The Highest Quality Telephone Answering Service in the United States

Centratel

Telephone Answering Service

A flooded room needs immediate intervention to be asked from a Property Management Answering Service

Water damage can put a real damper on your bottom line

November 29, 2017
IN Property Management
BY Jesse Merickel

As any wise property manager will tell you: when it comes to plumbing leaks, time is of the essence. A leaky toilet or backed up plumbing system can cost you thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars.

If left unfixed, a mild toilet leak can waste up to 6,000 gallons of water each month, adding an extra $1,000 to your annual bill.

A backed-up toilet, however, has the potential to cause much more serious damage. Within a matter of hours, a toilet overflow can ruin your floors and cut your income in half. Instead of collecting rent, you’ll be moving tenants, hiring contractors and working around-the-clock to get your properties back in living condition. If a toilet on your second floor leaks, you’ll have to replace ceilings. If the leak results in mold, you could be dealing with the problem for years.

Unfortunately, toilet overflows and other potential disasters often occur during the property manager’s off-hours. After all, you can only be present on the property for so many hours each week. How can you deal with property issues when you’re not in the vicinity?

In order to prevent a fixable problem like a toilet leak from turning into a catastrophe, many property managers have turned to answering services like Centratel. A good answering service is the antidote to any property management emergency, enabling your tenants to report the emergency in real time. Centratel answering service will contact you or your on-call personnel to relay the message as soon as the event is reported.

No property manager wants their tenants contacting them at all hours of the night for every little issue that might come up. At the same time, no one wants to deal with the potential costs of a leak. Answering services are an efficient and affordable way for you to deal with backed-up toilets, flooding, and other issues that can easily become costly problems.

Centratel is an elite national telephone answering service located in Bend, Oregon. Centratel’s Property Management Answering Service assists hundreds of property managers handle overflow calls, capture leads and forward calls. Whether you’re managing rental homes, renting out apartments, managing an HOA or senior living facility, a property management answering service is an ideal solution.

Price Quote Request

To Apply for Service, fill out the form below. If we receive your request on a non-holiday weekday between the hours of 7am and 4pm PST (10:00am and 7:00pm EST), a member of our sales team will do their best to call you back on the same day. As an alternative to filling out the form, you can call our sales line direct at 1-800-664-7159, or email us at sales@centratel.com.

By clicking on the sections below you will find information regarding prerequisites for service, Centatel’s service guarantee, details of the 30 day free trial, pricing and comparison shopping considerations, determination of cost, an outline of the “human factor” element, the Terms of Service Agreement…and a gift for you.

PREREQUISITES FOR SERVICE

We are sorry but we do not take applications for new or “start-up” companies. Note also that Centratel does not accept all applications for service. We serve businesses or professional offices that have been in operation over two years, and owners/managers who are clearly searching for quality rather than simply price-shopping. Also, in order to keep our service quality high, we only accept new accounts that fit into one of our ten specialty categories. Note that our average client tenure is approximately seven years.

NO CONTRACT, TERMS OF SERVICE, FIRST 30 DAYS ARE FREE

We do not ask for a term contract for service because we believe our clients should have the opportunity to evaluate their arrangement real-time, without constraint. Our Terms of Service are simple and straight-forward. Accounts are billed on a month-to-month basis. Your first month is free, with no obligation.

MONTHLY OR 28-DAY BILLING CYCLE?

Important! At Centratel, we use a “monthly” billing cycle in which invoices are compiled from the first day of the month to the last day of the month. When soliciting quotes from other telephone answering services, be sure to ask if the base rate charges are monthly, or if they are billed on a “28 day billing cycle.” 28 day billing cycles have become popular with many answering services as some customers, without careful consideration, assume 28 days is equal to a month. Customers billed on a 28 day cycle actually receive 13 billings per year and therefore overall costs for service are higher.

COMPARING ANSWERING SERVICE PRICING

Apples and oranges: Comparing pricing from one answering service to another is difficult. There isn’t an industry standard for billing, and each service has its own formula. Also, some services charge by “time,” others by “work units,” while others might combine the two. At Centratel, we charge for the work we do, not by the time we spend. This is important: At no risk to you, the 30 day free trial will not only give you an idea of the quality of our service, but will provide you an accurate estimate of ongoing monthly costs.

ESTIMATING YOUR COST

In order to provide you with an initial cost estimate for service, it’s helpful for you to provide us the average number of calls you expect Centratel to process in a monthly period, as well as a description of how your current service delivers messages to your office and/or your on-call staff. Please consider that even with this information it will still be impossible to provide you an exact figure. We won’t have a truly accurate estimate of your account’s monthly costs until we have handled your call traffic for at least one month (remember, this first trial month is free, with no obligation).

PRICING

Starting as low as $75 per month, our pricing is affordable and competitive.

Our most popular plan includes 120 calls per month for just $295.

Yes, that’s based on the total number of calls per month, not on minutes or seconds like some other answering services that can drag out calls to increase cost.

MORE REGARDING THE 30-DAY FREE TRIAL OF SERVICE

Remember, the first month of service is at no charge. Whether you decide to stay with Centratel or not, you will NOT pay for this first month of service. During their free trial, many of our new accounts choose to continue to keep their current answering service account active, simply forwarding their phones to us for the duration of the trial. In the unlikely event that Centratel service is not satisfactory, returning to the original answering service is easy, just a matter of forwarding the phone lines back to the original service again. If the new account chooses to switch permanently to Centratel, after one month of paid service, we will credit the monthly base charge billed from the former answering service during the trial.

STATISTICALLY, “THE BEST IN THE U.S.”

Answering service quality is 100% dependent on human decision making, and in the course of a day a multitude of human decisions are made by the people who handle the calls, our Telephone Service Representatives (TSRs). Sometimes these are “gray area” judgments. Errors can be made. Also, telecom equipment can fail. But note that Centratel’s error rate is light years ahead of industry standards. Our most recent Customer Reported Error Rate (October through December, 2019) was 1 customer-reported error for every 6,716 message transactions processed.

Here’s a recent testimonial from a new medical client that just finished their 30-day trial:
Hi Angie,
Of course, I love the “per month” amount as it is pretty close to the amount I was allowed by the president of the company. I did tell him that if we did not continue with Centratel, I would resign as the Director of Customer Service and I meant it. I never make those types of statements unless I am ready to be accountable for both options. It’s a great fit, we have had NOT ONE complaint from a client which, as you know, we received daily (with our former answering service). I love how the reports are being generated by first name. Everyone here is just so happy and I don’t know how you do it, but that daily report is in at exactly 9 am; not 9:01 and not 8:59. I keep each one in my Simple Nursing Centratel folder, and it’s a great review for me to make sure all the calls are going to the correct person, and they always are. That part is certainly difficult because the calls can be vague and could easily be sent to the wrong person.

I love you, Centratel and the price. I’m ready to sign whatever documents you require.

Thanks for the great service, the free month, your reliable calls and your willingness to find easier ways to make me happy.

To a great partnership,

-KB, Phoenix

FREE GIFT FOR TALKING TO US

If you talk to us about answering service, we will send you a free hardcover copy of Sam Carpenter’s book Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less. There’s more information regarding the book at workthesystem.com. First published in May 2008 and now in its 3rd edition and revised for 2019/2020, the book is also available on Amazon and in your favorite bookstore.