Large apartment property organizations have IT departments that small apartment owners can only dream of. Recently, I wrote about 10 steps to slow down the apartment turnover “revolving door” through exceptional customer service. Improving customer service requires being aware of customer service issues.
If you use an office answering service that can email voice messages in the MP3 format and have an iPhone, Blackberry or Android cell phone, here’s a way that property management can directly track customer service requests, as they are called in. Using this system, I can view a text transcript of each customer service call, within about 10 minutes of the call being made. Then, I can discuss selected customer service calls with the maintenance staff before they begin their work day’s tasks or throughout the day. Not only does this allow me to keep mental track of anomalous service issues, but it also affords me the opportunity to discuss dealing with specific customer service issues in a quick training mode. You can set up your own customer service monitoring system with these tools:
Google Voice, which is in a limited beta service requiring an invite, also provides a free text transcription service. However, the quality of the text transcriptions are woefully substandard and not practically useful for a business purpose. The texts generated by the unlimited YouMail transcription service is of such a high quality that you may find yourself rarely listening to voice messages, but simply scanning voice message texts, saving yourself a significant amount of time.
What about allowing customers to email service requests? This method is becoming more and more common. We don’t use an email or text messaging approach to customer service requests because they are less reliable methods based on our service expectations and need for redundancies. Notification of service phone calls to our 24/7/365 full maintenance is sent to a digital pager, and are subject to a calling tree in the event that a phone call to retrieve the voice message is not quickly returned by a maintenance staff person to the system. The calling tree reduces the chances that a service request gets missed. This method gives us better assurance than an email or text messaging system that a customer service request gets responded to in a timely manner.
We perform about 2,500 customer service requests a year, many the result of our proactive effort to ask our customers for service requests when we encounter them. Our expectation for our customers is to provide same day service response, often within minutes or an hour, unless the service issue requires coordinating with a contractor or a part that is not immediately available. Since I can monitor the customer service calls using this system, I can also better understand service issues that are not resolved in a timely manner.
Rick Hevier
Richard Hevier
Richard S. Hevier
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