Why AktivBo?
And not general survey tools or survey companies
Get a basis for better management, simplify priorities, and make investments that the tenants really want? Streamline internal processes and at the same time increase customer satisfaction? Follow up on external contractors? Avoid vacancies and costly adjustments? Create momentum and commitment in the organisation and work towards set quality goals?
For real estate companies, there are many advantages to working customer-driven and using customer feedback to raise the level of service and quality. But how do you start? And which support should you choose?
Among all the different companies' creative websites, buzzwords, and polished PowerPoints, it can be difficult at first glance to decide who and what is right for you. In general, it is good to start by asking yourself what results you want. At AktivBo, we often get the question, "What makes you different from other suppliers of services like this?" In fact, the answer is already in the question.
Our work is to be a partner in our customers' improvement work, not a supplier. AktivBo was not founded to carry out surveys or to compile statistics, but to bring about change. To get the real estate industry to focus not only on the properties – but also on the people who live and work in them. Based on our "why", our "how" and "what" have been designed to have the most impact and create success for real estate companies.
Why AktivBo?
Get a basis for better management, simplify priorities, and make investments that the tenants really want? Streamline internal processes and at the same time increase customer satisfaction? Follow up on external contractors? Avoid vacancies and costly adjustments? Create momentum and commitment in the organisation and work towards set quality goals?
For real estate companies, there are many advantages to working customer-driven and using customer feedback to raise the level of service and quality. But how do you start? And which support should you choose?
Among all the different companies' creative websites, buzzwords, and polished PowerPoints, it can be difficult at first glance to decide who and what is right for you. In general, it is good to start by asking yourself what results you want. At AktivBo, we often get the question, "What makes you different from other suppliers of services like this?" In fact, the answer is already in the question.
Our work is to be a partner in our customers' improvement work, not a supplier. AktivBo was not founded to carry out surveys or to compile statistics, but to bring about change. To get the real estate industry to focus not only on the properties – but also on the people who live and work in them. Based on our "why", our "how" and "what" have been designed to have the most impact and create success for real estate companies.
Industry-specific services and products
AktivBo's method, products, and services are gathered under the concept of Tenant Experience. “Customer Experience”, but only for the real estate industry. We are experts and specialists with over 30 years of experience in supporting different types of real estate companies in their customer satisfaction work. Our work is not about delivering a figure in an annual report (although that is also important), but to provide a basis for improvements that engages your entire organisation. Our ambition is to be a partner who works with you to help you achieve your goals. In other words, if we are perceived as a generic survey provider, we have failed.
The critical difference between AktivBo and other companies offering survey and platform services is that all our services and products are completely designed together with and for real estate companies. All our focus is directed towards continually improving our offerings so that our customers, the real estate companies, can maximize the benefits of tenant feedback. Generic survey tools, survey companies, or companies that work with change leadership do not have this opportunity. They must ensure that their offerings fit all types of companies and industries, which complicates the development of industry-specific services. Being able to invest vertically will also be crucial for upcoming AI services where industry-specific data is central to creating value (more on this at the end of the document).
It happens all too often that real estate companies come to us and say, "we conduct customer surveys but it's not a direct focus and the organisation doesn't work much with it."
We know, and have ourselves lost customers where we have not done enough to ensure that their organisation is involved in the journey.
It is necessary to ask the right questions and present the answers in a way that makes it easy to take action. But no surveys and no platforms (not even ours...) yield results without the organisation being onboard. The entire methodology and philosophy of AktivBo are about creating engagement and motivation in the customer satisfaction work. Our services and products are designed so that everyone in the organisation can understand and relate to the answers gathered. To unify employees and create momentum, knowledge must exist about what constitutes a good result, a less good result, what the goals are, and how to reach them.
We also believe that those who work closest to the customers matter most when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction. In other words, it is not enough for the CEO or an analyst to sit with the result analyses and prioritise, instead the best effect is achieved when as many people as possible work operationally with the tenants' feedback. In this way, commitment to common goals is created, which encourages improving "their" results for the business area or "their" properties. Through internal benchmarking, you can then learn from each other and create best practice. This, combined with clear and achievable goals, creates a driving force and a commitment that is guaranteed to lead to more satisfied tenants, employees, and owners.
AktivBo Analytics is designed to create an optimal workflow for real estate companies. A major advantage of operating only in a vertical is that platform development can take into account the processes, data or information that are critical for a specific real estate company. When we developed AktivBo Analytics, we did it together with our customers to capture the needs of both smaller and larger companies. In order to develop industry-specific services, it is necessary to understand how a housing company or a commercial manager works with governance, regardless of whether it concerns management, customer service or communication, and how the processes can differ between different types of companies.
From a user perspective, this has allowed us to tailor the various components of the platform to how real estate companies work to prioritise different areas of improvement. This makes it easy and smooth to see what actions to take and which issues should be prioritised first.
Examples of industry-specific services in AktivBo Analytics
Real-time Customer Journey Tracking for Real Estate Companies
AktivBo Analytics is structured to support real-time tracking of customer journeys in real estate companies. This means, for example, that you can analyse all your different surveys in the same view and group topics freely between them. This is crucial when a marketing or communications department wants to capture all issues related to information and marketing, regardless of department, year, or survey.
Customisable Overview Dashboard
The dashboard is adaptable for all parts within a real estate company and can be tailored to organisational structures, roles, geography, or areas of focus. This benefits, for instance, a manager who only wants to see their properties, or a customer service department that only wants to see issues related to their section.
Geographic Analysis on Digital Map Views
Significant effort has been put into the development of geographic analysis using digital map views. For a real estate company, the area overview is absolutely central, and it is essential to easily see and compare results for different nearby properties and areas. This is particularly helpful for safety work, where it becomes clear how one must work with paths and blocks.
Customisable Filters
One of the most appreciated services in AktivBo Analytics is the ability to customise how data is viewed at different levels, providing not just in-depth analysis capabilities right down to the address level, but also supporting goal-oriented work. Many of our clients, for example, have set personal goals, sometimes linked to bonuses, which are easy to monitor in different ways on the platform.
Enhancing Efficiency Through Understanding
Customer Contact Points
Based on an understanding of how a real estate company's various contact points with its customers look, and their significance for the overall customer experience, we design services to increase efficiency. For planned and recurring processes and interactions with tenants, the best option is to follow up with standardised and automatic customer surveys. For example, for move-ins, move-outs, fault reporting, and customer service. For other more unplanned initiatives or efforts, we developed AktivBo Create – a survey tool in Analytics that allows real estate companies to create and send out their own questions. Based on our experience, we have also created templates and question modules, as well as a question bank that is progressively built up by all users and enables future benchmarking.
We are experts at transforming data and valuable customer feedback into actionable insights. In this regard, industry-specific benchmarking plays a critical role. What constitutes a good result? What constitutes a less good result? How are we performing currently? What are our goals and how do we plan to achieve them? With relevant and industry-specific benchmarking, you gain crucial answers. In other words, it is absolutely essential not to compare "apples to oranges", but instead to compare companies facing similar challenges or with comparable conditions.
Thanks to our vast database, we can provide comparative values across many different areas and levels. This means that we support many different segments within the housing and real estate industries with information, statistics, and data that aid in decision-making. We tailor benchmarking on local, regional, national, and international levels. The comparisons are also breakable down at all different levels (index, sub-index, questions, company size, ownership form, type of area, etc.).
Benchmarking is also a vital part of our change and improvement efforts and is used to create best practices, engagement, and motivation. The Benchmark Events we conduct not only focus on the opinions of tenants but also drive real estate companies and the industry as a whole to strive for improvement. We continuously work to make visible the efforts made in daily management.
AktivBo's survey method is based on the "democratic principle" where all tenants have a voice. There is a great value in a high response rate. Not only because it demonstrates engagement from both customers and the organisation, but primarily because it provides staff with clear results for their respective properties. They can be certain that "their" tenants are represented and have provided feedback. It's not just about being able to send out questions and surveys, nor how often this is done.
It's about sending the right questions, in the right way, and presenting the answers in a manner that the entire organisation can understand and utilise. Any survey company can conduct surveys, and there are also numerous free tools to create and send out surveys yourself. AktivBo's methodology—the way we pose questions, the response scale, survey structure, and how tenants' answers are presented—is solely driven by the ambition to achieve the best results for housing and real estate companies.
Naturally, it is important to avoid leading questions such as “how satisfied are you with x or y”, but it is even more crucial that the tenants can relate to the questions. It may even be important to ask questions that may not be highly relevant to the landlord or property owner, but are important to the customer and thereby lead to engagement and increased response rates. Starting with general "comfort questions" is necessary for the respondent to properly engage with the survey and complete it in full.
It is no coincidence that AktivBo has a considerably higher response rate than any other company conducting customer surveys in the real estate industry. The average response rate for 2023 is 61.4%*, and below we have included some reasons why we succeed.
*Refers to Sweden 2023 for Customer ScoreCard - residence
Customer communication
A tenant survey is not a market survey in that it involves persuading someone to buy more. Instead, it is an opportunity to influence one’s living or working environment and thereby their overall quality of life. We support our client companies in communicating the value of participating in the surveys. By explaining the value of the feedback and the reasons for the questions, we create a willingness to participate in the survey. Providing feedback after a survey has been conducted, thanking participants, and detailing planned actions and their timing, are crucial to boosting response rates.
Survey design
A neat and tidy survey with a user-friendly interface is of course important, but should be seen as hygiene factors. However, what distinguishes AktivBo's surveys from many other companies' surveys is the structure. It may be tempting to prioritise the property company's "most important" questions first, but the respondent needs to be introduced to the survey properly. This means that some preliminary questions, even ones that are hardest to improve or address, must be included because they matter most to the tenant. Questions about layout and furnishing fall into this category and are top in response rates.
Question formulation
While it sounds easy to avoid asking leading questions, this is a mistake too many people make, even professional companies. The questions must be neutral, properly formulated, clear, and easy to understand.
Response scale
We offer different response scales depending on the type of survey and question. This includes, for example, CSAT, NPS, five-point, and ten-point scales. However, it is AktivBo's ordinal 4 + 2 scale that forms the basis of our method, and is also the response scale that yields the highest response rate. Why is this the case?
Questions must be posed in such a way that tenants understand what is being asked and can answer in a way that reflects their own experiences. In developing AktivBo’s method, different scales were tested in the tenant surveys. A key difference from many other established scales is that the middle option has been removed so that respondents must actively choose that they "have no opinion", "do not know", or "do not want to take a stand". This encourages respondents to think about their answer and not routinely mark the middle option. This also makes tenants more inclined to write free-text answers and motivate in their own words why they responded as they did (see next page). This approach significantly increased response rates compared to other options.
Free text answers
Allowing tenants to express themselves and give feedback in their own words is a central part of our survey method. Our surveys therefore offer ample opportunities to provide free-text answers. About 80 percent of all respondents use this option. There is often a need to dig deeper behind the numbers, and the comments facilitate the understanding of the quantitative check-box answers and significantly contribute to taking concrete actions in the right places. Essentially, the tenants justify their answers and describe why they answered as they did. This also serves as a quality check where the check-box answers are validated and it’s confirmed whether the respondents understood the questions. All this makes the written comments a very valuable basis for improvement.
In our development of AI-based services, great emphasis has been placed on these free-text answers as generative AI can rapidly classify and extract the essence from large text volumes. The technology also enables automatic improvement suggestions based on tenants’ own words, with time and cost estimates for respective actions. With AI-based analysis, open-ended questions such as "What is most important to improve?" become even more crucial than before. Allowing tenants to tell in their words what they think the landlord should prioritise offers the most reliable answers (compared to, for example, regression analyses).
To ensure all employees of real estate companies can use tenants' free-text answers in improvement work, we have developed a service we call "clear text reading". It offers privacy protection by extracting all personal data from the material so that concerned persons can work with it without risking personal attacks.
Response channels
We continuously optimize the opportunities for tenants to be able to respond through the desired response channel. This means everything from website pages, text messages, and emails, to postal surveys and personal interviews. We also create partnerships with other leading players in the real estate industry in customer communication, where real estate and housing apps have emerged as a natural channel. AktivBo's services can easily be integrated and function as an "in-app" service.
Sendings and reminder management
Based on our thirty years of experience in conducting surveys in the real estate industry, we have learned when and how to ask tenants. We know, for example, that a deadline for responding is counterproductive because it delays the tenant's willingness to respond. Or that incentives and raffles do not have the effect you might think, but have very little impact when it comes to issues of housing and workplace.
There are survey companies that take care of all your needs, from the initial personal meeting to management, dispatch, reminders, and result analysis. This approach (hopefully) ensures quality and allows real estate companies to focus on the right things. Some companies prefer to manage all their survey and data needs themselves, choosing from the various survey tools available on the market. This approach is convenient and agile, with reduced lead times (and consulting costs). The primary reason real estate companies choose to administer all surveys themselves is to save money, although the internal time required often offsets the initial cost savings. Competency in survey methodology is also needed to do this correctly.
With AktivBo, you don't have to choose. We take care of all the surveys that should be handled by an external partner. At the same time, we give you the opportunity to create and supplement with your own surveys where it is most appropriate.
Respondent management, data cleansing, onboarding, optimized sending and reminder management, and more... we take care of everything. Our dedicated and experienced customer teams provide you with full service and support for everything related to your surveys. We believe that a major reason why many of our customer relationships extend beyond 10 years is because we simplify things for our clients and ensure that all necessary steps are managed with the highest quality.
Besides the surveys that we at AktivBo handle, there is a built-in survey tool in AktivBo Analytics that allows you to formulate questions and build surveys according to your wishes. You also handle all the administration of dispatch and reminders yourself.
The service works as an excellent complement to the planned and standardised surveys. For most contact points in the customer journey, it is most effective to set up automatic dispatches through an integration between AktivBo's system and your property management system.
For smaller and more unplanned dispatches, such as occasional questions about specific actions, AktivBo Create is perfect. We developed the service so that the entire survey need can be managed on the same platform. Essentially, it's an ecosystem. This allows you to analyse the results in the same views, both from the surveys AktivBo handles and your own.
At many real estate companies, there are parallel systems and platforms where different departments analyse customer data in isolation from each other. This was a challenge we wanted to address by integrating a survey tool into AktivBo Analytics. When all data is on the same platform, different departments can more easily take advantage of all the data collected. This saves both time and money, while also providing deeper insights into understanding customers and their needs.
We support many real estate companies in "making it happen". This can involve everything from result analysis, presentations, participation in kick-offs, to longer change management assignments where we provide support from start to finish in implementing a customer-driven approach. Giving tenants the opportunity to influence is important. However, if there is no driving force or willingness within the organisation to make improvements, the results will not improve on their own. Our project managers and customer teams ensure that the organisation is part of the journey and create engagement in the customer satisfaction work. Often it's about ensuring everyone understands why it is important, both for the landlord and for each employee.
Nine out of ten employees in a real estate company work in a customer-related role. What indirect message does management send to the organisation if they do NOT focus on the customer? By setting customer satisfaction goals, measuring and monitoring them, and structuring improvement work, it demonstrates to employees that their work is central and makes a difference. From an employer branding perspective, this is more important than all other job-related benefits combined.
In this context, our work may involve creating motivation, unifying management teams, or supporting processes and reporting. How is it ensured that actions are followed up and that those responsible are aware of what is being done? How are reasonable goals set and how are they to be achieved? How much improvement can be expected from the planned actions and what should be prioritised?
But we aren't reinventing the wheel. And it's not us at AktivBo who know the most, but rather those who actually do the work every day. Therefore, best practices play an important part in our method. By collaborating with over 450 real estate companies, we see many examples of successful initiatives and efforts every day. Our role is to highlight this and thereby save both time and money for other companies in similar situations. Regardless of the needs, our dedicated customer teams and consultants can support the entire improvement process. Based on our collective industry experience, coupled with knowledge of your company's organisation and challenges, we ensure that data is brought to life and translated into continuous improvements.
Recently, huge advances have been made in AI technology and most industries have jumped on the bandwagon to create new, more efficient automated services. At the same time, the systems and new services will not be smarter than the data we give them.
New technology breaks new ground, but with vertical knowledge, value creation becomes even greater. Thanks to our many years of industry experience and thousands of live customer projects, we can more easily identify where the challenges lie. In this way, we use our experience and knowledge together with new technologies in the development of the next generation of services.
Scalable model with great potential for real estate companies
A concrete example of how we have applied AI to get even more out of tenant feedback is our AI-based text response analysis. Every year, we collect over 1.2 million text responses from different types of surveys. The written answers contribute to an understanding of what concrete improvements and priorities are requested by the tenants, but are unfortunately often not fully utilised in the improvement work. In combination with the quantitative answers, this is extremely powerful and streamlines follow-up and improvement of the entire customer journey, which benefits both tenants and landlords.
The AI service can efficiently and structurally classify large amounts of tenant feedback. To preserve tenant privacy, feedback is completely anonymised. It is transmitted and stored encrypted, is not used as training data, and is automatically deleted after classification.
The service that has been developed is scalable, works for different types of processes in a real estate company's customer journey, and can identify measures for both local and housing companies on all levels. Based on the tenants' written answers, suggestions for concrete improvement measures are automatically given, which are then categorised based on business area and type of action. Based on this, the time and costs for the implementation of the measure are then estimated. This means that it becomes an important link between the analysis work and the action plans that customers link to the tenants' responses.
Want to know even more? Book a meeting, we'll be happy to tell you!
I good company
