Telephone Answering Services Are Necessary for Property Management Offices

If you run a property management office, employing a telephone answering service will provide a direct 24/7 line for your tenants and any prospective tenants to call when they need assistance. Your tenants count on you being available 24 hours a day in case an emergency arises. If you are not there to answer the call, in addition to ruining your reputation as a property management company, you may also be liable for any personal damage caused by a poor answering service, voicemail, or your company just not being able to answer and respond to the call. For many reasons, answering service are a necessary part of any successful business plan for property management, apartment, and rental offices.

You Have Unique Needs & Need A Unique Service
Whenever the subject of "outsourcing" is breached, the first thought is always how can any company match my protocols or adapt to my individual needs. When you deal with any reputable telephone answering service as an outsource solution, accounts are always customized from how the operators answer the phones to what constitutes an emergency and how those calls should be handled. You seldom need to adjust your own internal procedures to bend to the will of the service itself as most services are able to accommodate your needs into their own framework. From programming all of your properties into the call center software to detailed routing tables for your on call, answering services can act as your dispatch office, your sales office, and a virtual receptionist all in one. And, on the sales side if you are experiencing spikes in call volume because of any promotions or your lease period is up, a service can benefit by acting as your front end sales staff and gather any sales information you need from your callers.

Believe it or not, each telephone call you receive and how that call is handled is a direct reflection on your business. To keep your image shining, the benefits of using answering services include:

24 Hour Receptionist Support: Your outsource staff picks up your telephone and acts as if they were the front office of your property management office. These agents can dispatch your calls, take messages, and help close sales around the clock.
Custom Inbound Call Process Handling: Services will process your telephone calls and follow your protocols depending on the nature of the calls. For instance, if you want to hold routine calls for your morning report and page your on-call with emergency telephone calls, the answering service can usually set it up so the operators always know what to do & who to contact.
Quick Message Delivery: In the property management business, emergency calls are just as important as they would be for a doctors office. Using a service means voicemail will not be a liability for emergency call management. All emergency calls are treated the same as they would be for those inbound calls in the medical profession where the information can be quickly sent via text, email, fax, pager, voicemail, or call patch / operator message relay.
Outsourcing sometimes has an "impersonal" stigma and you may be concerned your property management will not be represented the same compared to how calls would be handled in your own office. When you work with a reputable answering service, calls are handled as efficiently as they would be in your own office. In the property management industry, professionalism and urgency on the telephone is a necessity so it is a viable concern but many times unwarranted if you choose a good service.

Choose A Full Service Call Center
With so much competition in the answering service industry, there are more and more call centers that are offering an amazing suite of services to help property management offices. If you have made the decision to outsource for 24 hour coverage, it behooves you to outsource to a service that is able to manage responsibilities beyond telephone answering and message dispatch. Among the most helpful services that will have the most benefit to offices like yours are:

Appointment Setting: The ability of the call center staff to log into your web based calendar to setup appointments with any potential residents as well as appointments with any service personnel.
Email Response: Operators fetch and respond to your emails. They act as if we were your own front office receptionist.
Industry Experience: Make sure your service has experience and past customers in all real estate management industries including apartment complexes, home owners associations, condominiums, national property management associations, community neighborhoods, and others.
Property Management Software Integration: If you have your property management software web accessible, see if the call center operators can log on to your software or if they have experience with it. Many of the popular formats that answering services are beginning to integrate into their own platforms are Yardi, Intuit Rental Property Manager, Buildium, ATM Direct, and Land Lord Max.
The bottom line is missed telephone calls are missed opportunities in any industry. While answering services are so crucial to the property management industry is because of the sales side but also because of the liability side. If it is a missed opportunity to fill a vacancy or to aid a tenant who is having a problem, each call counts. If you don't already have an to manage your after hours calls, employing one can only serve to benefit your company.