Update – After over a decade of service with Action, Liz Garcia was recently promoted to captain the ship that she has long been a passenger on. As the new Community Care Manager, Liz oversees all day-to-day operations for our inbound contact center team that provides front-line support to our homeowners. With one eye on customer service and the other on operation efficiencies, Liz is prepared to continue moving Community Care forward to be the best customer service team possible.
If you’re old enough, you probably remember the sound of your computer dialing up a phone number and connecting to a modem. It’s a sound that is forever burned into your memory — one you wish you could forget, but it will never really be gone. For Liz Garcia, Action Property Management’s Community Care Manager, that sound still rings true in a very literal sense.
While her job description has nearly as much variety as the cereal section at your local grocery store, this one ear-piercing task is often overlooked by those not familiar with the inner workings of the property management industry. Access control and HOAs go hand-in-hand, and Liz and her team are the ones responsible for ensuring that gate remotes, key fobs, and electronic directories work for residents in 48 different communities.
To communicate with local access control systems within these communities, Liz connects directly with many of the devices via an old-fashioned modem. Fortunately, web-based systems are slowly taking over, but until every community makes the transition, she’ll have to rely on older technology. Once she’s connected, she can program remotes and fobs and update information for new residents in the electronic directory located at the main gates.
Action currently works with nine different access control systems, each requiring a unique knowledge of how it works. When Liz first started her job fourteen years ago, there was no centralized source of information for these systems. She was forced to learn all she could about each one through whatever means she could find. To solve this problem, Liz recently completed writing a one-hundred-page manual that describes the necessary processes for programming each system.
It’s all just another day in the office for Liz, though. She chuckles when she thinks about her first days working the call center at Action. “I didn’t even know what stucco was,” she recently said. “Now I speak fluent plumber.” In those early days, Google was her best friend. Liz went above and beyond to master unfamiliar lingo so she could better communicate with vendors, board members, and homeowners. Now she helps to oversee the team that ensures every work order for every community is addressed quickly and professionally.
Liz Garcia
”Liz helps to oversee the team that ensures every work order for every community is addressed quickly and professionally.
One of the greatest pleasures Liz gets from her job is reporting back to anxious homeowners that their problem has been solved. She also finds joy in the never-ending variety of requests that come her way. With high-rise buildings, condos, and communities extending from San Diego to San Francisco and all the people who occupy those homes, she gets to learn something new each day.
In the Community Care department, teamwork is essential. “Our team is closer than ever,” she remarked, “and communication is key.” It’s not uncommon for one work order to be handled by as many as five team members, so the notes included each step of the way must be precise.
Outside the office, Liz is, quite literally, a closet poet. Her closet holds three boxes of old journals, each of them containing handwritten notes about life, mostly in the form of poetry.
From a young age, Liz was drawn to poems. As she got older, she started writing her own. At first, they were quickly scratched onto paper with no real long-term perspective. As she honed her skills and style, she went back and transcribed those early writings into neat journals, artistically printed by her own hand. For Liz, this is not only a highly personal hobby that is seen by no one but herself, it’s also a therapeutic means of processing her thoughts and feelings.
Like many busy professionals dedicated to meeting the needs of others, Liz has found her own place of solitude — a place where she can unwind, decompress, and enjoy being alone. With her batteries fully charged, she will once again wake up with the sun, ready to solve the challenges of a brand new day.
