Are board members truly satisfied with the level of service provided by your HOA management company?

Over the past few years, the expectations of board members have changed drastically. As an HOA management company, the opinion and expectations of the board members should be of high importance to you.

In this article, you’ll learn about 4 ways management companies can meet and even exceed board member expectations.

1) Increase visibility

An important goal of board members is to ensure that community operations run smoothly and that decisions taken are in the collective members\’ best interests.

An HOA or Condo association will often hire a management company to help them to run the community\’s operations and handle finances, maintenance, violations, complaints, and more. Board members want to gain visibility into the community\’s operations and finances. They also want to know the type of issues residents are experiencing and how the management company is handling these interactions.

Managers can meet board member expectations by improving visibility, regularly communicating with board members, and providing them with status updates. One of the most useful ways to give your board members visibility is by creating a monthly Board Packet. Board packets can include financial statements, reports on in-progress and completed work orders, resident support requests, violations, and any other tasks that managers are working on.

Pilera’s HOA software empowers managers to increase visibility and communication with the board through real-time analytics. The Ticket Analytics Report gives insight into the open, closed, and in-progress tickets for work orders, ACRs, rule violations, support, and tasks. With the help of these real-time reports, managers can directly communicate the value of their services to the board member and thereby improve board member satisfaction.

2) Fast response time

In the digital age, customers expect a fast response time from the companies they do business with, and it\’s no different for HOA and condo communities. It\’s important to establish a method of communication with your board members and residents and the frequency with which you will communicate with them. When they reach out to you, it\’s important to set expectations on when they will get a response. Here are a few ways to manage expectations and improve your response times:

• Inform your board members of when they can expect a response from you. Is it within 24 hours or 48 hours? Clearly state this on your website or email responses.
• Maintain a singular place for board members and residents to submit requests, whether that is through email, a form on your website, or an online portal.
• Encourage self-service in your community by keeping your website or online portal fresh with the latest community information, documents, events, and more.

3) Reduce the risk of liability

Since board members volunteer their time to run the association, they may not have the expertise to handle rules and regulations that impact the community. Therefore, they often look up to an HOA management company to guide them through legal questions or challenges. Managers need to be well-versed in community association law and actions that a community needs to take to comply.

Also, by maintaining information on a technology platform, you can help board members reduce the risk of a community\’s liability. Here\’s how:

• Maintain all interactions and communications within the community. This can be done effortlessly through an HOA software such as Pilera’s.
• Keep a history of all open and closed tickets for work orders, ACRs, rule violations, support, and tasks.
• Pilera\’s document library has board-specific folders so they can access important rules & regulations.
• Managing repair work is a major task undertaken by management companies. HOA associations are required to acquire a minimum of 3 vendor bids for repair and maintenance work. Managers can help associations compare bids and secure the best vendor.
• With Pilera\’s vendor management, you can easily store vendor information and receive automated COI reminders, thereby reducing the community\’s liability.

4) Manage daily operations efficiently

Board members rely heavily upon HOA management companies to run their associations and manage their operations. An HOA management company acts primarily as an advisor of the HOA board and serves as its helping hand. As an HOA manager, you have to handle a variety of tasks such as maintenance, resident requests, violations, architectural change approvals, vendor bids, and more. With so many tasks to manage, time management and efficiency are critical. Creating more efficiency enables you to generate better outcomes for the community as well as save the community money. Here are some ways in which you can improve team efficiency:

• Streamline processes – You should have a well-documented process of how your team handles different tasks from start to finish and how to handle any problems that arise.
• Improve communication with staff and board members – It\’s important to keep your board members informed of tasks and projects that you are working on for them. With a collaborative HOA platform such as Pilera\’s, you can update the status of any work, communicate with board members and staff, and automatically maintain a history of each task.
• Invest in technology to automate tasks – With the right technology, you can manage a variety of tasks, communicate with board members and residents, and monitor your workflow.

Conclusion

By working with your board member clients, you can create more self-sufficient communities and improve operations together. When you invest in automated technology, you can improve transparency with the Board, respond faster, reduce any potential risks or liability, and create more efficiency.

Residential community clients may oftentimes be unhappy with community ongoings or the level of customer service they received, and will take that dissatisfaction to an online platform.  With the rise of digital platforms from social media to review sites where people receive up to the minute information and interact, the impact of a negative review is amplified. Thus, developing a plan to proactively mitigate negative comments shows proactiveness, openness to consider feedback, and make positive change.  This surely goes a long way in ensuring happy clients and establishing relationships with new community prospects.  In this blog post, we’ll navigate through five important tips to effectively improve online reputation.

1) Know what your clients are saying about your company

Constantly monitoring what your clients (residents and board members) are saying online about you is the foremost important step to improving your management company’s online reputation.  First, assign someone in the management company to lead this new effort. They’ll need to take stock of the platforms your clients use for sharing complaints. These platforms may include review sites such as Yelp, search engine reviews such as Google, or social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.  Here’s how your company can stay on top of online monitoring efforts:

• Setup Google Alerts – Enter the name of your company and/or relevant keywords.  Google will then send daily emails of articles/mentions you specified straight to your inbox.  Check Google’s help article to learn more about how to set these alerts.
• Check mentions on social media regularly.  These include direct replies to your posts and indirect mentions of your company.
• According to Forbes, 91% of individuals use a search engine to learn more about a company before they buy from them.  Thus, it\’s important to research search engines to see what is being said about your company.  Simply type your company name and navigate to the News tab to see what is being said about your company.
• Don’t rule out personal communication.  When residents walk into the office or they send an email, ask them if they are happy with the services they’re receiving?  This is a great way to better understand how residents feel about your services and if they are likely to share their complaints on social media.

2) Remain a calm stance in your response (and don\’t engage in online arguments)

Words used in reviews are oftentimes rude and one’s natural tendency might be to defend their stance. However if not handled appropriately, the online encounter can quickly escalate into an argument, resulting in the risk of legal tussles and worsened reputation. It’s absolutely essential that the employee responding remains calm while being clear and assertive in their response. Here are a few tips to respond to negative comments:

• Respond to the issue quickly, preferably within a few days.
• Be sympathetic in your response to the residents and show you understand their concern.
• Let them know you are looking into the issue. Continue the discussion offline via phone or email.
• Once the issue has been resolved, respond within the same review with a short description of the resolution and thank them for their patience.

3) Don\’t simply use \”copy-paste\” responses

It’s important to make your responses to comments thoughtful and personalized so that residents will appreciate that you took the time and valued their opinion. If you notice a pattern in your response that includes repeated text, build a template with that content in it so you can reuse it. Make sure to leave enough room to address the problem stated in the review.

4) Generate more positive reviews on the platforms that matter

A library of testimonials on different platforms helps spread word of mouth the quality of services you deliver and can become a great form of social proof for your business. The question is, how do you generate positive reviews for the hard work your client services team puts in?

• Conduct a survey regularly requesting resident feedback and if they are willing to post their feedback on a review platform. Or, provide a link to this survey in every customer support email.
• If you can fit in reputation management software in your budget, it can help you to monitor reviews on multiple platforms and separate the negative reviews from positive ones before they go live on public platforms.

5) Continue your efforts in creating a stellar customer service (take feedback in your stride)

The best way to invest in the welfare of your company’s reputation, in the long run, is to continue delivering excellent customer service to your residents.  This effort improves resident satisfaction (and with it, generate more positive reviews), boosts client retention efforts (communities will stay with you longer), and better operations (less chaos in the office dealing with issues).  With these long-term benefits in mind, how can you support ongoing customer service?

• Engage in transparent communications with your residents and keep them informed.  Miscommunication or lack of it can result in resident dissatisfaction. Know the best ways to reach them – through emails, phone calls, text message, newsletters, direct mailers/letters, and/or website updates.
• Provide an easy way for residents to connect with you and retrieve information.  Community management software such as Pilera’s allows residents to log into a website or web portal to see their financial balance, update information, submit work orders, and retrieve all latest community information.
• Take any feedback you receive from clients, whether positive or negative, in your stride and consider it for future improvements.

An investment in reputation management is an investment in your community management company\’s success in retaining satisfied communities and establishing new relationships.  Identifying online platforms where your customers interact is important in understanding what they say about your company and level of services you provide.  Then, you can develop a strategy to effectively handle any complaints, respond with transparency, and incorporate feedback into customer service and operational improvements.

As a board member or a community manager, you hold regular HOA board meetings on a monthly and annual basis to discuss important community issues, make decisions, and communicate those decisions to residents. Successful board meetings are critical to smooth community operations, reducing costs, and increasing resident satisfaction. However, many board meetings are plagued by low attendance, an unorganized agenda, and overrun meetings. This can cause frustration for residents, board members, and managers alike. In this post, you will learn how to improve your HOA board meeting by offloading some key tasks onto technology platforms.

Preparing for your HOA Board Meeting

1. Schedule your HOA Board meeting well in advance, and notify your residents.

Low resident attendance is one of the biggest challenges that board members and managers face.  It’s important to schedule board meetings well in advance and communicate with residents.  Notifying residents in a timely manner can help alleviate attendance woes by giving them enough time to fit the meeting into their busy schedules.*

Community management platforms can help to keep residents informed and increase attendance.  Through such a platform, you can create one-time or recurring events and notify residents on-demand.  Through Pilera’s event calendar feature, managers can create a custom Board meeting calendar, set recurring events, and notify the community by user role. Residents can log into their community portal and view a calendar with all the upcoming events.

2. Create an agenda and make it accessible to residents

Most states require that an agenda be created for the board meeting. The purpose of an agenda is to keep track of all the issues that need to be discussed or resolved in the board meeting. It generally includes topics such as maintenance projects, manager updates, disputes, and homeowner concerns.  In some states such as California, residents must receive a copy of the agenda along with the meeting notice 4 days in advance of the meeting.

A document management system can make it easy to store agendas and share them with residents. Make sure that through your document management system, you can create folders and subfolders to organize your documents. Your residents will then be able to find what they\’re looking for quickly.  

In preparation for your meeting, you can also take advantage of a task management solution to keep track of all agenda items.  Through Pilera’s task management system, you can create tasks and assign them to other board members or managers. You can create a special category called \”Agenda\” and use the dashboard to filter just those items during the meeting.   

3. Survey your residents

Getting your residents involved and curbing apathy starts with letting them know their opinion matters.  A survey is a good way to collect resident feedback prior to the meeting so that you can stay on track during the meeting.  You can decide which ones to respond to via email and which require more discussion during the meeting. 

Some community management platforms provide automated communications and form features to automate this process.  Through Pilera’s integration with Formsite, you can create simple or more comprehensive forms.  Through our automated communications feature, you can distribute the form link electronically and track who clicked on it. Charts, searchable tables, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets help you to capture the data you need to make decisions.

4. Holding an election during your annual meeting

During annual meetings, communities will usually hold elections for members to vote for the next year\’s board positions. Many communities are now turning to online voting as a way to increase owner participation. Residents can vote from anywhere, even in the comfort of their own homes. In an online election, it\’s important to prepare the online ballots well ahead of time. Make sure that candidate information and how they plan to operate and improve the community are clear on the ballot.

As many residents may worry about security and privacy of their data, it\’s important to make sure that your community management platform has security protocols in place. Pilera\’s integration with Formsite for voting provides a secure platform for residents to vote and management to store election results. It also allows one vote per unit so your elections remain fair and compliant. The results are also instant, eliminating the need for managers to manually count the votes. Leaders can get insights into what the community finds important with analytics. Results and feedback can be collected in multiple ways – searchable tables, visual graphics, PDFs, or Excel spreadsheets*.

*These are best practices aimed at helping you improve your board meetings.  These tips are not legal advice.  We highly recommend that you review the community’s governing documents and state laws on what your board meetings must adhere to.  Different states and governing documents will have varying requirements on meeting notices, agendas, voting, and meeting conduct.  

During your virtual Board Meeting

In the past year and a half, most communities have turned to online meetings like Zoom or Skype to conduct association business. With virtual board meetings, members can meet from anywhere, making it more convenient and a good way to increase homeowner attendance. Since virtual board meetings tend to attract a larger number of homeowners, it\’s important to have a structure, timeline, and set expectations to be respectful of everyone\’s time.

1. Do a test before going live

Before you go live with your Board meeting, you\’ll want to set 30 minutes to an hour of time to test the meeting software with the Board. As you run more meetings and become more familiar with the software, you can dedicate less time to a test run. Doing a test run helps you identify any issues beforehand so that there aren\’t any delays in the meeting. In your practice meeting, you will want to test the following:

• Audio settings – Make sure that each speaker\’s microphones are functional.
• Screen share – Test that each person is able to share presentation slides and web browsers.
• Questions – Enter in a question and check if other presenters can see it.
• Chat – Enter in a chat message, and then test responding to the chat individually or publicly to everyone on the meeting.
• Muting and unmuting individuals – It\’s essential to make sure that muting options work to limit distractions during the meeting.
• Document sharing – Upload a document and test to see if others can download it. Do a similar test with links.

2. Assign roles

Assigning specific roles during the meeting will help to run the meeting a lot smoother, especially when everyone understands what they are responsible for. Depending on the size of your community, you can combine these roles or keep them separate. Here are some roles you\’ll want to assign:

1. Speaker – This person will be responsible for driving the meeting. They will go through the meeting rules and agenda items.
2. Meeting Coordinator – This person will assist the speaker by managing the chat, muting or unmuting members, and providing technical support to residents during the meeting.
3. Task Manager-  The task manager will be responsible for noting down action items that come up during the meeting.  They will benefit from a task management system that allows them to create tasks, assign them, set a priority, and a due date.  Pilera’s task management system makes it easy to create and manage tasks on the fly from any device or location.
4. Meeting Minutes Coordinator – This person will be responsible for taking meeting minutes.  The coordinator should use some type of word processor to type the notes during the meeting. As an example, Gmail provides a free word processing software called Google Docs.  

3. Dedicated time to each item on the agenda

No one wants to stay in long board meetings on a workday evening, so it\’s important to keep meetings focused. Dedicating a set amount of time to each item on the agenda keeps everyone on track. You can dedicate an equal amount of time to each item or based on the complexity of the issue.  

4. Allow a set amount of time for homeowners to speak

If your governing documents allow for it, dedicate a set amount of time for homeowners to speak and give their opinion. Before the meeting, it\’s important to set expectations on the amount of time residents have to speak about their issues or concerns. During the meeting, have your residents use the \”raise hand\” feature on the meeting software when they want to speak. Table any issues that homeowners bring up that require a longer discussion for the next board meetings.

After the Board Meeting

Now that you’ve run a successful board meeting, what’s next?  

1. Send meeting minutes

Meeting Minutes are important to document what occurred while reviewing items from the agenda.  It should be a short and concise summary of who called the meeting, discussions about the agenda items, and any items that were resolved.  Check out the Meeting Minutes template created by Hillcrest Management.

Once the meeting notes have been approved and recorded, store them in a secure online document management system.  Keep each month\’s meeting minutes organized by creating folders and subfolders. Additionally, the document management system should allow you to notify residents when you\’ve posted the new meeting minutes.     

2. Review action items list

Revisit all the action items that your team took note of during the Board Meeting and transition it to a task management system if you haven’t already done so.  Your task management system should allow you to organize, prioritize, and track items efficiently.  Be sure to assign each task to another board member or manager, prioritize it, and set a due date for completion.  That way everyone knows who is responsible for what tasks and nothing slips through the cracks. Through Pilera’s task management system, you can keep everyone informed by posting an update, changing the status, and e-notifying boards or managers.

3. Collect post-meeting feedback from residents

Even if you’ve had a successful board meeting, there are always things that you can improve for future meetings.  Collecting feedback from residents on how the last board meeting went can give you insights on what was done well and what needs improvement.  Create a short survey, email the residents, or encourage them to log into their community portal to complete the survey.

Improve your HOA Board Meeting with technology

With the advancements of technology, Board members and community managers can offload many key, cumbersome tasks onto software. It empowers you to handle every aspect of the Board meeting to ensure it\’s productive for everyone:

1. Prepare for a board meeting by scheduling meetings, sending event notices, conducting surveys, and sharing agenda documents via a community management solution.
2. Run a smooth meeting with virtual meeting platforms like Zoom or Skype and keep track of action items in a task management solution.
3. Keep your team on track with action items by prioritizing them and providing updates in a task management system.

Pilera\’s community management solution enables board members and managers to streamline various aspects of a board meeting with automated communications, events, document sharing, surveys, and task management. To learn more about how Pilera can work for you, request a personalized demo.