Let’s start with a quick story. My toddler and I were about to go out to do some grocery shopping during the lunch break. As I opened our apartment door, I felt a sheet of paper sliding down but ignored it because I was in rush. Later, when I returned home, I had forgotten about the paper and, if I hadn’t remembered, I wouldn’t have known about the next emergency fire alarm maintenance service schedule. Fortunately, my daughter picked the notice up out of curiosity and handed it to us.
Now, my question is: what if we missed out on this notification? We could have faced an awkward situation when the maintenance folks arrived, asking us to let them in while we are about to go out.
This risk may seem like a trivial one but incidents like this happen. In today’s digital world, issuing paper-based notifications is becoming a pre-historic tactic when it comes to alerting tenants or giving them a heads-up if the property management is doing something that may interrupt their service.
It is certainly more effective to use an automated tenant emergency notification solution to make sure tenants know about any upcoming events such as service interruptions, fire drills, regular unit check-ups, etc.
Using a digital solution, property management can maintain an accurate database of tenants with their contact details and send “personalized” emergency alerts via email, SMS, and/or voice broadcasts.
Guess what? This solution exists! And you don’t even need any technical knowledge to make it work!
Here, in this blog we are presenting our top four advantages of using a digital, automated tenant notification system.
Benefit 1: No need to slide papers
I have seen my property manager going floor to floor, unit to unit, just to slide a paper notification under doors so tenants can be made aware of an upcoming event. Unfortunately, many of these notifications are not even noticed by tenants! There are many reasons for this, but we are not going to talk about them because the bottom line is: all the efforts of the property manager are wasted. It is a lot of manual work. You print documents, count copies, write out tenant details, and then slide the sheets under their doors. With a digital solution, all these tasks are gone! You just type your message, press a button, and let the solution personalize the message automatically and send the message to each of the tenants.
Benefit 2: Send alerts instantly
There are times when an urgent event is scheduled for the next day. You are a property manager and you received this news at 8PM the night before. Are you still going to go through all the trouble of printing papers and sliding them under doors? You don’t have time. Even sending a generic alert blast using your mobile phone can take time. What do you do? Well, if you have a list of anticipated alert message templates ready to go, all you need to do is to modify the times and click a button. Every tenant in your building(s) will be notified almost immediately.
Benefit 3: Confirm receipt of notifications
Imagine you are sending text messages to all tenants about an emergency maintenance task tomorrow. How can you be sure all of your tenants have read your notification and know about this emergency schedule?
This is where a notification receipt comes into action. If you have a way for tenants to confirm they have received the notification, then you can sleep peacefully knowing you won’t have to deal with angry inquiries tomorrow. Using an automated solution, you can easily set up an option for tenants to confirm alert receipts. For instance, if you are sending notifications via text messages, tenant(s) can simply reply CONFIRMED to your alert text, and you will see that they confirmed the alert receipt in your reporting dashboard, in real time!
Benefit 4: Allow tenants to give consent
Now, in many cases, maintenance or property management would need permission to enter an apartment to mitigate or investigate an issue. Imagine, you are a tenant and you are currently away from home. Now, if a property manager does not know you are away they would simply do what they currently do: slide a paper under your door, knock a couple of times, and leave hoping that you get the paper notification and be home when they visit. Sadly, you are not there and you know nothing about any visit. The maintenance people arrive at your apartment only to find it locked. They do not have your consent to go in so they can’t do anything. Awkward and a waste of time!
This issue can be resolved easily. Using an automated tenant emergency notification system, the property manager can send a notification to you with an option for you to provide your consent if they need to enter your unit. For instance, if they are asking you to reply CONFIRM to confirm that you got the notification, you can simply reply CONFIRM via their text message alert. The system can then send another notification that may ask you to reply with CONSENT if you give them permission to enter your unit. If you reply CONSENT, the property manager will be able to see that in the dashboard and they won’t have any issue going into your unit, even if you are out.
Sounds interesting, right? Well, there are even more benefits to such a solution! Request a one-on-one demo with our experts so we can explain our 100 percent ready-to-go tenant emergency notification solution to you.
