Delivering a Customer-Centric Experience: How We Put Military Families First

I’ve been general manager for hotel properties and COO of a hotel ownership group. I’ve designed tens of thousands of fan experiences at stadiums and special events. But, as competitive as those industries are, my most important customer experience challenge to date is my role with Lendlease as Vice President of Customer Strategy and Experience.

Across every industry, the customer comes first. A recent customer experience survey from Zendesk revealed that 73% of business leaders cite a direct link between their customer service and overall business performance.

The pandemic and increased customer expectations has only added more pressure to deliver memorable customer experiences. The same survey noted that 60% of companies reported increasing customer service standards since the start of COVID, adding automated tasks, AI-driven chatbots, and more to adapt to customer preferences.

But experience is even more vital when your business is building, sustaining, and growing strong communities and your customers are our military families, who traditionally face limited or no choice of where they can live. Lendlease requires thinking about the resident perspective and experience at every turn of strategy, design, or policy. And we are 100% committed, taking a resident-centric approach for every decision we make.

Bringing Customers to the Table

It starts with listening to the needs of military families. One important way we do so, is the introduction of Resident Advisory Boards (RAB) at our privatized military housing communities.

These RABs are a direct pathway for our team to engage with residents in problem-solving, not only calling to our attention any issues they are seeing or experiencing, but also giving them a voice alongside the military leadership of their installation.

The RAB program was uniquely created and launched in the military housing portfolio by Lendlease and demonstrates our commitment to truly understanding our residents and their expectations.

Designing with Perspective

Another prominent example of our commitment to our residents is on display at our military housing community on Fort Campbell, Campbell Crossing, where we’re building homes that have been designed to meet the needs of our military families. The goal in designing these homes has been to look not only within the military resident needs for design cues, but to draw on Lendlease’s vast development and housing expertise to apply to the units we’re building here.

Our team conducted detailed research on current trends, including what our residents need in a home on-post. We went so far as to conduct tours with military leadership, the RAB, and military spouses, which has been an essential part of the development process as Lendlease makes final design adjustments. It’s often challenging for a developer to view the product from a residents’ lens, but that is precisely the perspective required to provide military families with housing that will connect with them.

Researching for Deeper Understanding

We are proud to be launching an extensive research piece that aims to understand military personnel’s journey to find housing and where they experience challenges (or pain points) along their journey. This research will help inform how we approach day-to-day operations, marketing, the choice of amenities, and allow us to improve the overall experience.

More fully and closely understanding our residents will help us to meet their expectations and needs and better adjust when those needs change. This research will serve as a baseline for underpinning and strengthening our resident experience.

Lendlease’s mission is to provide homes where service members and their families can live, work, and thrive. I am honored to continue this tradition by centering our residents in everything we do.