This is How Artificial Intelligence Tackles Today’s Top Two CRE and FM Challenges
Driving High Tenant Satisfaction Rates and Improving Preventive Maintenance
If we had to pinpoint a single trend that seems to drive the disruptive transformation of the Commercial Real Estate world, it would be the shift from serving the building to serving the tenant.
Though these two are inherently connected to one another, the focus has essentially moved from the physical maintenance of the buildings to ensuring their tenants enjoy a fast, easy, and comfortable experience in using their spaces, just like they do when they use their smartphones.
Taking it down to the operational levels, this virtually changes the way assets are maintained and the experiences tenants expect from their space management, from trusting their equipment all the way to the speedy handling of their service requests.
It is exactly at this point that CRE management is facing its biggest challenge today – turning existing assets into flexible, interactive spaces for people to live and work in. This new approach to optimizing their property’s life cycle requires CRE executives to excel in two key processes– great user experiences and high-quality maintenance.
Thought artificial intelligence was just a concept? Think again
If you had a way to drive operational excellence in those two crucial areas, without major investments and changes to existing infrastructure, your tenant retention and property longevity rates would skyrocket. And that’s exactly what artificial intelligence is providing today using role-based preventive alerts to uncover tenant and maintenance issues in real-time.
Let’s take a look to see how it works for those two processes
1) Preventive maintenance that drives better asset cost control
One prominent problem almost every facility manager and CRE teams are well familiar with is the fragmented and disconnected value chain of maintenance; from regular upkeep to repairs and ongoing troubleshooting – there is no one workflow for all these departments and vendors to work on. Once there’s a single management workflow connecting all those dots together by issuing ongoing, timely reports on equipment, alerting on potential issues before they even occur, and notifying on incidents in real-time to the right personnel – proactive measures are taken on time, equipment downtime is prevented or reduced to a minimum, and costs are substantially reduced.
This visibility into data on ongoing events tightens operational team’s monitoring and improves CRE management’s interaction with the physical building, thus allowing you to optimize your assets.
While it is customary to think smart monitoring of your physical assets can only be made possible through IoT technology by implementing sensors across your property, this is not the case.
The obstacle standing in the way of most facility managers and real estate executives is not the lack of equipment sensors, but the difficulty to retrieve data from existing sources and leveraging it for actionable decision-making.
Thus, the solution doesn’t start with implementing sensors and IoT infrastructure, but rather should be focused on giving CRE executives and facility managers access to available data so they can optimize performance based on its insights.
An advanced AI notification platform allows you just that; it can integrate with your legacy systems to access your existing data and extract actionable insights to the right staff members and executives – without implementing a single sensor on your existing equipment. But implementing AI to turn your maintenance into preventive maintenance is just one side of the coin. To optimize your properties’ life cycle, you also need to ensure tenant satisfaction.
2) Great user experience that boosts tenant satisfaction
let’s call it what it is – those we used to call ‘tenants in our properties’ should now be referred to as ‘users is our flexible spaces.’ The user experience people enjoy on a daily basis in other sectors has significantly increased users’ expectations from essentially every provided service, including the spaces we occupy. The digital mindset we’ve all grown accustomed to is changing the way we perceive our physical experiences, and what we’ve all once known as pure physical spaces have now turned into space-as-a-service. The result is high expectations that our buildings will function according to our needs, flawlessly.
Hence it’s no wonder maintaining high tenant satisfaction is conceived as the number one priority for 97% of facility and real estate managers. But in a reality where CRE managers don’t have their hands on actionable data to react to tenants’ needs or understand where their greatest pains are, this objective is simply unreachable.
When the data is in silos, managers can’t be expected to allocate the right staff or reduce response times; both reported being the top challenging managerial tasks in property management.
When it comes to multi-campus enterprises, valuable data with real insights on tenant satisfaction such as incoming service requests and their frequency, work orders analysis, tenants’ leasing patterns, response times and completion times – can only be actionable when processed through machine learning algorithms. In fact, without applying AI applications, operational teams and managers are forced to dig through endless printed excel reports, manually looking for patterns and behaviors among tens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of tenants.
In a world of faster, seamless user experiences, operational teams and their CRE and facility managers need to be able to process vast amounts of tenant data to automatically produce insights on patterns and anomalies in order to gain a better understanding of their tenants’ needs and difficulties, and how to solve those as quickly as possible.
AI is your new enabler to operational excellence
In order to tackle today’s biggest challenges in facility and CRE management, executives and operational teams on the ground need to be able to have their hands on insightful, actionable data from both their properties and tenants in real-time. Using advanced AI algorithms, CRE executives and operational managers can be constantly informed on ongoing measurable processes to maintain the highest quality of user experience and preventive maintenance – without any additional investments in infrastructure.
