answer: the owner’s ledger in both the owner portal and our UI shows the owner’s balance including any payments tenants have made that haven’t settled to the bank yet. But our low balance automated warning emails were going off of settled funds only. So while the owner’s portal was saying he had over $2k in his account, his email was saying he only had $50 and he had a $400 bill to pay. Who knows how long it would have taken us to figure that out ourselves, but Opus had it figured out in a minute or two, and not only that, but wrote new code to fix the issue going forward so that the low balance warnings only kick in if there aren’t funds waiting to settle. AI got the owner an answer quicker, and also preemptively solved the problem going forward for other owners.
AI also improves the customer experience because it gives us a better window into operational performance. Now every PM can have a custom dashboard to track just about any KPIs they want. That means that you can drill down and figure out where the real problems are that need to be solved, providing a better experience for every customer. I also have AI scoring every email that comes in to our company by priority and tone, then it puts those emails into priority order so that we’re tackling the most important issues first.
Finally, and this is something I haven’t implemented yet but is coming soon, AI allows for extreme personalization and customization at scale. Every new owner lead that comes in to my PM company will soon have data on that customer like what their hobbies are, where they shop, what subjects they’re interested in, who their favorite sports teams are, etc. Access to this kind of data costs a little money, but it allows us to provide an extremely personalized experience. Imagine knowing that your customer having a bad experience is a big Atlanta Braves fan. After their call, you get online and send them an autographed Tom Glavine baseball. Costs you $100, but that customer is never going to forget it. And you were able to do it automatically, all because you’re using AI data collection on every customer.
Ultimately, AI isn’t just about reducing headcount and cutting costs. Sure, that certainly helps your business. But it’s really about a bigger opportunity of producing better experiences and allowing your team to focus on the more high-impact work.
Standardize the Floor, Not the Ceiling
The purpose of all of this is not to make every customer experience identical. Sure, we don’t want employee roulette where every customer gets a different experience based on the employee’s attitude that day, but we also don’t want a cookie-cutter experience that doesn’t recognize the individual needs of each customer. What this is really all about is making sure that we are meeting a minimum standard of excellence, regardless of which employee is involved.
We still need to leave room on the upside, though. Employees need to have some latitude to solve problems using their personal judgment. Each employee also needs to be able to have their own personality, within reason. The more AI becomes entrenched in our daily lives, the more people are going to crave that genuine human interaction, and that involves different people having different personalities. But we want to make sure that despite personality differences, our customer experience is always meeting a minimum standard of excellence.
We also need to allow some room for creativity. Not every problem is the same, and not every situation can be predicted ahead of time. When unique problems surface, this is where humans still shine over AI. But only if you allow them to shine.
What we want is for a type of standardization that raises the floor on our expectations for the customer experience while still allowing our employees to excel and push the limits of the type of experience we can offer.
What Not to Do
AI and automation can amplify a well-designed customer experience, but the opposite is also true: it can make a poorly-designed experience into an outright hellish experience. You know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever had to navigate the Comcast AI receptionist.
To avoid this, you need to establish solid processes first before trying to automate them or enhance them with AI. Automating a broken process just adds efficiency to poor experience. That’s hardly desirable.
You also can’t even design a proper AI before you’ve defined the kind of experience you want. Go back to the beginning of this article where we talked about defining your customer experience. Your AI needs to know those answers before it can deliver what you want it to deliver. It has to be part of the prompt. For example, by default, OpenAI’s models are extremely agreeable. They seek out to give the person interacting with them exactly what they want, sometimes to the detriment of accurate information. This is the last thing you want. It can even lead to legal issues. So you need guardrails that are designed around your definitions of a good customer experience.
We also don’t want to prioritize speed over quality of service. Yes, you can deploy a functional ChatBot in a matter of minutes with modern AI tech, and that ChatBot will be able to handle customer questions with lightning speed. But is it actually going to solve the customer’s problems or conform to what you want it to say and do? Unlikely. A well-functioning ChatBot takes work to properly train. You could deploy that tech and find that it’s actually creating more problems than it’s solving, despite how quickly and efficiently it can work.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the problem of employee roulette is not really an employee problem in most cases. It’s a systems, standardization, and leadership problem. Customers are left at the mercy of chance simply because you haven’t put in the work to create proper systems and set the right expectations for your employees.
Customers and clients should never be placed in this situation. Your brand should be predictable so that the people you work with know exactly what to expect whenever they need to interact with your team. This is going to require the right systems, the right expectations, and the right blend of technology. All perfectly formulated to deliver the customer experience that you want to consistently deliver.
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