Struggling With A Low ORA Score?

Struggling With A Low ORA Score – See Nicole's Top 10 Tips To Grow And Repair Your Online Reputation 

The age-old question- What is the secret sauce to earning and maintaining a high Online Reputation Assessment (ORA) Score? The recipe, if you follow, is really simple—when your residents feel genuinely cared for and connected with your office teams, when your property delivers on all the "promises" you've made at the time of leasing, when those operational issues impacting the daily lives of residents are handled in a timely manner, and when communication is consistent, the residents will be happy. Happy residents talk favorably about your property online and offline, and those referrals and lease renewals roll in. As a result of commitment to resident satisfaction, a property sees less negative chatter and more positive comments, resulting in higher ORA scores. 

After each monthly ORA Power Ranking, we are often asked what we can do to improve our ORA score. Here are the Top 10 Tips from Nicole Patterson, Director of Training and Business Analytics. 

1. Improving resident satisfaction correlates to improving online reputation, so improving your ORA score is all about high resident satisfaction. You need to know how you perform internally with your residents before you seek to drive reputation performance.
2. There should be a top-down approach to reputation excellence, from your corporate to your regional to your maintenance to your leasing teams should share common goals and clearly understand your strategy to make improvements. 
3. Know your reputation landscape- where do you have reviews, how many reviews, and what is the overall rating?
4. Understand how the various review sites work and partner with J Turner's team to learn more about this. Some sites allow you to ask for reviews, some do not, and some sites have a vetting process before posting online.
5. Aim to have a well-balanced reputation that is consistent across sites. Do not allow your review sites to cast doubts about your property in your prospect's mind.
6. Understand the issues and complaints your residents highlight in your 1- & 2-star reviews. Most often, these complaints relate to day-to-day operations. Once you know the issues, you can improve your operations and eliminate those pesky complaints. Remember, the best properties get minimal negative reviews.
7. For every 1-star review, you need seven 5-star reviews to offset a 4.5-star average. Work with your teams to develop a strategy to proactively engage your residents to share feedback online.
8. There is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Your game plan to grow or repair a property's reputation will vary based on its unique challenges, resident demographics, and reputation landscape.
9. Set checkpoints in your plan, and periodically visit your progress in achieving your reputation goals. If you've implemented a new parking policy to tackle the complaints about insufficient guest parking, see how your residents react to it. Is it bringing the instances of towing down or related complaints down?
10. Online reputation for a community is a team effort; when all employees are focused and engaged, they can achieve incredible growth or maintain a strong presence.

  For questions, please contact npatterson@jturnerresearch.com.