How to Choose the Best Coworking Management Software in 2022
How to choose the best software to help you manage your coworking space
June 1, 2022
Blog
Summary:
- Coworking space software is a platform that can help operators manage, measure, and grow their coworking business
- Having some degree of automation in your coworking space is the best way to scale your business in a sustainable way
- When choosing software, consider what your biggest operational challenges are, what your members want, and how well the platform will integrate with your existing tools
Running a coworking space can get complicated.
Coworking operators often manage everything from member support and administration to accounting and marketing for their space.
One thing that can help ease this burden is implementing coworking management software.
In this guide, we’ll show you exactly how to choose the best software to help you manage your coworking space.
What is coworking management software?
Coworking space software is a platform that can help operators manage, measure, and grow their coworking business.
It does everything from:
- Automate time-consuming member management duties
- Gather insights into how your space is performing and how enhanced your community is
- Support your business in scaling and growing your space
- Elevates and reinforces your coworking brand
- Improves the user experience
Once upon a time, there were manual solutions and spreadsheets. Now, there is software to take care of the day-to-day.
What are the benefits of coworking space software?
Your time as a small business owner is incredibly valuable. Software for coworking spaces is specifically designed to help ease the everyday burden of running a flexible workspace business.
Implementing coworking software in your space can help you:
- Grow your membership and differentiate your space
- Enable you to offer unique services and experiences
- Deliver insights that ensure data-driven business decisions and solution design
- Provide you with tools that help maximize your customer acquisition and retention
- Save time, energy, and money on mundane day-to-day tasks
- Empower your members to utilize the space autonomously
Having some degree of automation in your coworking space is the best way to scale your business in a sustainable way.
But selecting that key piece of software can be a daunting task. How do you ensure you’re making an informed decision?
How to choose the best coworking management software in 2022
Ask yourself these seven questions to make the best decision on software for your coworking space.
1. What are my coworking space’s biggest operational challenges?
The answer to this question will likely come from your team, so take the time to sit down and talk to them about their responsibilities.
Understanding their most time-consuming tasks will help you pinpoint areas that can be improved with the help of automated coworking software.
Some common challenges coworking spaces face include:
- Membership billing: Between one-off charges, overage fees, and custom membership plans, billing can quickly become a complex process for your team (especially as you expand).
- Booking and scheduling resources such as hot desks and meeting rooms: Members expect access to a variety of spaces. Manually coordinating the schedule for all of these is not only time- consuming, but also prone to errors like double booking.
- Issue reporting and capturing feedback: Delivering an exceptional coworking member experience is a sure-fire way to ensure long-term retention. To do so, however, you first need to understand how to improve your service.
- Lack of data insight: Without hard data to back business decisions, each choice you make is a shot in the dark. As a result, the chances of failure are higher.
- Community engagement: Nurturing a sense of community is crucial for coworking spaces, but it can be tricky to find ways to engage members.
- Growing your business: Scaling can be tricky without the right tools. Ensure you have a platform that can grow with you as you grow.
Good coworking management software should have features to address these pain points and more for your team.
2. What do my coworking members want?
It can be easy to fixate on your needs when choosing coworking technology.
However, you can’t forget your members. After all, coworking software is a tool that will impact their day-to-day lives as well.
Now is a great opportunity to run a quick member survey to gather direct insight into your member experience and how to improve it. Ask these three simple questions in your survey:
- What are we doing well?
- Do you have any frustrations with your coworking experience?
- Is there anything you would change about this coworking space if you could?
The answers will not only clarify which features members want from your coworking platform, they’ll also highlight other areas you can improve to boost member experience even further.
3. Will the coworking management software integrate with my mission-critical tools?
Another key consideration is your technology ecosystem.
Will your coworking management software integrate with your current tech? Is it flexible enough to scale with your business as it grows?
The platform will be significantly less useful if it doesn’t connect with the tools you use today, and the ones you will need in the future.
For example, perhaps you’re planning to install an access control system so members can check themselves in and out. You’ll need to integrate it with your coworking software‘s membership plans or it becomes very difficult to grant correct access and track usage quotas.
To help make the question of software integration easier, look for solutions that connect with the automation tool Zapier. This unlocks integrations with over a thousand other technology tools you likely use or will be using soon.
4. What kind of onboarding and ongoing support comes with the coworking management software?
It’s important to understand what a typical onboarding process looks like with the software you’re going to choose. Not only will this reassure you that you’re in capable hands, but it will also prepare you for the next steps.
At this stage, it’s helpful to select an internal champion to spearhead the initiative and coordinate the necessary resources on your side.
But it’s not just onboarding you should think about. Getting up and running won’t happen overnight. You need to ensure your provider can troubleshoot issues, answer questions, and support your long-term success with the platform. Some resources to look for include:
- Training: Will your team receive training on how to use the software? What about materials to help members maximize its value?
- Customer support: Does the provider have staff on hand if you or your members need help? How can you reach them: phone, email, online chat?
- Help Center / FAQ: Is there a Help Center or FAQ to help you get quick answers and advice on using the software’s features?
All these resources will be invaluable as you get set up and started with your coworking management software.
5. Does the coworking software provider’s vision align with mine?
Coworking management software is a long-term investment. The last thing you want is to outgrow your provider in a few years’ time.
That’s why you need to make sure their vision aligns with yours. Asking the company these three questions will help gauge your long-term compatibility:
- What is your vision for the software in the next five years?
- Is the product receiving regular feature updates and new functionality?
- Will I have a voice in your development roadmap?
- Will my feedback be taken into consideration as the product grows and evolves?
Choosing a mission-driven company with values that align with your own can ensure your partnership is a long-term agreement and not something that will change in six months time.
6. How customizable is the coworking space software?
Coworking software is oftentime an out-of-the-box solution. This means, you’ll be able to start using it immediately without any dev work involved.
However, it’s likely that your space will have custom needs that are beyond the scope of what your software was designed for.
Therefore, it’s extremely important to consider how flexible the software is, for example can the features be turned on or off, in addition to the platform capabilities and APIs of your coworking software platform. Having a platform with APIs, tools, and documentation will be a game-changer; enabling you to develop customized experiences and services.
With APIs, you’ll be able to customize the platform to fit your unique needs such as:
- Adding additional features to the platform
- Anything else it does?
The coworking market is young and evolving quickly. You need to be able to experiment with unique feature innovations to differentiate your business within your market.
7. Can the software scale with me as I grow my business?
Your business is growing and your platform needs to be able to grow with it.
Having a software that supports multiple locations and can grow with your business is extremely important for your overall business. You don’t want to be limited in your ability to grow your business because your software can’t support you.
Spend some time looking at where your business is now and where you want to be in the next 3-5 years.
Then, make sure that you are choosing a software that supports multi-location management including:
- A single dashboard for multiple locations for easy oversight
- Detailed data and analytics of each location
- Reasonable scale pricing
- Ability for a single user to access multiple locations
- Flexibility for how locations interact with one another
At the end of the day, the important thing is to think long term and choose a platform that you can scale with and build on.
Ready to get started on your coworking software journey? Connect with one of our friendly Product Experts to find the right coworking management software to help you tackle your operational challenges, and transform the experience your members have within your space.
