“You have to monitor indifference at the sites,” Van Tilburg says. “We still want our people answering phones if they’re available. If they don’t, the call center costs can go up [as] the volume of calls increases.”
AvalonBay thinks it has found a way to cut costs with its call center. Since phone representatives now inform customers about its properties, the company has scaled back on its printed media. “We didn’t approach it as a service tool, but as another media cost; the monthly cost is essentially the same as a print guide insertion,” Thompson says.
THE FINAL SCORE Still, even if a call center can’t help an apartment firm cut costs, it can provide a huge boon. Why? People calling or emailing a property will get someone’s undivided attention. “We felt [by going to a call center] we could pick up missed calls and calls [that] properties were not returning,” Van Tilburg says. “The opportunity to respond to after-hours calls was also intriguing to us.”
But shouldn’t the industry be doing a better job of getting customers off their phone or computer and onto the site? The problem isn’t that the leasing folks are lazy or incompetent. They simply have too much on their plates. “The call center enables our apartment communities to focus on their main priorities,” says Terry Bate, vice president for contact center operations at AIMCO, an apartment owner and manager based in Greenwood Village, Colo. “The phone is a conflicting priority with everything coming at the communities.”
Meanwhile, the call center’s only priority is converting phone calls or emails into sales. “They can dedicate the time for it,” Kemmer says. “They’re doing that one task over and over again. The call centers grade them on that. If they want job security, they have to do that right.”
According to most apartment companies, call centers aren’t just doing their job right—they’re making a big impact on the bottom line. “We’re getting thousands of leads and prospects,” Van Tilburg of Archon says. “In addition to phone calls, our initial e-mail inquiries go through the call center. For those prospects that first get in touch through the call center, we have an average closing ratio of 54 percent YTD in 2007, which is consistent with performance in 2006.”
The company is not alone. Like the rest of the industry, AvalonBay traditionally converted about 10 percent to 15 percent of its calls to in-person traffic. With its call center, the REIT now gets 35 percent to 40 percent of callers on-site. That’s a huge improvement. “We, like the rest of the industry, were not effectively converting calls and e-mail leads into site visits,” Thompson says.
With people like Joan answering the phone, it looks like that will soon change.
Les Shaver is senior editor at BIG BUILDER, a sister publication to MFE.
MFE RESIDENT FILES: Need to Know
Tell customers that off-site reps are part of the team.
Offsite call centers can help bring prospects to a leasing office. But once they’re in the door, these prospective residents sometimes want to meet the person they spoke with on the phone. Explaining why they aren’t there can be tricky for some on-site employees.
Justin Richardson, property manager for Dunwoody Place in Sandy Springs, Ga., has a basic explanation for customers asking this question. “We tell them they’re part of our larger team that’s based offsite,” he says.
Making it appear as if the call center is part of the on-site operation is actually important to many apartment companies. “[The call center] tries to keep it hidden,” says Mark W. Van Tilburg, director of operations for Archon Residential Management, an apartment owner and manager in Irving, Texas. “We don’t make it obvious until it’s necessary. If it never becomes necessary, you don’t tell them.”
And usually, it doesn’t come up. “The only time it becomes an issue is when the caller wants the person to do something, be there when they get there or [otherwise] pins them into a corner,” Van Tilburg says. “Then the call center agent says they’re an off-site leasing professional.”
