Circle Community Land Trust was struggling with an after-hours answering service that misclassified maintenance issues, escalated too many calls, and left tenants feeling disconnected from the organization. With frontline staff receiving three to four calls every evening and weekend and burnout becoming a growing concern, Circle sought a specialized partner that understood housing operations, could protect the tenant experience, and ensure only genuinely urgent issues reached its on-call team.

Circle's Challenge: creating a reliable after-hours experience

Circle’s after-hours situation, like that of many housing providers, was creating real strain on the team.

Staff were fielding three to four calls every evening and weekend from tenants who needed support, and the answering service in place was not delivering.

Conversations that needed patience, reassurance, and clear direction often became more tense instead, leaving tenants frustrated and frontline staff constantly pulled into issues that should never have reached them in the first place.

“We were inundated in evenings and weekends. We really had to keep our frontline staff pretty heavily involved… we were on a path to burning a few of them out,” says Lauren Blumas, Circle’s COO.

As a growing organization, the impact quickly became difficult to sustain. Maintenance calls were being misclassified, urgent issues were not always correctly identified, and there was very little consistency in how tenant calls were being handled.

“It felt really obvious to the tenants that it wasn’t us answering the phone,” Lauren explains.

These challenges weren’t new to her. At a previous organization, Lauren had gone through three different answering service providers over five years.

None of them cracked the code. By the time she arrived at Circle, her expectations for the industry had hit the floor.

“I’ve only ever known answering services to be bad, quite frankly.”

A particularly difficult winter eventually became the breaking point.

“We had a really tough winter where we were like, my gosh, we can’t have another winter with them. Surely there has to be something better than this.”

Choosing the Right Partner

When Circle began evaluating alternatives, leadership approached the process cautiously. After years of disappointing experiences with answering services, the organization was no longer looking for generic promises.

They needed a partner capable of understanding housing operations and handling tenant situations with discernment and consistency.

Telelink came highly recommended through trusted referrals within the housing sector, including recommendations connected to Calgary Housing. What stood out immediately was Telelink’s specialization in property management.

“Property management as a call out… was really important to us. We knew we needed some discernment.”

The conversations themselves also felt different. Instead of feeling like an outsourced vendor relationship, Telelink felt like a team that genuinely understood the realities of housing operations and could operate as an extension of Circle’s own team.

That distinction mattered because Circle wasn’t simply looking for someone to answer phones. They were looking for a partner they could trust with tenant relationships, operational continuity, and after-hours decision-making.

The Solution

After selecting Telelink as their after-hours answering partner, Circle worked closely with the Telelink team to build a customized call handling and maintenance triage workflow tailored specifically to their operations.

Unlike a general call centre where clients are pooled together regardless of industry, Circle is serviced within Telelink's dedicated property management division, meaning the agents handling their calls are trained specifically for housing operations.

They understand the nuances of tenant communication, know how to triage a maintenance emergency from a routine request, and bring the right level of judgment to every call.

The onboarding process focused on creating clear escalation paths, refining scripts, and ensuring the after-hours experience reflected Circle’s communication style and tenant care standards.

“It’s now working pretty seamlessly.”

One area Circle found particularly valuable was Telelink’s responsiveness. With previous providers, making even small scripting or workflow adjustments often became frustrating.

Changes would take too long to implement; communication would go back and forth for days, and even then, updates were sometimes still incorrect or inconsistently applied.

With Telelink, the experience felt entirely different. As operational needs evolved, scripting updates and workflow adjustments were implemented quickly and collaboratively.

“When we’ve had to make scripting adjustments, they’ve happened really quickly.”

Telelink also provided Circle with detailed reporting and recorded call visibility through its client portal, giving leadership immediate access to overnight activity each morning without delays or repeated requests.
 
 
 

Results Achieved with Telelink

I've listened to the calls, and there's just some logic and brains behind the conversations. I used to listen to the other calls, and there's definitely a difference. Every call that I've listened to has been great. I feel like it's consistent with how we would talk and approach tenants.

Lauren Blumas | Chief Operations Officer, Circle

The impact was noticeable quickly. What had been three to four after-hours calls every evening dropped dramatically to roughly the same number in an entire month. Calls that now reach the on-call staff warrant attention because they have already been properly triaged.

The improvement also changed how Circle structures its internal operations. After-hours calls are now rare enough that on-call responsibilities have moved to the senior leadership level. This reflects their confidence that if Telelink escalates a call, it is because something truly urgent is on the line that would need a leader's attention anyway. During the two weeks Lauren was most recently on call, she received only two calls. One of them was a fire.
 
“We have good confidence that if your phone is going to ring when you're on call, it means it's important.”

Part of what made the shift so meaningful was that Lauren could verify it herself. She went back and listened to the calls and said it was immediately obvious that the conversations were being handled with discernment, sound judgment, and a real understanding of housing operations.

"I've listened to the calls, and there's just some logic and brains behind the conversations. I used to listen to the other calls, and there's definitely a difference. Every call that I've listened to has been great. I feel like it's consistent with how we would talk and approach tenants.”

The reporting and recording visibility also became a meaningful operational asset. Every morning, Circle’s team can review overnight interactions, understand the context of conversations, and follow up with tenants seamlessly. “There’s continuity… we can kind of just pick up from where you left off.”

For tenants, the experience became far more consistent. Rather than feeling like they were being handed off to an unrelated third party after hours, interactions began feeling like a true extension of Circle itself. “It feels like an extension of our brand.”

For an organization that took over a skeptical tenant base and has spent five years building credibility, having that continuity reinforced every night matters in ways that are hard to quantify, but easy to feel.

When asked what she would tell other housing providers struggling with after-hours answering services, Lauren’s response was simple:
“There is a solution, and it’s Telelink.”
 
 
 

Post-Implementation Life

I used to go into weekends and long weekends with a personal level of stress thinking, what are we going to miss this weekend? I just don’t feel that way anymore.

Lauren Blumas | Chief Operations Officer, Circle

Lauren still describes herself as pessimistic about the answering service industry overall. She has seen enough to know the problems are widespread, which makes her endorsement of Telelink even more meaningful. “You guys are the outliers,” she says.

But beyond the operational improvements, one of the biggest changes has been the impact on the team itself. Staff who were once constantly interrupted after hours and stretched thin are now able to focus on their work during the day without carrying the same level of stress into evenings and weekends. The difference in morale has been noticeable.

“I used to go into weekends and long weekends with a personal level of stress thinking, what are we going to miss this weekend? I just don't feel that way anymore.”

Operations is Lauren’s responsibility, and having a reliable after-hours partner has changed what it feels like to carry that responsibility day to day.