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Strata Management, Great Service and the Internet

Strata Plus Reviews

Reputation is all-important in strata management gained from many years of delivering customer service that is based on ethics and transparency. We understand our duty to assist with managing your most valuable assets and do the right thing by property owners. We care and that’s why we get great feedback.

How do we help when our clients have issues? So how do we deal with complaints?

We look after the people. Solving a problem or issue is how we build customer loyalty.

We deal with problems or issues in a personal way and prefer direct contact, human contact. Where possible we like to speak with the person to make sure we fully understand the problem or issue. We care about making sure the client knows that they have been heard and what exactly the next step is. When a call or email comes in and the word complaint arises, our team knows to try to find a senior manager to look after the person. It’s all about helping. Our team knows that the focus is to help and that they don’t need to worry about getting a team member into trouble.
And how do we deal with our customers in the digital age?

If our client doesn’t want to talk on the phone, we make sure they have options to flag their issue. An email can be sent directly or through our website where you can choose the specific office

Our website also identifies the leadership team. Owners and related persons can easily identify who is in charge. We are happy for our 20,000+ owners to know who they can escalate to.

The internet has massive advantages in terms of its ability to speed up communication and get things done. However, it has its drawbacks too as nothing quite beats a good old fashioned person to person interaction, understanding and agreement with the next action.

As it’s easy to send an email our strata managers generally need to handle 50+ new emails per day. 100+ generally happens to each manager at least once a week. Interestingly enough, when Strata Plus first started in 2001, most owners didn’t have a personal email address. The job of a strata manager was full time, even when they might only be receiving 5 emails per day.

Without the telephone chat, it’s easy for misunderstandings to happen or assumptions to be made. In the old days, this used to be called a ‘broken telephone’ where only part of the message was understood.

A good example of ‘broken telephone’ online is a scenario like this: a customer calls up and states that their request has not been actioned. If the strata manager is unavailable, a message is taken, and reception also suggests they can speak with an Assistant or they can send a follow-up email. Often the customer is frustrated with the time it takes for a decision to be made or instruction to be given on their matter. It’s the misunderstanding as to how a decision is made. The customer generally thinks that the strata manager has the authority to progress their request. After the phone call, they become angry, so they might then go online and post a bad review.
It is easy to jump online to something like Product Review, Google My Business Review or Facebook and post positive or negative reviews about good, bad or poor service performance.

Online review sites are not perfect

All too often complaints are made online in public forums that can’t be retracted or deleted. Because they can’t be deleted, even if the misunderstanding is resolved to the satisfaction of the customer, the damage is often already done. So a negative review might be fair if the company has not attempted to sort out the communication. However, it’s not so clear cut if the company has gone out of their way to attempt to sort things out.

This is a problem for any company, not just in strata management. Consumers use the internet to compare goods and service providers. In the case of strata they will be able to compare services and reviews from all the top strata companies including Strataplus. These include Bright & Duggan, Strata Choice, Jamesons, Platinum, Whelans, Beaumont, Irvine, Strata Title Management, the PICA group which includes BCS Strata & NSW Strata. This is not a finite list. If you don’t know where to start to find a top company simply ask Strata Community Association (SCA) as to who their corporate members are.

Product reviews on sites like www.productreviews.com.au are not always necessarily true. ‘Fake reviews’ or malicious posts are always going to be out there. They are aimed at being misleading and are often put up there by competitors or someone with an axe to grind. If you are going to use search terms like ‘compare’ or ‘best service’ for strata management, we recommend you try to get as much information as possible from as many sources as you can. Remember the internet is not always reliable.

Word of mouth is the best

Check out and search to see if there are online community forums where you are more likely to get honest reviews about a manager’s performance and the customer experience.

Strata Plus have years of great customer experiences and comments about our service. Most of our growth over our 16+ years is due to personal referrals. Please just ask us for some of the many comments we have received over the years or see for yourself on our Raves & Reviews

Check out our reviews on Productreview.com.au here

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