How Bots Enhance Leasing Efficiency
Towne Properties’ Anne Baum on how adding a bot to your leasing toolbox can help streamline operations and improve your prospect experience.
Chatbots have become a key tool for multifamily leasing teams, allowing prospects to be assisted around the clock. With nearly half of all leads coming in after hours, using some form of bot technology—including email bots, chatbots and text bots—ensures the leasing office is always “open,” offering an efficient way to manage high volumes of inquiries without requiring teams to be constantly on call.
Towne Properties Director of Marketing Anne Baum sat down with Multi-Housing News to share her insights on how bots have transformed leasing operations, improved lead conversion rates and enhanced prospect interactions.
What makes bots a helpful tool for leasing teams?
Baum: From a marketing perspective, chatbots allow leads to be tended to and answered 24/7. We see about 47 percent of our leads come in after hours and having a bot or having that automation so our leasing office is always open is really a game changer.
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What has been the biggest impact on your leasing team since you started using this technology?
Baum: The impact is twofold. First, the ability to handle large amounts of leads in an almost instantaneous fashion. It’s allowed our teams to not necessarily be glued to their CRM queues because a majority of incoming inquiries are handled by automation, through email bot, text bot, chat bot, and that’s really big. It also allows for bulk amounts of leads, and it frees up time for the leasing teams to be able to focus on other aspects of their jobs.
What do you learn from the data gathered through interactions between bots and prospects?
Baum: First, we’re seeing the number of prospects that are coming in after hours. When we first started with chatbots and automation, about 40 percent of our leads were coming in after hours, and now we’re seeing about 47 percent. And to really understand prospect behavior from that standpoint, that data has been really important.
We’ve also seen our lead-to-appointment ratio increase. We’re seeing that prospects aren’t shying away from interacting with bots, and in some cases, they might not be able to even tell that the interaction is being handled by a bot. Those are all really valuable data points for us.
What are some of the challenges you encounter when making the interactions feel personalized?
Baum: We rely on our technology partner to ensure that they’re upgrading the bots as new technology becomes available. When we first started with our chatbot, it would answer questions, but you could tell it was a chatbot. The technology that backs the bots has gotten better, and the bot is starting to become more conversational. So when we get to a place where we can roll that out to our communities on a wider scale then some of the concerns that existed about kind of the interactions with the bot will be erased.
Another challenge or limitation is that not only are leads coming from so many different sources but also from multiple people from different generations, who may communicate differently. Based on how an inquiry comes in or based on how questions are phrased, the bot might not be able to handle a string of multiple questions. Or maybe it’s kind of an obscure question, and the bot hasn’t been trained to answer that particular question yet.
For us, the nice thing is that if there’s an interaction where either a prospect wants to speak to a real person, or the bot gets to a place that it can’t answer the question, it goes directly into our queue for our leasing agents to be able to handle. So it’s a very streamlined process to move it to our leasing teams.
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How does evaluating the questions that are challenging for bots feed into training and improvement efforts?
Baum: We look at the questions that are being asked and not being answered in our interface, on an individual basis. It is a minimal number, but it does still exist. So we can go through each conversation, see if it was handed off or not and see what was the catalyst for the handoff. That’s one way that we’re able to look and see what questions a bot may not be able to answer.
There’s also reporting in the bot interface that we have that identifies training opportunities for us across our portfolio. We’re able to see if there’s a theme in questions that are being asked that the bot can’t answer. And then we can go train, either on an overall model or an individual property level.
Do you regularly review bot interactions, and what prompts you to initiate those reviews or identify the need for training?
Baum: There are a couple of ways that we’re alerted that we should be looking at if a model needs to be trained. We’re fortunate that our site teams really communicate with us and let us know if there’s an interaction that they thought that the bot should have answered, for example, and it didn’t.
The second thing we do is we work with the product support team on the vendor side to do reviews with us on a regular basis, so we can see if there are portfoliowide patterns that we should be addressing. The last time we went through that, there were about eight things that we had to train the bot on. To make your bots as useful as possible, it’s important to go through this on a regular basis to train your model. I recommend doing this quarterly.
What feedback have you gotten from prospects after interacting with the chatbot?
Baum: We actually had a woman come in for a tour at one of our properties who didn’t realize she was chatting with a bot because of the language and the helpfulness.
Where I’m able to see the feedback is in the KPIs we measure. We are looking at the percentage of handoffs that we have to the site team. And then on the flip side, I’m seeing how quickly the bot is responding and seeing interactions, which are sometimes well into the night.
When I’m seeing that quick interaction, it tells me that it’s a good prospect experience, because they’re getting the information they need on their time and the response is coming in a timely manner.
We have seen about a 55 percent increase in our prospect-to-appointment conversion ratio, which tells me that overall, the bots are providing value to our prospects, because they’re willing to schedule appointments.
What advice would you give to operators who are considering implementing a bot?
Baum: I don’t want companies to be afraid of bots. Bots are a great tool. You will still need to vet the right technology partner, create a technology rollout plan and know what metrics you’re going to measure or the metrics you’re trying to influence through use of the bot. But it’s definitely something operators should explore.