Can-Chatbots-Replace-Humans

Can Chatbots Replace Human Agents?

January 10, 2022

Imaginations run wild as soon as you mention the word “chatbot.” Recent movies have contributed to the idea that bots can be dangerous and jeopardize human jobs. While that may be the case in the film, in reality, chatbots should not replace humans. Chatbots are great for fulfilling simple intents and menial tasks. However, when it comes to higher-level problems, that’s where humans excel.

Instead of looking at chatbots and humans as either/or propositions, it’s crucial to think about them as a creative way to solve problems. Chatbots can supercharge the abilities of human agents by focusing on those repetitive tasks so that humans have time to focus on solving more complex issues that require emotional and intelligent engagement. In fact, a study conducted by Informs PubsOnLine shares that when chatbots are upfront about the fact that they are bots, prospects are 79.7%. more likely to buy. So why not let chatbots jump in and do some of the heavy lifting?

Some ways chatbots can help support leasing teams include: 

24/7 Availability

Use a chatbot on your website to assist visitors 24 hours a day. The chatbot can help prospective renters find the information they are looking for, like finding a home, and subsequently hand them off to the appropriate person. The chat transcript is shared with the human agents, eliminating repetition and speeding up the process.

Boost Engagement

Chatbots can be used to boost engagement with existing clients. A chatbot can be perfect for managing maintenance or other simple requests without the necessity for phone calls. This can speed up the time it takes to service a request and, in turn, improve customer satisfaction.

Nurture Leads 

Frequently properties become overwhelmed with the number of leads entering their inbox. That’s where chatbots come in. Some chatbots (including BetterBot) offer the ability to follow up with and nurture leads in the beginning stages while handing off only the most qualified leads. This allows for better closing ratios, as these leads are most likely to convert. 

In conclusion, chatbots won’t be completely replacing humans any time soon. They are meant to help them with simple tasks so that humans can focus their attention on more complex tasks. If you’re considering chatbot solutions, check out our article on 6 things to consider when looking for a chatbot solution. 

January 10, 2022

Put Down the Wide Brush – Why You Should Tailor Your Chatbot to Your Unique Property Type

December 6, 2021

Under the multifamily umbrella, there are various property types – and no two properties are the same. And while innovations in proptech have made it much easier for property management teams to do everything from schedule tours to convert leads into new renters, no technology is a one-size-fits-all solution. Especially in the case of a multifamily chatbot, we’ve found that the more you can personalize and tailor your bot to your unique property type, the more effective it will be in the long term.

In this quick resource, we’ll outline both the benefits of tailoring your multifamily bot and how to go about it with specific examples.

Why tailoring your multifamily chatbot is important

More qualified leads

A great chatbot can help you insert yourself in conversations when and where it matters most. Still, a generic property chatbot can only help you get so far. Tailoring your chatbot to fit your property’s unique type and renter requirements can help you secure even more qualified leads and tours.

Meet your prospective renters where they are

Depending on your property type, prospective renters may be on the hunt for specific amenities and features. For example, students looking for housing may be interested in knowing how many beds an available room has. Customizing your bot to feature this and other relevant information can make it much easier to meet prospective leads’ needs directly without going back and forth with a property management team.

Give your team valuable time back

When your chatbot can more effectively meet people’s needs and provide relevant information, it can save your property management team valuable time. Instead of fielding endless email and phone queries, any information a person needs can be quickly obtained through your custom chatbot.

How to tailor your bot to common property types

Student

The apartment rental process can be unique for students, which is why it’s a great idea to craft a chatbot solution that can meet their needs. A few ways to tailor your bot for the student housing experience include:

Allowing students to search by unit availability: With many looking for apartments at the beginning and end of semesters, it can be helpful to search by availability at the touch of a button.

Search by the number of beds: Many students will opt to live with roommates to minimize the amount spent on rent. Your chatbot should be searchable by number of beds, not only to help your prospects find the right space but to help your property management team stay organized.

Student scheduling: The school year can look different based on the type of school and location. Our student bot offers a custom scheduling tool to schedule by semester, trimester, or quarter calendar.

Access to student resources: Providing interactive student resources is a great way to help your renters stay up-to-date with what’s going on at their building and school.

Conventional

Looking to spruce up your apartment chatbot? Here are a few of our recommendations:

Add multilingual support: Don’t leave great leads hanging just because English isn’t their first language. BetterBot offers multilingual support so you can easily communicate with all your prospects.

Offer virtual tours/videos: Although we’re a far cry from the beginning of the pandemic, many prospective renters may feel more comfortable taking a virtual tour of your property. With BetterBot, you can easily embed your virtual tours from Matterport, LCP360, Zillow, Vimeo, Helix, Realync, YouTube, and more.

Embed your photo galleries: Instead of sending users away from your chatbot to check out your fantastic pool and tennis court, you can quickly embed all the galleries you want directly into your chatbot.

Affordable

Especially in affordable/section 8 housing, it can be challenging for property management teams to keep up with the volume of leads and daily requests for information. A personalized chatbot can help make your life much easier by offering the following:

Waitlist management: With a user-friendly dashboard, our Affordable Bot makes it simple to view your waitlist at a glance. And once a renter moves out, you can easily choose the next – no physical list needed.

Affordable-specific dialogue: For example, you can pre-qualify leads by asking for yearly income and the number of residents looking to move in. This can help prospective renters know quickly and easily whether or not they qualify to move into your affordable spaces before even speaking with your team.

Affordable-specific reporting: Even at an affordable property, it’s still crucial that your team can sell your property experience. Our affordable-specific dashboard allows your team to quickly assess top-of-funnel leasing performance, helping you determine what’s working – and what isn’t.

Lease-Up

A Lease-Up specific bot can be beneficial for communities that may be so new that they don’t have a website up and running yet.

Offer community-specific information: Your bot will be the first (and likely only) place people go to learn about your upcoming community. Make sure to customize it with plenty of relevant information, including info on parking, amenities, and whether or not your facilities will be pet-friendly.

Set up tour appointments: Just because you don’t have a site yet doesn’t mean you can’t start booking tour appointments. Set up and manage tour appointments directly from your bot from the get-go.

In almost every industry today, personalization and customization reign supreme. And it’s not just about better serving your leads and renters – it’s also about helping make your teams’ life easier too. With the right chatbot solution at their fingertips, property management teams can feel empowered to spend less time on repetitive, low-value workflows. For more chatbot guides and insights into multifamily industry trends, check out the BetterBot Blog.

December 6, 2021

7 Things Our Apartment Chatbot Learned From Greeting Over 50 Million Renters

May 27, 2021

At BetterBot, we’ve reached a huge milestone! We’ve greeted over 50 million renters through our platform over the last two years. Our product has evolved into a more effective platform over time, and we’ve learned so much. With that being said, we want to share seven things we’ve learned from greeting over 50 million renters. 

1.After Hours Traffic Is Increasing

We’ve found that on average, 58% of our customer’s traffic is coming after hours. That’s over half of their traffic! We see this as a trend industry-wide. This highlights the importance of having service for prospective customers after the offices are closed. 

2. Onboarding Should Be Easy

No two properties are alike, so why should your onboarding experience be cookie-cutter/copy and paste? We know that bringing on new technology can be overwhelming. Over time we have maximized our onboarding process to ensure that it’s easy and accurate for our customers. It takes a 30-minute conversation to get our users onboarded, and it’s the most straightforward thing you’ll ever add to your processes. 

3. Guided Conversation is Effective

It’s crucial to guide renters so that they want to schedule a tour. However, you can’t force it. Lead gating can disrupt the prospect journey, which is why it’s been important to our team to create a flow that naturally guides the conversation so that prospects are eager to visit your community. 

4. Different Properties Call For Different Experiences

We know that all properties are different, especially when it comes to working with different property types. When engaging with an affordable community or a community built for students, the experience a prospect has when engaging with an affordable community has other parameters, qualifications, and even a different way of leasing. So we created Student & Affordable Bots to handle that and create a custom experience for your prospects.

5. Accuracy Is Important

Prospects expect a seamless, effortless, and easy interaction when engaging with a chatbot, including excellent access to property information while providing accurate and up-to-date answers. With Natural Language Processing (NLP) bots, we’ve seen a 33% error rate on average. That’s an F average if we’re looking at a typical grading scale! With Guided Conversation bots like ours, the conversation is natural and accurate all the time. 

6. Accessibility Is a Non-Negotiable 

It’s important that your prospects can reach you anywhere. Renters want real-time information, and they want to be able to contact you on any channel. That’s why with BetterBot, we’ve found great success using omnichannel marketing. Using our omi-channel marketing, you can reach prospects on any platform, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Yelp, Craigslist, Apartments.com, Apartment List, and so much more. You’ll never miss a prospect, and you’ll acquire more qualified leads. 

7. Time Is Valuable

Time is the most valuable thing we have, which is why we understand the importance of spending it wisely. We’ve developed our bot to handle the menial tasks so that leasing teams can focus on what’s essential….being human! 

Greeting over 50 million renters sounds daunting, but for us, it’s been fun. We’ve learned so much about what renters crave, and we are continuing to evolve as we learn more. Stay tuned to find out what enhancements are on the horizon and see how we’ll keep improving!

May 27, 2021

3 Things Every Chatbot Onboarding Experience Should Include

May 25, 2021

Bringing a new process to your team can be overwhelming, which is why we’ve worked extremely hard to ensure that our onboarding process is different. When onboarding a new bot to your team, there are three things you should always look out for, including: 

  1. Quick Process
  2. Painless Set-Up 
  3. Straightforward & Simple Training

Let’s dive deeper into why these elements are essential to successful onboarding. 

1.Quick Process

If your onboarding is estimated to take more than a few days, run away! Bringing on a chatbot solution should be pretty seamless. A quick onboarding process will ensure that you are getting the most out of your solution. Residents must be greeted by your chatbot as soon as possible so they can get the information they’re looking for. So why wait? At BetterBot our onboarding process takes on average five days. Our team works tirelessly to ensure your bots are delivered promptly so that you can get started reaping the rewards of your new chatbot. 

2. Painless Set-Up

You should not be building your bot yourself. That’s a lot of work! Setting up your bots should be painless. Your chatbot solution should be able to provide insight on what renters are most receptive to. They should know what information is the most sought out and what prospects want to know. You should be able to rely on experts to help maximize your bot’s responses. It shouldn’t take countless hours of deciding what trail your prospects should go down. At BetterBot, it only takes 30 minutes to get started. We will sit down and have a conversation to determine your needs and branding elements. Then, we are off to the races, and our development team gets started building your bots. It’s painless and straightforward for all parties involved. 

3. Straightforward & Simple Training

Your team doesn’t need to spend countless hours training. It’s vital that your new chatbot eases the burden on your team. Why should having a new tool increase your team’s workload? It’s there to make life easier. BetterBot has an intuitive platform for your team to utilize. Your on-site staff should understand what your bot does for them, and they should know it’s there helping prospects. Beyond that, selected members of your team will want access to your BetterBot dashboard to make sure information stays up to date and to pull reports. This training is straightforward and simple, allowing you more time to focus on leasing apartments.

Bonus Tip: New technology should be exciting

Adding a new solution to your already existing tech stack can be daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. New technology should be exciting! It’s here to help. Onboarding your chatbot should be fun and exciting, not dull and time-consuming. It’s essential to keep these principles in mind when looking to bring on a chatbot solution. Remember, BetterBot checks all three boxes, so you’re at a great starting point. CLICK HERE to learn more! 

May 25, 2021

BetterPractices: How to Test Your Apartment Chatbot

May 21, 2021

So you’ve finally decided to create a chatbot – amazing! We’re so excited for you. Now you’re one step closer to transforming your property’s leasing process for the better. The thing is, it’s not quite enough to simply build a bot and call it a day. Every chatbot solution you create needs to be thoroughly tested to ensure it’s helping your property management team meet its goals. Additionally, if you’ve recently updated or upgraded an existing solution, it’s also important to run everything through QA. Ultimately, the better you understand your bot, the better you can make it work for your team’s unique needs. So how should you go about testing your bot? Keep reading for our tried-and-true best practices on how to test your chatbot.

How to test your chatbot

When it comes to effectively testing your multifamily chatbot, you’ll want to keep this flexible framework in mind. Every bot is different, but all bots need to meet these guidelines.

Hone in on your ‘why’

What do you want your bot to be used for? Answering questions about properties? Booking tours? Streamlining the leasing process? All of the above? Before you let your bot run free, it’s important to establish the ‘whys’ behind your bot. Write down every use-case you want your bot to cover, along with potential responses. Rank them by priority. 

The more potential scenarios you can plan for, the better! At the end of the day, a successful bot will be able to accommodate each and every one of these scenarios, creating a more streamlined user experience. Having trouble coming up with use cases? Ask your renters directly what features they would most like to see!

Establish KPIs

Once you know what queries you want your bot to cover, you’ll want to establish clear KPIs. These will help you gauge your bot’s performance. Classic bot KPIs include number of users served, number of steps needed to complete a request, and self-service rate (how well your chatbot can resolve a request without human intervention). Other great KPIs to keep an eye on are customer satisfaction rate, which can be measured through surveys, and sales conversion rate. The better your bot is able to meet these indicators, the more functional it is. 

Make sure it’s conversational 

Your customers may be talking with a bot, but that doesn’t mean their interaction doesn’t have to be anything less than conversational. The best bots are one that create an engaging experience with users, so you’ll want to make sure yours doesn’t sound too robotic. When you’re drafting up possible responses, keep answers straightforward and friendly. People don’t want to spend minutes reading through long answers that could’ve been said in a sentence or two. 

At this point, it may be helpful to bring in some test users to see how well the bot does. Additionally, this is a great point to implement A/B testing to see which types of responses prompt better conversion rates. 

Run performance tests

Now that you have a comprehensive set of use cases and responses, it’s time to optimize your bot’s performance. Along with improving response speed, you’ll also want to focus performance tests on security as well. Conversations between users and your bot need to be encrypted and adhere to consumer privacy compliance. 

Never stop testing!

Once you’ve got a chatbot you’re happy with, the work isn’t done yet! One of the great things about chatbots today is that so many of them can learn from user experiences and update themselves to improve. If your bot is designed to learn, it’s important to check in with it every month or so to ensure its responses are still up to par. Even if you manually update your bot, it’s still a good idea to check-in every so often and run speed and other performance tests. Continuous testing will help ensure both you and your customers are getting the most out of your bot!

At the end of the day, your chatbot solution is only as good as the quality of answers it can give. That’s why it’s so critical to run your bot through rigorous testing to ensure each user can get exactly the information they’re looking for. 

Now that you know how to test your chatbot, it’s time to optimize your bot’s presence on your website. Learn what to do (and what to avoid) here! 

May 21, 2021

5 Ways to Guide Your Multifamily Chatbot Solution

May 14, 2021

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.

May 14, 2021

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