Family owned and operated since the 1920s, the Kaled Management organization manages over 7,000 residential units in New York City, Nassau and Suffolk Counties, ranging from garden apartments to mid- and high-rise buildings. We spoke with Jordan Platt, the VP of Operations at Kaled about his experience implementing Synco’s real-time messaging platform with his team.
Q: What are the challenges you face when communicating across your team and across properties?
A: You get so used to using email that you assume it’s the only way to communicate. I was getting inundated with thousands of emails that I didn’t necessarily need to be on, and it was very cumbersome. When I would try to read email chains I was copied on to see what was going on at a property, I would have to start at the very beginning of the email and read backwards up, which is very annoying. For example, I was reading an email chain and couldn’t figure out which apartment was being referred to – I had to go all the way down to the bottom of the email to find what apartment we were discussing. This process is a big time-waster for everyone across our organization.
And besides email, our building staff were using text messaging to coordinate things that weren’t necessarily rising to the level of a formal email, things that I would never be able to get visibility into.
Q: How did these communications problems impact your business and team?
A: We had accepted the overload of email as the way to do business, even though we wasted so much time going back and forth on email. For example – doing a vacancy inspection with photos that we need to refer to later. Our property staff would write an email, send it around to a group, and attach all of the pictures of the vacancy inspection to the email and say that it was complete. The time spent to write that email, and try to find it later – it just doesn’t make sense from an efficiency standpoint.
And some conversations were done via text messaging because for our building staff, it’s just more intuitive and less formal to do that – but the downside is no one has visibility into it, and if the person leaves the company or loses their phone, that information is all gone.
Q: What were some of the high-level feature capabilities that drew you to Synco?
A: First, the real-time communication aspect. When I read a conversation in Synco, I start at the top, I can see the conversation unfold and the attachments all in one place. That’s such an improvement over viewing email threads that have attachments in different places, email signatures, disclaimers, etc. clogging up the screen.
That speed of conversation appeals to our building staff, who picked up using Synco immediately. Our building staff are more likely to respond on Synco because it doesn’t feel like they’re writing a formal email – it’s like just responding to a text message, and is more conversational.
Second, the files and photo uploads are so easy in Synco. For example, a building manager just sent me a Synco message with a picture of a broken fixture asking if he could replace it. Before Synco, something like this could be three or four emails going back and forth.
Q: How has implementing Synco impacted Kaled’s team so far?
A: We’re using Synco to communicate from the boiler room up to the boardroom. It’s made my life so much easier as far as the day-to-day communications I need to be a part of to keep our properties running. I’ve noticed the number of emails I now receive has decreased 50-60% since starting with Synco.
And for our building staff, they adopted it so quickly – they were up and running before we even did the Synco training, because the app is just so simple to use.
Synco is awesome, it’s easy to use, and it really does make running our properties much easier.
