Mastering Community Management - Gaining the Competitive Edge

South Africa’s community management industry is highly competitive. Achieving consistent growth and success requires a razor-sharp competitive edge. Of course, finding and honing that edge isn’t always easy. It takes a deep understanding of your operations’ strengths and weaknesses – and tools and processes primed for agility – to successfully evolve your business for optimal performance.

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In practical terms, that means tracking a number of critical KPIs in order to use the information to adapt and refine your business model and strategies. Sounds simple, right? It is – when you have easy access to the necessary insights using (for example) WeconnectU’s intuitive KPI summaries with full drill-down capabilities.

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But, what KPIs should you actually be tracking? What information do you really need to get a leg up on your competition? In our experience, it all boils down to two key areas: business growth and customer retention.

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Business Growth

Business growth is one of the most obvious KPIs to track. It’s certainly one of the most rewarding measures of success for many business owners. That said, the common practice of using unit numbers, alone, as a proxy for business growth only shows one small piece of the overall growth picture.

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To truly understand – and take control of – the driving forces behind growth, business owners need to track several other growth-related metrics. At the bare minimum, these should include active communities and active units under management; communities added, currently in take-on, or lost; types of communities under management; communities with utilities in recovery; and all financial year-ends.

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Only by combining these insights is it possible to start proactively identifying weaknesses that need attention, and strengths that can be exploited to intentionally drive business growth and long-term customer retention.

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Customer Retention

Customer retention is a more complex KPI to measure and to manage than growth – despite being an integral part of making that growth sustainable. Sure, you can track how many clients/communities you have, and how long they tend to stick around, but that doesn’t give you much to work with in terms of identifying and controlling positive and negative influences.

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To get to grips with these, you need to understand your performance in areas that directly affect customer satisfaction. Things like risk reduction (compliance and proactive task management), financial security (outstanding levies and bank account reconciliation), asset protection (maintenance and repairs), professionalism (access to advice and information, seamless community meetings) convenience (supplier payments and ownership transfers) and visible value communicated well (community reports).

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No time… like the present!

If it sounds like tracking these KPIs is a full-time job, you’re not wrong. Not because of the workload – that’s negligible if you’re using WeconnectU’s intelligent dashboards – but because this is where the attention of business owners can achieve the greatest results.

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This is the reason we’ve made it our mission at WeconnectU to empower business owners to step back from daily activities and spend more time in their true role as strategic leaders. Our tools are designed to streamline workflows and reduce admin through powerful automations, enabling staff to handle the full range of daily tasks without needing management engagement.

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Business owners’ hands are then free to use our intelligent software and intuitive dashboards to oversee consistent service delivery and quality, generate in-depth reports in moments, and tap into the full power of their business data as a critical strategic asset.

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It’s time to say goodbye to manual KPI tracking and hello to proactive workflows that empower you to see more, do more, measure more, and truly become the valued and more valuable property manager you are.