Building a Global Community of Property Managers

Condo Control is a powerful software for property managers, home ownership associations, and condo boards. It has two parts to it: an administration module that empowers operations teams to work more efficiently and a communications module that allows property teams to reach out to residents and receive feedback easily.

Founded in 2008 and based in Toronto, the company now counts customers in countries all over the globe including Canada, the United States, Costa Rica, and the Philippines.

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Between board members, property managers, and residents, there are a lot of stakeholders in a single residential building or homeowners associations. Condo Control helps everyone communicate and helps building administrative staff reduce the time they spend on paperwork with its SaaS platform.

In an effort to make sure the company’s global customers always had support, Condo Control built a community with Bettermode.

Only two months into implementation, Condo Control is already seeing 24/7 engagement, both from the Condo Control team and more importantly from community members supporting each other.

Speaking with Bettermode, David Guthrie, the Customer Success Marketing Specialist at Condo Control, explained more about the company’s community vision and what it meant to get a platform up and running so quickly.

Building a 24/7 resource for a global customer base

After years of successful growth and product iteration, Condo Control had a challenge ahead of them: its platform is incredibly customizable for all types of property use cases. However, this also made the platform a little confusing to new customers who had a lot of questions about how to configure the software for their use case.

Internally, the Condo Control team also wanted a way to informally connect with its customers, property managers, and administrators. This platform needed to be available 24/7 for the company’s global customer base, so it had to be something that could grow on its own rather than relying solely on the customer support team to respond to every question.

“Being software that is pretty robust, it has lots of features and can be fully customizable… [but] that can be a bit overwhelming,” said David. “Some people don’t know exactly what to do with a feature.”

Building a community became the solution to both challenges.

A community would provide a much more casual space for the Condo Control team to talk with customers rather than trying to ask someone how their day is going via a support ticket. Further, a community meant that more advanced users in the Condo Control ecosystem could help new users both when the support team was not available and when there was a niche use case to discuss.

This also served the ultimate goal of having customers supporting each other with Condo Control helping out, rather than owning all support conversations.

“They can access the forum. 24/7,” said David. “The employees don’t work 24/7. But the idea is that, you know, someone in the Philippines might also be up who’s also on the forum can also help those people.”

Why Condo Control built community with Bettermode

Originally calling the project a “forum” internally, David began to research tools that would help them host a private community and noticed Bettermode mentioned in a lot of comparison articles.

David liked the features Bettermode offered, but they chose the platform specifically for three reasons:

• Growth: Both companies also had strong growth trajectories, which David liked because it gave him confidence that Bettermode could scale with Condo Control over the years.
• Location: Both Bettermode and Condo Control had offices in Toronto, which gave David a good feeling about supporting a local company.
• Price: Compared to other platforms, David appreciated Bettermode's transparent and fair pricing, which made it easier to build a business case for the platform.

“[Bettermode] was a great price point for us to be able to get into a community,” said David.

How Bettermode supported Condo Control

Bettermode Platform made it extremely easy to add the community access touchpoint into the Condo Control software. Using Single sign-on (SSO), customers can log in to the community simply by clicking on a button available in Condo Control software. This gives a sense that the community is a part of Condo Control.

Spaces and Collections are used to categorize content and facilitate customer conversation in a structured format. The community centralizes resources such as user guides, how-to videos, product updates, and enables the Condo Control team to share various training sessions. In addition to that, there is a dedicated Space to collect customer feedback.

The Condo Control team also utilized the Customizer to add and arrange different Blocks for customizing the community as well as Spaces. For instance, the Space for Live Training of different modules of Condo Control highlights a Block with 3 sections for different training sessions.

Since the Condo Control relies on videos to educate and help customers, they simply upload and embed videos. These videos directly play inside the community so the members don’t have to go to a third-party site to view the video content.

Finally, Bettermode's community, Campfire has been an amazing source of inspiration for the Condo Control community. David was kind enough to share that his feature requests, suggestions, and questions posted in Campfire always receive prompt responses and quick resolution.

The results

Despite Condo Control’s community being relatively young—just a few months old—David is already seeing great results. He spends a lot of time responding to and prompting discussions but he’s already seen customers taking charge of commenting and answering questions posed by others.

David loves that every conversation has an entire history to it. Unlike support articles that are static—even if you offer a feedback thumbs up or down feature—every conversation in Bettermode is visible to members. When customers look through old questions they can see multiple perspectives and follow the flow of conversation rather than hoping a support article would be applicable to their circumstances.

The Condo Control Community is also available 24/7 for members around the globe to check out recent conversations, respond to a comment, or post their questions.

“You can actually just see a conversation of what happened and what people are saying,” said David. “You can search, and it’s all listed there.”