A match made in... Your apartment complex? Answering services and property managers are teaming up more and more to provide a better tenant experience while property managers are striving to achieve better work-life balance.
It turns out that answering services and property management companies or individual property managers make the perfect marriage. Property managers want to keep their tenants happy and, in their units longer with less turnover. The things that make tenants happy align perfectly with the core competencies of a good answering service.
Communicate quickly and effectively
Property managers deal with a lot of calls. It can be overwhelming, especially when many of those calls come outside of a normal 9-5 workday. Using an answering service helps you keep up with those important calls, and lets your tenants know they're heard. Reduce the amount of “catch up” you’re playing and allow more proactive activities.
Many property managers start by having their answering service cover the evenings and weekends, but quickly pivot to send all their call traffic to the answering service. Pushing 100% of your call traffic to the answering service allows you to provide consistent, professional and 24/7 contact for your tenants.
Triage and dispatch the right help
Answering services are also able to take action to help your tenants resolve their problems. Through expertly crafted call scripts, agents can determine what is an emergency and needs immediate attention (like a broken pipe that is flooding the apartment) or a non-emergency (like a leaky pipe that drips into a bucket) and can wait until morning.
The ability to distinguish between true emergencies and non-emergency calls can save you thousands on maintenance overtime bills.
Reporting and call analytics
Taking thousands of calls means you can gain insightful information about your tenants. But only if it’s captured, interpreted, and delivered as a report. When your answering service takes each call it’s catalogued and categorized by call type, duration, and more.
The result of tracking your calls is a detailed report with information the property manager can act on. For example, you might see that 28% of all calls are about clogged toilets. Rather than reacting to each call, you might instead buy a plunger for each rental unit so that tenants can handle the issue themselves and you no longer have to deploy resources for calls of this nature (and reduce the number of calls as well).
Leasing assistance
Arranging viewings and providing information about units can be very time-consuming. Your answering service can help take some of that burden off the property managers shoulders.
Custom Solutions
Each property comes with its own set of challenges. When unique challenges arise your answering service should be able to help you develop unique solutions to match. For example, one of Telelink’s customers had an issue with managing guest vehicles. They were looking for a remote concierge service.
In this scenario, when a tenant invites guests over, they call Telelink and let us know their guest’s license plate number. We enter that number into a 3rd party software, and the software’s associated video camera in the parking garage recognizes the vehicles license plate upon arrival on the list. The guest is then let in the garage automatically when they reach the gate. Not something you would traditionally expect from an answering service.
Happily ever after
From everyday call taking to license plate recognition software, an answering service and property manager have a beautiful coexistence. When an answering service can take the administrative legwork and call taking responsibilities off the shoulders of the property manager, the property manager can then focus on proactive relationship building and core business activities. Read about how Telelink helped GWL residential achieve their goal of spending 70% of their time on proactive service and reducing the amount of admin work down to 30%.