Call Center for Tenant Maintenance & Emergency Calls

[Dan Bosak]

I am looking into some options to handle tenant maintenance and especially emergency calls.  I have just over 100 units now and want to create a reliable and scale-able system for these calls (and emails and texts).  

2 Options I am considering: 

1. Hire a Reduced service property manager who would be able to get the calls and send out their own crews as needed.  This is probably the easiest solution but since we don't control it directly, may not be the best to integrate with our system. 

2. Hiring a call center to: receive the calls, determine the issue, decide if it's an emergency or if it can wait until normal business hours, coordinate appropriate contractor (based on my list of approved contractors) and followup with the tenant. 

Ideally, I'd like them to be able to log the info into our current property management system so that we have records of what was done.  

Pat live might be an option but they do not call out, so they will not be as effective with coordinating the repairs,will not followup with either the contractor or tenant to make sure it was handled properly and certainly wont work with our system.  Likewise, my currently property management system is set up to receive texts and emails (which is simpler for a lot of tenants) so I want to keep that as an option.    

Has anyone tried the call center route and if so any suggestions or issues I should look out for?

Any other suggestions for how best to handle the calls?

[Phil Earley]

We use Nighttenders for after hour coverage so that we don't completely burn out our maintenance department and to improve on tenant/customer service.    The tenants get a live person on the phone who will initiate the emergency call to our vendors and/or let them know the account has been noted and that our staff will contact them in the morning for the non-emergency items.   We have found this to be more cost effective than implementing the appfolio call center for now.