Skeleton crews, also called skeleton staffs, refer to your work staff where a large number of people are not available despite normal to high work volumes, thus your team only has “bare bones” or bare minimum manpower to serve customers.
More About Skeleton Crews For Customer Support
You should expect to have skeleton crews during the holiday season where employees are expected to take off from work. This is very common for companies as customer support can be overloaded with inquiries following the holidays. This is especially true when gift recipients have problems with new products. They can also occur in periods during the summer time, in which employees will schedule their summer vacations.
Around these times, the employers expect the employees that are still at work to do more with less, but that is easier said than done. Without the adequate amount of staff at work, calls can be missed that could otherwise lead to an addition or retention in your customer base. People who are untrained with taking calls can also try to assume this role, only for the experience to be underwhelming for the person on the other line. Both these shortcomings can be problems for your business, even if you only expect to have a skeleton crew for a week or two at a time. Those missed opportunities to impress and satisfy customers could affect your bottom line.
How An Answering Service Can Help Skeleton Crews
You can hire the best property management answering services during times in which you are short on staff. With an answering service, you get additional help whenever an urgent matter from a caller shows itself, so that a call representative will be able to answer when your staff cannot.
Many answering services offer 24/7 coverage, so any time you are not available, even late at night or on weekends, calls to your business will be answered and concerns will be addressed without your supervision. If you haven’t offered 24/7 customer support, you could now be able to provide it to customers in order to be competitive with other companies who are trying to win over the same clients.
Usually, answering services tailor themselves to your business in particular. For instance, if you run a property management firm, the call representatives from tis answering services will be trained to follow a unique script to answer questions about renting property, requesting maintenance for problems such as no electricity or water, and more. The representative will then relay this information back to you or other responsible parties so that you are able to resolve the caller’s problems.
For that matter, the rest of your staff can work easier without worrying about doing the jobs of multiple people. This allows employees to focus on their tasks at hand and won’t need to answer calls if they are not comfortable doing so.
To top it off, answering services work well with your budget. You might seem like you have to pay for multiple employees, but you are actually paying for a service, so you only have to pay one flat fee a month. What’s more, you can get started with a 14-day trial without a credit card required so you can find out if an answering service is right for you.
Summary
Companies often face a shortage of employees at certain times of year, leading to problems that might make a big difference. Property management answering services can help in this regard, allowing additional customer support for staff for just one monthly fee.