Don't use LeadSimple Inbox yet? If you want to grow your business, it's time to level up your customer communications. You can learn how here!

Property management is 80-90% communication. The health of your customer relationships rests mostly on the quality of your communication with the customer.

If you get customer communication right, you've set yourself up for a long and successful relationship with your owners, and tenants too.

But what does "getting it right" look like?

Below we'll explore tips and tricks to bring your customer service and experience to the next level, and how to achieve this with LeadSimple Inbox.

Let's dive in!

Share Conversations & Context - Inbox Configurations

First, you need to get your customer communications visible to everyone on your team who interacts with clients.

Our recommendation is to:

Start by connecting your DIRECT emails to LeadSimple (example: jim@example.com). If you primarily use direct emails for customer communication, this is a good way to ease into changing to shared inboxes later.
Next--or if you already have them--connect your SHARED emails. Shared emails are the ideal way to handle customer communications because they ensure messages are seen by multiple people, who can respond faster based on who is most available. See our guide to choosing a shared email configuration.

Sharing Messages Using Direct Inboxes

By default, you--the owner of a direct email inbox--are the only one who can see the emails in that inbox. But you can share specific conversations with other team members to make them more visible and share context.

Here's how you can make conversations visible within your direct inbox.

Open a conversation in your direct inbox
Click your name in the upper right corner to assign it to someone else
Choose someone to assign it to
Move it to an inbox that person has access to and hit "Share & Assign"

Conversations with owners, tenants, and vendors are automatically visible to everyone on that customer's Contact record. Just search for their name in the sidebar, open their Contact and scroll down to see everything you and your team have said to them. This is a great way to gain context before responding to a given message.

If you want to share your entire direct inbox with your VA, or a teammate while you're out of office, give that user access to your inbox in the settings.

Sharing Messages Using Shared Inboxes

When you create a shared inbox, you should give multiple users access to it. Everyone who needs to respond to customer communications that come into that email or phone channel should have access.

Learn how to configure this here.

As with direct inboxes, customer conversations are automatically tracked and visible on that customer's Contact record, and on the corresponding Property record.

You can stop forwarding emails! 🎉

With Inbox, you no longer need to forward emails to your teammates internally. Forwarding creates multiple copies of the same email thread, making it difficult for everyone to stay on the same page.

Instead of forwarding, assign a conversation to a teammate or mention them in a note.

Route Conversations To The Right Person

Get conversations to the person who is most capable of addressing them as quickly as possible. For example, if maintenance issues are all handled by a dedicated maintenance coordinator or department, you should put a system in place to get those conversations routed to them so they can respond quickly.

Our recommendation (using maintenance as an example):

Everyone on your team--or a designated person--should monitor your shared inboxes for maintenance-related issues and either A) assign them to your maintenance coordinator or B) tag them with "Maintenance"
If you choose to tag them with a "Maintenance" tag, the people who handle maintenance on your team can filter the Inbox by that tag to see everything they need to look at.

Use Quick-Replies To Answer Common Questions

You probably get some questions more often than others. It takes valuable time to respond to these over and over, so it's best to avoid when possible.

You can use Quick Replies to write pre-written responses to common questions, which you (or your team) can easily use when these questions come up.

One quick reply will save you 5-10 minutes of your time depending on the question you're answering. If you got just 2 identical questions every day, Quick Replies could save you as much as 1 hour or more every week!

You can insert quick replies into any conversation by typing the forward slash key / and typing the name of your reply. Hit "enter", then hit "send"! It's that easy :)

Learn all about how to create and manage quick replies here.

Mark Conversations As "Resolved" When They are Complete

Once you have addressed the customer's issue, mark the conversation as "Resolved". This removes the from your conversation list and archives it so you can focus on new conversations that need your attention.

This allows you to track how long it takes to resolve issues for clients, which is important to creating trust with your customers.

If the customer responds to that email again, the conversation will become "Unresolved" and show up in your inbox again.

Snooze Conversations When Waiting For A Reply

If you're waiting on a customer to respond, you can clean up your inbox by snoozing the conversation to a later date.

When the snooze time is up, the conversation will move back to your "unresolved" inbox (the view you see by default when you open Inbox).

Or, if the customer responds before the snooze timer is up, the conversation will also be moved back to "unresolved".

Monitor Your Team And/Or Cover For Your Teammates

To ensure your team is responding quickly, or to help a teammate out if they have a lot on their plate, use the All Conversations view and filter it by user.

This shows you what's assigned to that user so you can share their work load, coach, or otherwise keep up to speed on what everyone is doing.

Track Your Communication Metrics - Then Improve

Review your communication metrics on a regular basis to see how you are improving and identify ways to improve. You can't improve what you don't measure!

You can easily copy these metrics into a scorecard for weekly review with your team (if you use something like EOS)

View your metrics inside Inbox Reports. You should pay close attention to First Response Time and Time To Close (this is how long it takes to mark a conversation as "resolved", or complete).

Pay attention to the little arrow beneath the metrics. This indicates if the score has improved or degraded from the last period.

Prioritize Conversations - Organize Inbox Using Tags

Tags can be used in Inbox, similar to Gmail and Outlook, to ensure you can prioritize conversations more efficiently.

We recommend using tags to track priority and team to help you prioritize what you should respond to.

There are several other things you can use them for too, listed below.

How you should use tags:

Categorize conversations by department/business function (Examples: "maintenance", "accounting", "renewals")
by team (Examples: "pod 1", "pod 2", or "maintenance team")
by urgency ("urgent", "timely", "not urgent")
by priority ("🔴 Priority 1", "🟡 Priority 2", "🔵 Low Priority")

How not to use tags

Don't use tags to categorize conversations by property or owner - LeadSimple automatically associates conversations with the property and owner they are related to

For now, tags can be applied to conversations manually. Automatic tagging will likely come in the future though 😉

Learn how to create and manage tags here.