What makes a great chatbot solution? To us, it comes down to the level of engagement your bot can create with your audience. The best bots are conversational, informative, and ultimately, helpful in pointing both prospective and current renters toward the right answers. This is easier said than done and takes knowing exactly what your audience is looking for and why. Your property management team can’t know everything though, which makes having a flexible, wide-reaching chatbot some of the best help your team can get. 

The best way to make sure your chatbot is able to serve a wide variety of people and requests is to optimize the questions it asks. From the beginning of the conversation to the conclusion, the right questions will help naturally guide both your bot and user toward the best solution for their specific query. 

So what questions should guide your bot? Let’s get into some of the most common types of questions your bot should utilize. 

1.Craft a friendly introductory probe

This is one of the first things a user will see and read, so it’s important that this first question is direct and open-ended. Introductory probes are questions that guide users to respond with a query or take a specific action. For example, “how can I help you?” is a super simple but effective way to get your user to engage with your bot. 

People tend to also respond best to bots that ‘speak’ in a friendly, conversational tone, so if you can craft something that evokes this tone, even better! Depending on your brand-specific POV and tone, you could embellish this first question by saying something like, “Well hello there! How can I help you?”. Chatbots provide a great way to showcase what makes your brand unique, so don’t be afraid to get creative! 

2. Get specific

Your multifamily chatbot is in place to help your audience find their next home, sign leases, and more. In order for your users to reach their end goal, your bot needs to be able to quickly determine your users’ needs. To do this, your guiding questions should be specific and targeted. For example, if a person is wanting to look for apartments available to rent, your bot shouldn’t just show every room available. Instead, your bot should ask specific questions that can guide a person to exactly what they’re looking for. Questions like, “how many beds are you looking for?” and, “Which price range looks about right?” are easy ways to narrow the field. 

3. Ask them how they’d like to contact you (and be contacted)

Sometimes, there’s only so much a bot can do before people want to speak with a human customer service representative. In cases like these, you’ll want to be proactive about asking how people want to contact you, and how they’d like to be contacted in the future. With a simple question, you can direct people to get in contact with your property management team via text, phone, email, or some other method. This is a great segue into how to ask for a user’s personal information. 

4. Ask for their information

Gaining personal information like emails and phone numbers from your users is important in tracking who’s using your bot and why. Additionally, if your bot’s interaction leads to an in-person engagement, it’s important to have peoples’ information on file. The thing is, most people won’t want to give out their info willy-nilly. Instead, your request for information should come up naturally within the context of your conversation. 

Instead of asking for their info right off the bat (or worse yet – gatekeeping information and resources until they submit their info), only ask for something once they’ve indicated they want to be contacted. Once they’ve chosen a method of contact, i.e. text, email, etc, then you can prompt them to submit their information with a friendly, “How can we best reach you?”. Don’t forget to ask for their first and last name as well! 

5. Give lots of choices

This last guideline is not so much a specific type of question you should ask, but how your questions should be framed. The best bots give users a lot of choices and flexibility, so don’t be afraid to give people lots of choices. The more choices you’re able to create, the more likely your bot will be able to take care of everything for your user, freeing up valuable time for your property teams to focus on other tasks. 

By building your bot around these guiding questions, you’ll not only help users reach the information and resources they need faster but will help free up valuable time that your leasing team can use to engage with renters and leads directly.