Navana Property Group has appointed Charlotte Crawley – the former Partner and Head of Customer Experience at Cushman & Wakefield. Charlotte joins Navana as the Culture and Experience Director, as the group continues to disrupt traditional asset and property management models.
Charlotte has held several high-level experience roles in the property industry – eight years as Head of Customer Experience at DTZ, then nearly five years at Cushman & Wakefield. Charlotte also sat on the accessibility and customer experience committee at REVO (previously the British Council of Shopping Centres) which advises on industry best practice.
Charlotte will lead a new specialised practice at Navana, planning and delivering customer experience and cultural strategies for the group’s clients, including for its recently launched Build to Rent division. Navana will focus on partnering with owners and operators of mixed-use developments, coordinating programmes across commercial, residential and retail uses to support occupier retention and drive visitor footfall.
“As lifestyles and consumer preferences evolve, developers need partners that can help them navigate these trends to create places where people will enjoy living, working, shopping and visiting. The property industry is more focused on customer and community needs than ever before.
“It’s a positive step change and one which Navana is helping to lead by investing in the tools and knowledge needed to inform a different way of creating and managing new places. I’m excited to be joining such a progressive team that truly understands the value of experience for both property users and clients.”
Charlotte Crawley, Culture and Experience Director, Navana Property Group
The practice will draw on Navana’s wider development consultancy and management capabilities – to help clients design assets around customer needs and follow this through to site activation. These include events, cultural programmes and customer experience training for building management teams.
The group is actively exploring how new technology and data can be used to better understand how people use places and deliver operational and environmental efficiencies. These include consumer research into resident and occupier trends, customer journey mapping, recruitment and customer experience training for on-site teams, and social impact consultancy to help developers track and measure their work with local communities.
“People make a place. How they experience a development is what ultimately drives its success, keeping visitors coming back and bringing in rental and sales income for developers. But we need to understand this from all aspects – how do people’s needs change when they transition from office workers to retail consumers to residents at the end of the day, and how can we create mixed-use developments that meet their different expectations?
“We’re putting experience at the heart of our offer for clients to help them answer these questions, designing and managing assets around the way people want to live to deliver their full potential. With her wealth of expertise and knowledge, Charlotte is perfectly placed to lead this work.”
Kelly Bream, COO, Navana Property Group
