Condo Media - January 2015 - 26

ANSWERING the CALL
This is not a new development.
Some companies have used answering services (known as call centers
today) for more than two decades.
That they continue to do so despite
the introduction of new communications technologies, such as blast
emails and texts, says much about
the needs these services address and
how well they work for management
companies and their community association clients.
Owners who try to reach a manager after hours are usually calling
because they have an emergency
or think they do. The suggestion
that an owner sufficiently upset
about something to call a manager
at midnight will be happy to reach
an answering service instead seems
counterintuitive, until you consider
the alternative - a recorded voice
inviting the caller to "leave a message after the beep."
AVOIDING VOICEMAIL HELL
The caller leaving a message has
no idea if the manager has received
it or when the manager will reply.
"They're left in voicemail hell until
someone calls back," notes Steve
Dannin, CMCA, AMS, PCAM, owner of Dannin Management Corp. A
text message creates the same uncertainty: Did the message get through,
and when will the manager see and
respond to it?
An answering service provides a
live person to answer the call, take
a message, and deliver it immediately, if necessary, to a manager to
respond.
Most management companies have
similar protocols for handling afterhours calls. If a problem requires
immediate attention, the operator
will contact the manager on duty. If
that manager doesn't respond, the
operator calls the next person on the
emergency list and the next one after
that, until a manager is found.
Ryan McGowan, CMCA, a
portfolio manager with Mercantile

CONDOMEDIA

GETTING THE MOST FROM

AN ANSWERING SERVICE

anagers who have
worked successfully
with answering services offer these suggestions
for organizing and managing
the relationships.

Personalize the handling of calls as much
as possible. Have operators note the name of the
community when they answer,
if they can: "Thank you for calling the XYZ Community Association after-hours hotline."

Operators should
understand what
you consider to be
an "emergency" for
which the manager should
be contacted. But also make
sure they understand that you want callers to be treated courteously and professionally. A good rule-of-thumb for operators: When in doubt about whether
to call the manager, do so. It's better to relay an unnecessary call than to block
an essential one.

3
4

Limit the amount of information operators can provide and the
questions they can answer. Operators aren't professional managers
and shouldn't be expected to make judgment calls, even if the judgments seem obvious.

Make sure the service has sufficient capacity (equipment and
personnel) and adequate back-up systems in place to ensure consistent coverage. But be prepared for glitches. Even the best services
slip sometimes. Equipment fails, systems are overwhelmed with calls, the
operators on one shift fail to relay essential information to the operators replacing them. Steve Dannin, CMCA, AMS, PCAM, of Dannin Management Corp., has
a back-up relay system in place. If the answering service doesn't pick up and a
caller leaves a message, the system dials out and delivers the message automatically to the manager on call. However, some problems are unavoidable. Dannin's
service once kept him on hold for more than 15 minutes during a blizzard.

Educate owners and board members about the role the answering service plays. Explain that the goal is to expedite emergency calls
not to block them. There's a bit of a learning curve when an answering
service is first introduced, says Ryan McGowan, CMCA, of Mercantile
Property Management Corp. "Owners and board members want instant access to managers, but they have to understand they can't always have it."

Condo Media - January 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Condo Media - January 2015