Life Bridge Management Invests in Customer Service

A Case for a 24/7 Call Center for Life Bridge Properties

Exactly one year ago, Life Bridge Management (LBM) was in the process of taking over the management of nine Life Bridge properties in Colorado. The previous management company did not have an established interactive website or call center for residents or future residents.

There was no online rental availability or access to online applications for future residents. Web traffic is the number one source of traffic for all Life Bridge properties.

Phone traffic from current and prospective residents is the second most common source of traffic for these properties.?Most of these calls occur when the property is closed on the weekends.

Current residents living at these nine properties had no way of submitting work orders/maintenance requests online or accessing their payment information via an app. The largest volume of work orders is submitted when residents are at home. Typically, this is after 5 pm during the week and on weekends. With no access to an online platform, these residents needed to call the office to submit their work orders.

When LBM took over the nine properties in July of 2022, only one property was set up with an answering service on RingCentral.com. This allowed residents to leave messages after hours, and the office would return these calls either the next day or on Monday after a weekend. The other eight properties were not as fortunate. These properties had hard-wired phones in the offices that went to voicemail if the phones were not answered. In July 2022, more than half of these properties had full voice mailboxes, which would not allow new messages to be recorded.

Over the last year, LBM has rolled out a highly advanced call center and websites to meet the needs of Life Bridge residents. Each property now has its own website, which is linked to the online property management software. The websites show which apartments are available, and most of them illustrate where the specific unit is located in the community using an interactive site map. Prospective residents can click on the exact unit they want to lease and complete an application to reserve the unit without even visiting the property or talking to the onsite staff.

Improving resident calls and communication were extremely important when Life Bridge took over in July 2022.?Immediately, all the properties were connected to a 24/7 call center, which allowed residents to talk directly with a live person. The initial call center was run by RealPage; it was a large call center serving multiple clients besides Life Bridge. While it was an improvement, the call center agents did not know the specifics of the Life Bridge properties and were not able to learn about our properties as they served hundreds of other properties. Our onsite staff could not communicate back and forth or follow up with the agent who took the resident’s call.

In the spring of 2023, LBM purchased call center software (Landis) and launched our own call center with our LBM team in the Philippines. We launched this service in the Microsoft Teams environment, so the call center team could message our onsite team directly. Life Bridge call center team takes calls 24/7/365.?If a call center team member is on another call, additional incoming calls go to voicemail.?All voicemails are transcribed into a Teams message and immediately shared with both the onsite team and the team in the Philippines. The team in the Philippines returns these calls as soon as possible. All calls are recorded in the call center and scored by our team.

Many of our team members in the Philippines have prior experience with our property management software (RealPage). The team can enter work orders or assist with leasing information. We have ongoing training with our team to better equip them to assist residents on calls and to assist the onsite staff with property management software questions or fixes.

The call center team is knowledgeable about all Life Bridge properties, which is very important when we are operating several properties in the same area (Kansas City, Boise, Colorado Springs, and Eagle). If the property being called does not have any apartments available in the unit type or timeframe requested, another Life Bridge property in the area may be a great fit. This added feature helps all Life Bridge properties.

The area where the call center and the improved website intersect is when work orders are submitted to the call center. If they are not emergency work orders, the call center agent helps the resident set up the RealPage app on their phone. This not only allows residents to enter their own work orders, with pictures for reference, but also allows them to pay their rent online and communicate with the onsite staff.?

Culture is very hard to develop when a property management company is in many locations and most employees will never meet each other in person. Using the Microsoft Teams environment so that the property staff, corporate team, and call center team can chat in real time about work orders and leasing activity assists in building a collaborative culture. Employees can ask for help in real time, and employees are able to encourage each other even though they might be located on the other side of the world. For a maintenance technician who must get up in the middle of the night to do an emergency work order, knowing that someone in the Philippines is there 24/7 if they need additional help or encouragement is essential.

LBM will continue to invest in people and technology to improve customer service at Life Bridge properties.

Example 1: Below is a phone call that came into the call center after business hours (6:49 pm). The call center agent (Cherry Montes) tagged the property manager (Jorge Guevara) about the resident’s call. Tagging the manager sent an alert to the manager’s phone.

Note the activity of the call: The resident wanted to pay rent, and the call center agent was able to help the resident set up their resident portal on their phone. Now this resident has access to paying rent and submitting work orders.

Example 2: On a Saturday night at 8:45 pm, the call center took a call from a resident about a loud breaker pop in the resident’s unit. Because the call center agent (Kathlyn Pepito) knew that the maintenance technician (Onesimo Gilpin) was already on the property attending to another work order, she asked him to stop by.?

The thread also shows members of the team encouraging the maintenance technician who was working on a Saturday night; the work order was completed at almost 11 pm.?

Call Center Data:?To better assist our properties and our residents, the data from Landis Technology based around calls to the properties is invaluable.?This information assists us with staffing.?We are also able to see leasing and maintenance activity for each property per day.?