What Property Management Companies Need in a Call Center

The work of a property manager is ongoing, be it a commercial or rental property.

You’re the first person tenants, landlords, and property owners call when they need support. Several inquiries flow your way when you’re on the last requested action. It’s constant work — sometimes even outside office hours.

However, not all maintenance calls or inquiries you receive are equally critical. AI agents or self-service options can quickly handle some simple FAQs. This way, property managers get more time to focus on critical inquiries, making their lives much easier. Nextiva’s contact center platform has everything a real estate management business needs to streamline call center operations.

Let’s dig into these operations in detail and look at how a contact center platform makes them more efficient.

Why Property Managers Need a Call Center Platform

Here are a few common challenges in a property manager’s day-to-day role:

High call volume

Property managers receive several inbound calls in a day. Every issue tenants face or every struggle with neighbors reaches the property manager’s ears. At the same time, calls from prospective tenants can further overwhelm them. While they’re dealing with unanticipated events, other routine tasks like collecting rent or supervising garbage removal cannot suffer.

A property management call center platform helps property managers stay on top of everything and maintain peace of mind when dealing with calls, paperwork, routine activities, and everything going wrong in a building. A virtual receptionist handles routine inquiries while offering call routing functionality to connect callers with a trusted service representative.

Missed calls and delayed responses

When you’re constantly fighting fires, some calls and follow-ups are expected to be missed. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s a lost opportunity or a chance to satisfy the community that relies on you.

Call center software lets you handle such situations. It picks up the call and lets tenants or callers schedule a suitable time for a callback. Call center software also helps in scheduling appointments as expected. This keeps your community satisfied while you have a more proactive approach to managing telephonic conversations in your day.

Inconsistent communication

A property management answering service deals with various issues in a residential property. Some issues get resolved immediately while some take days and a series of follow-ups. It can get chaotic when such issues run parallel, especially when you’re expected to answer calls internally and externally. Externally, a property manager is responsible for outsourcing some jobs to vendors and maintenance staff, such as maintaining elevators or overseeing sanitation and hygiene.

All of this makes things difficult for property managers, preventing them from making the required follow-ups on time. An automated call center for property management facilitates centralized communication. This helps keep everyone aware of progress and delivers context to back up every property manager’s conversation.

The system sends follow-up reminders and updates to convey new developments to the community proactively.

Inefficient maintenance coordination

Delayed maintenance doesn’t contribute to frustration, but delayed maintenance updates do. Tenants and property owners expect a real estate manager to keep them posted about issues or customer service calls they have raised. Even if they’re working on the maintenance issue, failure to update the tenants or the owner will result in unnecessary tension.

A call center system for real estate managers integrates with CRM software, helping managers offer timely updates. This keeps occupants aware of what’s going on and gives them a reason to be more patient.

Limited after-hours support

Although property managers address critical issues outside working hours, offering after-hours support for FAQs or routine service requests can be tricky. An IVR system can easily automate such issues. This lets the property manager handle after-hours emergency calls for maintenance requests, ensuring tenant satisfaction.

The call center platform acts as a sieve that filters non-critical issues from those that need urgent support from the property manager. The platform facilitates a 24-hour answering service to address, route, and resolve queries from tenants, making them happier and more satisfied with the building management. 

Scalability challenges

A property manager generally manages several properties in their portfolio, which means inquiries keep coming in from all over. To manage this scale of requests, you need a proactive rather than reactive approach.

The call center platform lets you grow your properties’ portfolio while you race to be at the top of everything in the buildings you manage. The platform comes with various features that streamline your workflow and automate a large part of it. Let’s look at what these features are.

Noteworthy Call Center Features for Property Management Firms

Property management call center services are the go-to entity for all things related to leasing, renting, dispute resolution, maintenance, and repairs for occupants. Whenever there is a breach of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions or a new need for urgent repair work, people immediately notify property managers. In situations where property management professionals are flooded with such alerts, a call center solution brings relief.

Here are a few notable call center features that facilitate this relief: 

Omnichannel communication

Property management firms communicate via email, social media, SMS, phone, voicemail, or other instant communication channels. The choice of channel depends on the activity they’re engaged in. For example, emails and phone calls are preferred for communication regarding a lease agreement. When listing a property on a multiple listing service, property managers communicate over chat or through phone numbers.

A cloud communication platform for real estate brings all these channels into one place, making it easier to manage and follow up. This allows real estate firms to stay on top of communication, which is a gigantic part of their role. The call center solution keeps the context alive by unifying several communication channels on one screen. It delivers a good experience to tenants, owners, or buyers’ agents conversing with the property management firm for various interests.

Call routing and prioritization

You have different teams to supervise diverse activities involved in managing a property. There are leasing, resident relations, marketing, maintenance, operations, legal, and compliance departments, keeping the management aspect in sync. Suppose you get a call from a tenant requesting repair work in their apartment. Manually, you can always route them to the right department, but it doesn’t scale well.

When inquiries increase, operations become overstressed until they collapse. A call center solution offers IVR and auto-attendant features that listen to the caller’s needs. Based on the requirements, the calls are routed directly to the department specializing in that request.

The routing can happen in multiple ways, creating different routing types:

• List-based routing: Sequential routing follows a particular order of the list of agents while routing calls.
• Round-robin routing: This type of routing evenly distributes calls among available agents. 
• Least occupied/idle routing: This routes a call to a real estate agent with the lowest talk time or least number of calls answered.
• Time-based routing: This happens based on an agent’s business hours and time zone.
• Skill-based routing: This routing is based on the skill set in which an agent specializes. This is most commonly used in automatic call distribution.
• AI-assisted routing: This is intelligent routing and assigns the best agent to a call using several parameters.
• Relationship-based routing: This is for privileged callers who have a dedicated property manager to help with their issues and confusion. The calls are automatically directed toward the dedicated agent.

These solutions also come with prioritization capabilities based on the urgency of the request or if something is critical. It allows managers to focus on critical issues and resolve them.

CRM integration

Call center solutions integrate with popular CRM software, making it easier to interact and resolve issues faster. The CRM software helps the property manager skip common questions a tenant or landlord may have on the call.

The CRM automatically fills in the gaps with tenant and property records for a unified view of interactions. It makes it easier to refer to and reflect on previous conversations.

Maintenance management

Communication software aggregates maintenance requests coming in through different channels in one view. This makes scheduling the required maintenance activity easier while promptly updating the client.

You can easily automate these updates using workflows. The requesting resident or owner will get an update whenever a job is picked up. Most importantly, the software solutions allow you to customize workflows based on your requirements.

Overall, it allows property managers to ensure these requests never enter the side burner and are scheduled when they arrive.

Call analytics and reporting

When reaching the property management team, call insights allow you to examine the response time and resolution rate for present inquiries. This analysis is critical as it will enable you to identify areas for improvement and actively coach your team in call handling while offering excellent customer service.

A call center platform presents different forms of analytics and reporting measuring the performance of agents and the overall quality of interaction. Here’s an overview of the type of reporting you get when you onboard a call center solution for your property management team:

AI-powered tools

Modern call center platforms like Nextiva offer AI capabilities in their solution. They support property management firms with quick FAQ responses and a chatbot. AI also helps with predictive analytics, which helps forecast call volumes in the future and make required staffing arrangements.

Artificial intelligence supports intelligent call routing and distribution by assigning calls to the most relevant agent at a given time. Here’s how intelligent call routing works:

Best Practices for Using a Call Center Platform

There are a few best practices you can follow to make the most of your call center platform:

Perform regular staff training

Use analytics supplied by the call center platform to offer coaching and training to agents on your team. To understand the quality of an agent’s support, you can measure their resolved issues over time, average speed of answer, or first contact resolution. Insights from these metrics will help to make strategic refinements in the process.

Furthermore, interactions across channels on the platform should be monitored to guide how to better deal with tenants’ or owners’ issues. You can pick up issues assigned to different agents to conduct this assessment. This will help you train the whole team, making their future interactions more effective.

Set clear response guidelines

Define service level agreements (SLAs) for responding to calls and messages to ensure consistency across the team. Prepare SLAs so they’re respectful toward residents as well as your team.

Set clear guidelines for addressing incoming inquiries in hours outside your working schedule. Define when to make exceptions while taking up inquiries outside working hours.

The IVR will take up inquiries outside working hours and help residents schedule calls. However, guidelines should be set on whom to contact and how to do so when residents need immediate attention from real people, especially for maintenance emergencies. This will set clear expectations for residents and your team to ensure a smooth experience for everyone. 

An IVR will automate most routine inquiries and route crucial issues to live agents. Simply define its rules properly to ensure the routing is relevant and as expected in a given situation.

Personalize tenant interactions

When tenants get proactive support from property managers based on previous interactions, it offers them a satisfactory experience. For example, when a tenant’s issue is resolved, sharing a personalized thank-you note for bringing up the issue shows you genuinely care about the community. 

This personalization makes you look less robotic, even when sending notices or updates to all. Although personalization is automated by integrating CRM data, it adds a personal touch to the message and encourages residents to perform the actions you expect from them. 

Offer multilingual support

English isn’t everybody’s first language. Some homeowners might struggle to explain the issue if they face language barriers. Make sure these barriers don’t prevent you from fulfilling your role. This can be achieved by having multilingual people on the support team.

You can also offer multilingual support on channels that support multiple languages and facilitate easy translations.

Why Nextiva Is the Top Option for Property Managers

Nextiva simplifies communication management by unifying all channels like video conferencing, phone, email, SMS, or chat into one platform. This helps bring several conversations and their context into one place to keep agents informed, especially when you’re managing properties at scale.

The system links call data with tenant profiles, enabling personalized interaction driven by context. You get advanced insights related to agent performance to help improve their problem-solving skills. This goes a long way, especially when you’re supporting a large community of homeowners. Overall, Nextiva is easy to use and implement for property management teams of all sizes.