Create a valued community
Serviced offices are ideal venues to create a community feel to corporate life. They are a hotbed of companies from virtually all sectors and sizes and have common spaces and facilities where people from different firms can mix and mingle. This backdrop gives us much to build on and we deliberately wanted to create a community, member club type mood in our serviced offices to ensure a social and friendly atmosphere.Seek regular feedback
Customer feedback is probably one of the most important areas of information for any business. Neglecting what your customers say and not constantly responding to their reasonable needs and requests can be very damaging, certainly for customer retention. We put our tenants at the centre of our business, running an annual customer satisfaction survey to ensure that any areas for improvement are identified and we move quickly to address them. We ensure that our channels of communication are always open – stationing managers onsite to ensure that our tenants’ feedback is fully taken into account in our operating strategy – giving us a clear understanding of what future tenants want and need in terms of their office requirements.Get the basics right
Invest in your customers
I have always believed that investing in your customers is money very well spent. In contrast to many of our competitors, we operate a freehold model, where we own our serviced offices, rather than lease them, so we are more willing and able to invest in the offices and facilities that we provide. We aim for HQ standard office space, world-class connectivity, and a five-star hotel standard for our ancillary services of salons, beauty treatment rooms and rooftop cafes. In the current very competitive contest for clients, being able to make this investment to provide the best office space and services we can for our tenants is one of the key factors in retaining them and in our very high occupancy rate.Continually innovate
Just as tenants’ businesses evolve and their requirements change, serviced office operators need to make sure that their offer develops to match this. For example, as the sheer quantity of data and information that our clients need to process online rapidly increased so we significantly upgraded the quality of the connectivity in our serviced offices. Similarly, as the more modern way of working sees people working 50+ hour days and almost seamless working between the office and home, we recently launched serviced bedrooms in our Monument office in the City of London, which has been warmly embraced and the bedrooms much used. As the way we work and live continues to change ever more rapidly, as does the technology to support this, other facilities and services we will likely have to consider in the future include gyms, electric cars docks, 3D printers and possibly access to GP services, given the increasing difficulty of getting NHS GP appointments.This article is part of a wider campaign called Founders Diaries, a section of Real Business that brings together 20 inspiring business builders to share their stories. Bringing together companies from a wide variety of sectors and geographies, each columnist produces a diary entry each month. Visit the Founders Diaries section to find out more.
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