Established in 1984, Ellis, Partners in Management Solutions, (EPMS) is one of the multifamily industry’s most respected providers of management and marketing consulting services. EPMS’ management mystery shopping reports have made it an industry standard in the performance evaluation of leasing professionals. EPMS scores are a very effective way to tell if your leasing staff is helping or hurting your properties. But what do you do when you consistently score in the 90th percentile in secret shopping reports? Some people might sit back and congratulate themselves. Not us. When this recently happened at our RentCafe Connect customer connection center, we decided to change the test. The Problem This sounds like an awesome problem to have, right? On the face of it, we agree. Everyone likes to be told they’re doing well. But we also knew that the scores were based on objective criteria about general telephone presentation and customer experience. Sure, we were providing really good general service as far as call centers go. But were we actually delivering the specialized support our clients deserved? RENTCafé Connect is an incoming communications center that exclusively supports residential Yardi Voyager users. Certainly we could do better. The Solution After listening to client feedback to better understand their expectations, we realized we needed to change our approach to better align with their needs, even if it meant initially scoring lower on our secret shopping reports. “Our team knew that we needed to customize testing and scoring to ensure that our customer connection agents provide the best possible support for our client’s properties,” said Joe Hendrix, vice president of RentCafe Connect at Yardi. So that’s what we did. In May of last year, we altered our EPMS form to match the criteria our clients are using. The new,...