In property management, one of the most important rules of business is responding quickly to client requests. As a small team, Marda Management had no issues — until it was time to grow!
Marda Management is a full‑service property management company based in Canada. The CEO and President, Marla Coffin, strives to provide top tier service in each the division of the company such as accounting, plumbing/maintenance, and operations.
Marla is a long time user of Email Meter. In the early days of the company, she was the only employee in contact with property owners. Her standard for customer service is extremely high, and her clients got used to very quick Response Times. As more people started coming on board, she urged her team to use Email Meter Free to check up on their own stats so they could scale their service level with the new growth. With just a few employees, Marla thought she had a good handle on performance. But after they started to grow, they realized they were missing critical historical data and trends, as well as easy-to-use team management features.
After using Email Meter Teams for a year, Marda Management was looking for a more cost-effective option for their quickly growing team, as well as some custom features they were interested in exploring. Email Meter’s Customer Success team worked with Marla to build a personalized dashboard that had all the features that her team needed.
Marla says the number one thing that brought her to Email Meter (many years ago) was “wanting to work off of data and not just feelings.” She believes having this data is just the tip of the iceberg: the transparency it brings is what allows for real progress to be made. Manager of Operations, Judy, says: “it's one thing to have insight, and it's another thing to act on it.” When she notices anomalies in her team’s stats, such as higher volumes, or decreased performance, she makes sure to provide personalized feedback. Whether it’s letting the team know they’re doing a great job keeping up with their Response Rate, or a heads up that there’s work to be done to reach their goals, she uses email statistics to offer support of all kinds to her team.
"As the company grew and expanded we realized we had really lost visibility. We couldn’t “gut check” how fast we were getting back to people anymore. When we were just 1-5 people I at least felt like I had a handle on it, but when we became 10, 20, 50, I realized it was impossible to keep track of.”
Marla is known by her employees for her quick personal Response Time, which she’s always trying to improve. As an Email Meter veteran, she’s always been interested in Response Time under different conditions. Marla’s vision for her Enterprise dashboard was one that would show her three different kinds of Response Times at once: Average, Median, and Customer Wait Time.
With Business Hours, Response Times are calculated only during work hours, giving Marla more realistic insights. The Average and Median Respones Times are both calculated with Business Hours applied. But Marla also wanted to be able to see Customer Wait Time, or how long it took for them to respond to property owners, regardless of the time of day. This is super important for Marda Management, because “though we are a 9-5 company, property management is a round-the-clock business.” By having all three metics side-by-side in the dashboard, managers are able to easily compare performance. As a result, despite an increase of 100% in the amount of emails received last year, they were able to not only keep their Customer Wait Time consistent, but actually make a 2% improvement.
Goals and KPIs aren’t super strict at Marda Management. They like to take a more holistic approach to the data, and when you ask them about their KPIs for a metric like Response Time, they won’t give you one figure. Marla and Judy are mostly concerned with any of their three Response Time metrics going over 14 hours. They understand that not everyone can have a less than 30-minute Response Time (although they would prefer it), and they are ok with that. As long as performance as a whole looks good, they don’t adhere to stringent performance goals.
They also like to use the Sent Heatmap in their dashboard to make sure that the team isn’t working too much on weekends and evenings. Marla was even able to use the dashboard to notice that she was sending large amounts of emails on Sundays throughout the day. Seeing the concrete data in front of her was shocking, so she was able to create boundaries for herself on weekends. Not only Marla was looking to restore her work-life balance — in the last quarter, the whole company has reduced emails sent outside of business hours by 16%!
“There’s no industry that doesn’t rely on communication. And this gets to the heart of it”
Using the dashboard in this way has allowed their employees to have a positive relationship with Email Meter. At first Marla had doubts that they might feel micromanaged — but after seeing how positive their results are, the team is totally hooked. Marda introduces it during onboarding and sets expectations that help new hires get on track for long-term success.
Industry
Real Estate
Company Size
25-50
Team
Company-wide
Solution
Scaling Growth
