Whiteboard Wednesday – Callmax for Resident Communications
On this week’s episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, Leanne Bradley continues her discussion of the MRI Callmax Automated Communications Suite with a focus on resident communication. MRI Callmax enables property managers to effortlessly communicate with residents via its automated, intelligent answering service, web chat, text chat, and outbound call recording. Finally, residents can use Callmax to initiate maintenance requests with full tracking of the page outs and communications.
Video Transcription
Leanne Bradley: Hi everyone. I’m Leanne Bradley. I’m the product owner for CallMaX. On today’s episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, I’m going to talk to you about how you can use CallMaX to interact with your residents. Last week we talked about how you can use CallMaX to interact with prospects. There’s definitely a lot of overlap, but there’s also a lot that you can get out of CallMaX for residents too. The first group we’re going to talk about is how your residents can interact with the property office.
The first way is using answer. While they’re probably not looking for leasing information, they might still want to leave a message for you while you’re not in the office. CallMaX will record their messages. They can leave a message for you, you can go through when you get into the property office. You can get notifications when the message has been left. You can follow-up with the resident once you’re available.
The next is web chat. You can embed a web chat, plug it directly onto your property website. When residents are looking for information from you, they want to interact with your leasing agent real-time, but they don’t have time to call or you’re not available. They can use web chat. This is also automatically built in to Resident Connect for those of you who use the residential connect suite.
The next way that they can interact with you is using text chat. They can text anything to your property-specific text number, and you’ll get a notification right in CallMaX. You can also sign up to get notifications to your phone or to your email, so you’ll never miss a text from a resident. You can interact in real-time and they don’t have to be sitting at their computer, waiting for you to respond. They can be on the go and they can respond as they’re able.
Finally, residents can use CallMaX to initiate a maintenance request. For those of you who have courtesy officers, CallMaX interacts the same way with courtesy officers and maintenance. If you have an issue that a resident needs help for, either an emergency maintenance request or an emergency courtesy request after-hours, CallMaX will initiate all of that. We’ll talk more about the page out process in next week’s episode of Whiteboard Wednesday.
You can also reach out to your residents, as opposed to having them reach out to you, with bulletins and surveys. With bulletins you can send an email, a text, or a phone message to all of your residents, some of your residents, it’s really up to you. You can send an emergency, “Our water shut off,” or you can send an email saying, “We’re having a party next week.” With surveys, you can also get feedback from your residents. You can say, “We’re thinking about having a party next week. What day would be better for you?” You can get feedback on if there is a need for extended office hours. You can really interact and engage your residents and make them feel like they’re part of their community.
For those situations where maybe you’re you’re looking at perhaps having a contentious conversation that you want on record, we have phone call recording. This will automatically record the entire conversation that you have between yourself and whomever it is that you need a record of a conversation. Maybe you’re calling somebody about a legal matter, maybe you’re calling somebody who is six months late on rent, and you just want to have a record of how that conversation went.
CallMaX also offers package tracking. With package tracking, when you receive packages at the property office, instead of what you probably are currently doing, which is writing out slips, delivering them to residents, keeping up with where things are located, who has picked up a package, how long has a package been here, all of that is managed automatically. Residents will get a notification based on their preferred method of communication; phone, text, or email, saying that they have a package to pick up. You can also set up automatic notifications, so if they miss a package, they don’t realize that they have missed a text message or their email gets get stuck, CallMaX will automatically send a notification on your schedule to remind them to come pick up the package, to get things out more quickly.
Finally, the page outs. Like I said, I’ll talk more next week about managing and streamlining your page out process. With the CallMaX page out process, residents calling the property manager or your maintenance staff gets notified that there is an emergency that they need to address. They can reach out to the resident, engage with them and get things handled as quickly as possible. You don’t have to worry about your maintenance staff not getting a notification or not realizing until the next day when somebody comes into the office that a message has been left that should have been addressed. All of this is going to increase your resident satisfaction. That’s all for this episode of Whiteboard Wednesday. Thank you.