Notes

Property Managers: Tips for Improving Your After-Hours Maintenance Hotline
While it is all to easy to make contact with a property management answering service or call center and set up an after-hours maintenance hotline, being sure that it really works well to suit your needs and your tenants takes a little more effort. Below are some tips you can follow to ensure that you are performing everything you'll be able to to find the most out of the service and your tenants happy.
1. Personalize the service around possible
The default property management script your answering services company provider is wearing file are certain to get the job done, yet it's always safer to personalize it to match your business.
For example, the default method in which operators answer the product might be "Thank you for calling, may I enable you to?" Instead of leaving this the actual way it is, modify it to add the name of your property and also 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 much more comfortable understanding that they're calling your dedicated line.
Or, for example, if your hotline will likely be employed for apartments that are all inside same building and have the same address, make certain operators only request the apartment number. It's annoying being required to provide your complete address when all that is needed the quantity. This goes for properties in the same City and State, also. No need to ask questions that you simply know the reply to.
2. Clearly communicate to tenants what constitutes an urgent situation
Your tenants should know about what is considered a crisis by your company and what isn't. Unfortunately, property managers often give criteria on their call center however, not tenants, producing a large amount of heated conversations. Instead of just giving your tenants lots to call after office hours, let them have the identical set of emergencies that you simply give your call center and tell them what is going to result in an after-hours maintenance visit and after that hold for that office.
Alternatively, you'll be able to scrap the listing of emergencies altogether, instead counting on a matter that asks the tenant whether they feel their situation is urgent as well as attention before regular office hours. The potential for abuse here is obvious, yet it's definitely a much more customer friendly approach.
Ultimately, only you can decide what is best for your needs, but either approach works well if many people are properly educated.
3. Stick to your office hours or prepare your answering services company to field additional varieties of calls
Understandably, having the capacity to forward your lines towards the after-hours service without notice might be too alluring to pass through up. If you're planning to leave any office or stop taking calls in your regular business hours, be sure that the call center is prepared to handle the different varieties of calls that they is going to be receiving. It's damaging to business to force callers in a live answering services company that can't do just about anything for them and has no info on what are you doing inside office. By emailing your live answering services company and telling them what your schedule is so when you will be out, they've got more info to offer callers and be more confident handling your calls. In addition, the scripting and instructions they follow ought to be suitable for form of calls they're taking and what they are telling callers.
As a sample, while it's perfectly acceptable after-hours to inform a caller using a non-urgent concern to call back the subsequent business day, it's ineffective and confusing to become told that at 1 inside afternoon on a Thursday. Call centers can certainly set up variable scripting, so make sure which you ask them to do so. "The office has gone out to lunch currently, but I can ask a person to return your call whenever they get back this afternoon" is a bit more appropriate.
4. Take advantage of the additional services, functionality, and technology that your answering services company has available
Today's sales departments will be more advanced as opposed to simple message taking services that came before them. Sometimes just having a message and delivering it properly is all that's required, however you may need to look in the additional features and technology your answering services company has accessible in order to ascertain if there's more they are often doing in your case. If so, there is a pretty good possibility any additional service will improve the effectiveness of your answering services company and increase the amount of customer service they're able to offer.
Examples of additional services include payment processing, scheduling showings on your behalf, and integrating together with your CRM or database as a way to look-up tenant information easier and automatically create work tickets in your system. Whether these services sound right to suit your needs often rely on your size as well as the investment required to contain the technology configured. When deciding whether to spend the excess money, make sure you factor inside the time it will require you to perform certain tasks, whether or not the changes will reduce or increase your payment (by increasing or reducing call times), and whether having a much more advanced answering services company will allow you to decrease vacancies and increase the relationship you have with existing tenants.
I hope these guidelines you could make your live answering services company experiences more prosperous. If you're working which has a reputable live answering services company and they're doing everything they can on the end, after this list must be everything you should result in the relationship a hit.
If you've got any feedback on utilizing an answering service /live answering services company with your property management operation, I'd love to know what you think. Whether your relationship was successful or perhaps a complete disaster, I always find it advantageous to talk to people and find out more on precisely what is working and what isn't.
Read More: http://www.masonre.com.au/