Notes

Property Managers: Tips for Improving Your After-Hours Maintenance Hotline
While it is an easy task to make contact with a property management answering service or answering services company and hang up an after-hours maintenance hotline, ensuring that it works well for you personally as well as your tenants requires a bit more effort. Below are some pointers you can follow to make sure you are doing everything it is possible to to get the most out of the service and your tenants happy.
1. Personalize the service just as much as possible
The default property management script that your particular answering services company provider dons file will get the job done, but it's always safer to personalize it to match your business.
For example, the default way that operators answer the phone could possibly be "Thank you for calling, may I help you?" Instead of leaving this the actual way it is, modify it to add the naming of your house and the intent behind the queue, such as "Thank you for calling Forest Pines Condominiums after-hours maintenance hotline, may I assist you to?" It's a minor change, nonetheless it makes people more at ease understanding that they're calling your dedicated line.
Or, as an illustration, if the hotline will be used by apartments which might be all inside the same building and possess the same address, make sure operators only request the apartment number. It's annoying being forced to provide your whole address when all that is needed the quantity. This goes for properties within the same City and State, also. No need to seek advice that you know the answer to.
2. Clearly communicate to tenants what constitutes an emergency
Your tenants should know about what is considered an emergency because of your company and what isn't. Unfortunately, property managers often give criteria for their answering services company however, not tenants, resulting in a large amount of heated conversations. Instead of just giving your tenants a number to call after office hours, let them have a similar list of emergencies that you just give your live answering services company and inform them what will lead to an after-hours maintenance visit and after that hold to the office.
Alternatively, it is possible to scrap the list of emergencies altogether, instead counting on a matter that asks the tenant whether or not they feel their situation is urgent and needs attention before regular office hours. The potential for abuse this is obvious, but it is definitely an even more customer friendly approach.
Ultimately, only you are able to decide what exactly is great for your needs, but either approach work well if most people are properly educated.
3. Stick to your office hours or prepare your live answering services company to field additional kinds of calls
Understandably, getting the chance to forward your lines to the after-hours service anytime is oftentimes too alluring to give up. If you're gonna leave a cubicle or stop taking calls within your regular business hours, be sure that your particular call center is prepared to handle the different varieties of calls that they will be receiving. It's harmful to business to make callers in a live answering services company that can't do anything whatsoever for the kids and has no specifics of what is happening inside office. By contacting your live answering services company and telling them what your schedule is so when you'll be out, they're going to have more info to supply callers and turn into more confident handling your calls. In addition, the scripting and instructions they follow must be befitting form of calls they're taking and what they are telling callers.
As an illustration, while it's perfectly acceptable after-hours to see a caller using a non-urgent concern to call back the subsequent day, it's ineffective and confusing being told that at 1 within the afternoon with a Thursday. Call centers can easily set up variable scripting, so make certain that you just have them do this. "The office has gone out to lunch currently, but I can ask a person to return your call once they get back this afternoon" is much more appropriate.
4. Take advantage of the extra services, functionality, and technology that your answering services company has available
Today's sales departments tend to be more advanced as opposed to simple message taking services that came before them. Sometimes just having a message and delivering it properly 's all that's needed, however, you should look in to the capabilities and technology that your particular call center has accessible in order to determine if there's more they may be doing for you. If so, there is get more info will improve the effectiveness of one's answering services company and increase the a higher level customer support they're able to supply.
Examples of additional services include payment processing, scheduling showings for you, and integrating together with your CRM or database in order to look-up tenant information easier and automatically create work tickets in your metabolism. Whether these services be the better choice in your case often depend upon your size as well as the investment needed to hold the technology configured. When deciding if they should spend the additional money, make sure to factor inside the time it requires that you perform certain tasks, whether or not the changes will reduce or improve your invoice (by increasing or reducing call times), and whether having a more advanced call center will allow you to decrease vacancies and increase the relationship you might have with existing tenants.
I hope these pointers build your live answering services company experiences more prosperous. If you're working having a reputable call center and perhaps they are doing everything they're able to on the end, after this list ought to be all you have to make the relationship successful.
If you might have any feedback on having an answering service /answering services company with your premises management operation, I'd want to hear from you. Whether your relationship was successful or even a complete disaster, I always still find it advantageous to talk to people and find out about what's working and what isn't.
Here's my website: http://www.masonre.com.au/