Running a large apartment complex is no simple matter, ask any apartment manager. During the day, a great deal of work is done arranging for routine and emergency maintenance in one of the units or around the grounds. Other areas include finding new tenants, collecting rent and writing reports for the complex owners.
Although some of these tasks disappear at the end of the business day, there are those that don’t. The issues that come up at any time of the day or night have to be attended to, in some cases, urgently. It is not unknown for a pipe to burst in the middle of the night. Providing telephone access to the manager means that employees who are trained to handle the situation can be dispatched when needed and where needed. Although the management office is not open around the clock, the phone never sleeps.
In the early days of answering services, the focus was mainly on taking messages for the client after hours. This apartment answering service would take calls and establish their roles as simply agents with limitations. Often, these services ended up overusing time for the callers and money for the owners. The bulk of the work was asking the tenant to call the office in the morning.
It is very different today. An apartment answering service has become very advanced, and is now designed to exactly fit the business needs of the client which allows the apartment to put itself in a much better light. The key is to make sure that true maintenance emergencies always reaches an on-call tech immediately, and that less urgent calls and maintenance requests are held until the morning. It’s also important that the onsite manager knows about all issues after hours, you also have to make sure the prospective residents immediately get the info they need about the property they are inquiring about.
Answering services vary in professionalism and price. A basic service where the operators do little more than answer the phone costs very little. For not much more in the way of monthly cost, it is now possible to engage the services of an answering service that has agents who are aware of the needs of the business; these services can quickly customize a plan for the client. The payment methods vary, from charging a set-up fee as well as a per call charge to assessing a simple monthly fee.
