Why is a Chatbot Important for a Property Management Software?

Why is a Chatbot Important for a Property Management Software?

As a Property Management Software company, you should think about all the solutions you offer – managing rental applications, streamlining maintenance requests, tracking rental payments, etc. As you probably know, most of your solutions are based on seamless two-way communication.

If your goal is to offer the best-automated solution, the first thing you need to do is follow in your footsteps and take on automation in the truest sense of the word – a chatbot with artificial intelligence.

What Is Chatbot?

Chatbots are automated, conversational messaging tools that you can integrate into your website and other messaging platforms. You may be wondering how chatbots can be used for property management, and multifamily property management software can help you create an accessible communication channel between residents and owners.

Chatbots for apartment buildings are revolutionizing the lead generation and customer service process for property managers. You can use property management chatbots or real estate chatbots to solve complex solutions for your multifamily properties.

We have listed some key points why property management chatbots are essential for property management software for multifamily buildings:

Multifamily Leasing Assistant

Property Management Chatbots (PMC) are virtual leasing agents that can capture leads for multifamily properties through real-time conversations on the website. When potential customers search for a property on the PMC website, they have no idea what kind of property they are looking for. They have many questions about the availability of the location, the application process, rental deposits, pet policy, expected move-in date, etc. 

All the questions a client would ask a real estate agent. Nowadays, most property buyers start their search on the internet. Therefore, it is essential to have a tool on the website to help visitors with their search. 

Multifamily property management software can automate property management by answering all these questions for each visitor. You can also integrate these bots with other channels such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Property management chatbots can present listings in their preferred location, amenities, parking, neighborhood, etc., guide them through the application process, inform them about rent levels and arrange viewings.

Screening & Nurturing Leads

The number of leads generated by property management is not so much a challenge as their qualifications. There are many rental criteria by which leads are filtered. 

Property management chatbots can pre-screen and filter your leads by asking most of these initial questions, such as the number of occupants, length of tenancy, lifestyle habits (smoking and pet ownership), and budget. You can then also integrate your leads’ contact information into your CRM. In this way, chatbots can reduce the time and resources needed to screen potential tenants, allowing sales staff to focus on the leases that matter. Your omnichannel presence also helps to generate leads from different platforms.

Virtual Maintenance Center

Property management and maintenance is a very stressful job. The number of tickets received daily by the PMC alone is very high. This can be very stressful for staff as they are often faced with rude and frustrated tenants. By using a chatbot for property management, you can develop a quick process for resolving maintenance issues.

Taking requests from tenants: Tenants often have issues with leaks, heaters, air conditioners, shower seals, etc. Thanks to 24×7 availability, they can open a maintenance ticket at any time of the day.

Determine the severity of the problem: Not all requests need to be dealt with immediately. Your property management chatbot can distinguish between high, medium, and low priority complaints and streamline requests that require urgent assistance accordingly. The chatbot can even be trained to offer solutions to minor issues that do not require expert intervention. It can send explanatory videos and links so tenants can solve the problem themselves.

Schedule an appointment: A chatbot for apartment buildings can automatically take repair orders and schedule appointments with the appropriate person, such as a plumber or electrician. This can speed up the process instead of making people stand in line for minutes.

Alerts and reminders

Almost every adult today has a phone, and 66% of Americans check their phone 166 times a day! Do you know what that means? It’s almost impossible for renters to miss important reminders sent to their phones; this can reduce missed appointments and increase on-time rent payments. You can choose the frequency of reminders, the timing of notifications and personalize your reminders. With the property management chatbot, you can automate the sending of notifications and reminders for:

1. Inspection calls
2. Property visit reminders
3. Rent payment reminders
4. Update on maintenance requests
5. Social & Community Events

Continuous Customer Service

Let’s look at all the components that are essential for efficient customer service:

Communication: Rent is a big part of your monthly expenses. So if your tenant is paying around $1500 per month, they don’t want to be ignored. The way a PMC handles their daily communication is critical to their success. Property management chatbots allow for constant communication and keep tenants and prospective tenants up to date on property and tenant-related information at all times. 

Immediate Response: Phone calls are a popular mode for customer service, but imagine how often tenants have to hold the call while speaking to a service representative. The immediate response from customer service has been a long-held dream and a problem that companies have tried to solve repeatedly. But nothing has worked as well as chatbots. Whether your tenant has a plumbing problem at 2 a.m. or your prospective tenants want to make an appointment for the weekend, your multifamily chatbots can determine this immediately without having to wait for staff to come by on Monday morning; for this reason, chatbots can solve problems in real-time.

Customer loyalty: Property managers must always build a polite and friendly relationship with their current and potential tenants, no matter the workload. You can integrate your brand personality into chatbots, and they can speak in the way you want, be lively, quirky, and funny. The idea is not to replace the human touch but to help similarly without neglecting its software roots. By providing a personalized experience for each customer, you’re one step closer to building lasting customer relationships using chatbots for apartment buildings. 

Marketing Feedback

Customer insights are valuable, so companies spend thousands of dollars to understand what the customer wants. Chatbots are not called marketing intelligence software for nothing, and they can pull your data. Based on the conversations it has had over time, your property management chatbot can provide answers to questions like:

1. What is the type of persona visiting your website? 
2. What are the types of leads you’re getting?
3. Which of your properties is popular?
4. What are the common issues your rental prospects are facing in your properties?

It can reflect how you are performing against industry standards and help you gather data to target your marketing strategies accordingly in the future.

Have you checked out our Property Maintenance Chatbot yet?

It helps you keep your website is in tip-top shape. Check it out now here: Property Maintenance Chatbot

Read More: Chatbots in Financial Services: Benefits, Use Cases and Key Features

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Chatbots in Financial Services: Benefits, Use Cases and Key Features

Chatbots in Financial Services: Benefits, Use Cases and Key Features

The banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry are in a state of flux. Developments in financial technology, generational shifts among customers, and high incomes in the first quarter of 2021 have accelerated the use of new digital technologies and increased the need to explore new ways of communicating.

Here we look at how banks are reshaping the customer journey to increase customer engagement.

Banks already have mobile apps, and their use continues to grow steadily. However, these apps are limited in several ways. Often, apps can only be accessed on one or two channels; customers cannot continue a conversation across channels – switching from their mobile phone to a smart home center, for example.

Mobile apps often offer limited functionality, requiring users to go to a website or call a call center to complete a specific process. Combined with complex menu systems, hard-to-find information, and a lack of personalized financial advice, it is clear that change is needed.

Chatbots not only allow customers to process requests faster and more efficiently, but they also act as a listening channel from which we can get to know our customers better.

We learn more about our customers, their likes, dislikes, and changes to their immediate plans or circumstances with every conversation. This information allows us to provide a personalized service, such as recommending the product or service that best suits their situation.

Improving customer service efficiency, minimizing human error, and resolving customer queries more quickly can significantly impact operational costs. According to research by Juniper, the use of chatbots will save banks worldwide up to $7.3 billion by 2023. This equates to a saving of 862 million hours or nearly half a million labor years.

Such deployments are critical for financial firms to transform to compete with industry giants digitally.

Chatbot Use Cases in the Financial Industry

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots in the financial sector shows how quickly the business landscape can change, even in traditionally conservative sectors. Here are several of the most successful uses of chatbots in the BFSI sector:

Enhance Customer Support

Chatbots for financial services can help customers with various financial transactions in a fun and secure way. From checking an account, reporting a lost card or payment, renewing insurance, or processing a refund, customers can complete simple tasks independently.

Provide Financial Advice

What if chatbots could not only handle all consumer queries but also give advice on their financial health? They could track their accounts, analyze their spending habits and recommend a budget or savings plan. In this way, they help users stay in control of their finances.

Prevent Fraud

Security and data protection is a concern for every business. But for banks and financial organizations, their reputation depends on it. Chatbots can effectively monitor and detect warning signs of fraudulent activity and alert customers and banks directly.

Manage Internal Operations

Chatbots provide employees with the proper support to speed up tedious and repetitive tasks and facilitate more complex and time-consuming back-office operations, such as managing internal records or training new employees.

Promotion and Cross-Selling

Banks, insurance companies, and financial institutions often offer a wide range of products and services.

AI chatbots can proactively suggest offers and services tailored to each user using all the data collected in previous conversations.

For example, if a customer regularly transfers money from a current account to a savings account, the bank only sees a single transaction; the customer’s needs are not understood.

But a simple conversational prompt from an intelligent virtual assistant, such as “Save for something nice? Can turn that transaction into a mortgage request, holiday insurance, or a car loan.

5 Key Features for a Banking Bot

You may think you already have a chatbot or virtual assistant, but most have limited capabilities and offer few features customers want.

These inadequate chatbots do not inspire the trust that a customer expects from their bank. Although the customer prefers a chatbot for various transactions, they end up talking to a live agent.

The ideal virtual assistant should function as a financial advisor and not as an FAQ chatbot. Above all, this means that the chatbot should know your customers, be an expert on your products and services, learn from accurate data and interact intelligently with users just as a human would.

A banking chatbot must have the following characteristics:

1. Conversational

The most natural form of human communication is language. Just being able to speak while interacting with a bot is something we all want to do. The frustration that arises when we talk to a chatbot that doesn’t understand us is immeasurable.

Therefore, the most important thing for a virtual assistant is that it is conversational so that we can use terms such as “my wife,” “my son,” “personal account,” or “joint account,” just as we would when talking to a bank advisor. In short, we want to express ourselves naturally, quickly, and be understood when we speak.

2. Transactional

A chatbot that cannot make transactions is useless. When we talk to a banking advisor, we want to ask him to transfer, open a new account or set up a mutual fund. The virtual assistant must be able to perform the same actions, and therefore it must be able to integrate with the bank’s back-office systems through Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

These integrations are often complex, and not all technologies on the market allow for this. If you are looking for a conversational AI platform, we recommend that you ensure that it can be easily integrated with external and internal systems.

3. Reliable

Money is a personal matter. Banks must offer security and reliability. Errors of interpretation or mistakes in the execution of operations are unacceptable. Everything must work perfectly, and otherwise, and it will only succeed if it loses customers.

4. Multi-Channel

One of the advantages of this type of technology is that it can be used in multiple channels. This allows customers to choose the channel they prefer, which contributes to higher usage of the solution.

Some customers will want to use the virtual assistant through their phone, while others will use it through a mobile app or an Amazon Alexa or Google Home device, or perhaps through WhatsApp or Skype. Therefore, it is essential to choose a conversational AI platform to deliver the application to multiple channels.

5. Security

Data protection and data security are essential in the banking sector, and it should ensure that ownership of call data belongs to the bank and that only the bank has access to it. In addition, the technology must comply with the European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and allow conversations to be retrieved, extracted, anonymized, encrypted, or deleted if required. Equally important is the solution’s ability to integrate with a central authentication system.

Chatbots can positively impact customer loyalty and engagement with a brand, helping to increase sales and reduce costs. But only if they deliver the experience that customers want.

Choosing the right development platform that provides the conversational intelligence, scalability, and control that banks need is critical to the solution’s success.

Have you checked out our Money & Finance Chatbot yet?

It helps you keep your website is in tip-top shape. Check it out now here: Money & Finance Chatbot

Read More: Chatbot Marketing Strategy

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Chatbot Marketing Strategy

Chatbot Marketing Strategy

In this article, we’ll dive into the world of messaging bots and provide you with detailed information on how to develop a best-in-class chatbot strategy. We’ll answer your questions about best practices for a near-human chatbot experience and how to get the most out of chatbots like Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, and more.

Here we go!

What is a chatbot?

A bot is simply a computer program that automates specific tasks.

In the case of chatbots, the automated task is to have a 1-to-1 conversation with a human.

These bots can use complex technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. They can be as simple as a series of IF-THEN operators.

Today’s chatbots respond with text, and yes, also with audio, video, images, GIFs, you name it. Even the tools for chatbots are growing exponentially – you’ve probably encountered bots in chat apps like Messenger and WhatsApp, and there are little buttons in the corner on many, many websites asking if you need help.

In this article, we will concentrate specifically on chatbots in social media channels.

10 Tips for Your Chatbot Marketing Strategy

We ended up studying the experiences of several different world-class chatbots to learn from them. Here’s a list of 10 lessons for those about to embark on Chatbot Marketing – like us.

1. Research your most frequently asked questions by asking your team

The first thing to consider with a chatbot is the content it contains.

Let’s take among our favorite chatbot use cases as an example: customer service bots. If the bot’s goal is to help customers and provide a quick response, we recommend looking at the questions your brand asks most often to see what content makes sense.

To find these common questions, there are a few good places to look.

• Your customer service team. They may have a lot of questions in their heads that customers are asking them all day long.
• Your social media support team, community team, or social media manager. The people who handle engagement on your social profiles should have a good understanding of the common questions that come through @mentions and DMs.
• Your sales and marketing team will understand the types of questions customers are asked when they come through the funnel. These may be common sales questions that sales reps face or questions your content marketers want to answer.

Of course, you can also get questions from places other than your immediate team. The search suggestions at the bottom of relevant Google pages are excellent to start, as are crowdsourcing communities like Quora and Reddit.

Suppose you choose to build a bot for sales, lead generation, or any other service. In that case, we strongly recommend that you research common questions and customer journeys to make your bot as fully valuable as possible.

2. Build your bot its very own conversation tree

Chatbots work best when given a specific set of questions that need to be answered. Without some degree of specificity and pre-planning, it becomes infinitely more complicated for a chatbot to deliver a reliable experience, let alone the correct answer.

This is why conversation trees work so well.

3. Avoid entirely open-ended conversations

Open-ended conversations can lead to confusion for your bot and a bad experience for the user. If you don’t have very advanced language processing technology, open-ended questions like “How can we help you today?” can go either way.

One of our favorite chatbots is Hello in Facebook Messenger. the bot’s first message to the user is to offer a drop-down menu: “Here are some common questions I can answer.” The options include the following:

• How does it work?
• What does it cost?
• Are you gluten-free?
• Are you vegan?
• Give me a discount!

The user can tap on any of these statements by tapping on the Messenger interface. The bot will then respond with an auto-reply.

This takes the guesswork out of the bot’s responses, as it knows exactly what to say and which message to receive.

4. Let people know that a human is just a step away

One of the most interesting statistics we’ve seen about chatbots is that they’re not as repellent to people as you might think. 69% of users prefer to communicate with a chatbot over in-app support. People like to have their questions answered quickly.

That still leaves 31% of users who may prefer the old-fashioned way – email or social support.

This can also be incorporated into your bot experience.

As part of the bot welcome message, let people know that the user is invited to contact a human at any time.

5. Give your bot a voice and a warm welcome message

Similar to the way you write about your brand on social media, you should consider the voice and tone of your chatbot. Maybe it’s just a natural extension of your brand’s voice and tone.

Other companies prefer to get closer to “bot-ness” by making the voice more robotic.

Whatever you choose is entirely up to you. Just be consistent in the dialogue tree.

One of the important places to master that voice and tone is the opening lines of your bot. In the previous tip, we mentioned that you want to let users know that they can contact a human at any time, and this is excellent information to include in your bot’s welcome message.

Additionally, the following items can be included:

• An attractive greeting.
• Create expectations. Let people know they are talking to a bot.
• There’s also a solid first question with lots of options to capture as much of the possible user journey as possible.

6. Track the effectiveness of your bot with special UTMs and discount codes

One of the most important questions you might have about your chatbot is… Does this thing work?

And “working” can mean many different things. If you are using chatbots to reduce the amount of customer support you provide, this is an easy metric to review. If you want to measure the effectiveness of your training, marketing, or sales, tracking the success of your bot with measurable links and codes is invaluable.

Hello does this with their bots – they include the word “bot” in their coupon codes (for example, ENGAGERBOT34).

You can also do this with your UTM code for the content your bot links to. Give it a chatbot UTM feed, and you can measure clicks and traffic from the bot and track the UTM through your customer journey.

You could even measure the ROI of your bot, which would be incredible!

7. Replace your email newsletters with chatbot newsletters

We often talk about how valuable chatbots can be for inbound requests. But what about requests that are sent out? There is a lot of room for experimentation here. One of the best ways to do this is to use your bot as a content delivery system.

Using Facebook Messenger as an example, everyone who talks to you via Messenger is added to your contact list. You can set up a chatbot and ask them to sign up for your regular updates and announcements so that you build a list of subscribers for your Messenger bot – and voila! That’s a Messenger bot.

8. Send simple surveys to your contacts

As bots have a high engagement rate, you also have a good chance of getting your message noticed in a survey. While it is notoriously difficult to get many responses to a survey via email or on a website or app, it is easier to use a bot.

Like the email newsletter tips above, with a survey, you first ask people to sign up to hear from you, and then you can send them occasional messages with short and simple surveys.

Many of the tools mentioned earlier offer the option of a two-click reply, which is ideal for a mobile experience with social media bots.

9. Enrich your bot with data and personalization

Check out this list of powerful chatbot superpowers:

• Universal Studios tells you the wait time for rides
• Marriott can tell you room availability
• CheapFlights tells you the best options for your dates and your price range
• Domino’s lets you order pizza!

It’s all thanks to the big data these brands are putting into their bots. Let’s assume you haven’t reached this scale yet; don’t worry. You can wade through the water by anticipating your customers’ most common questions and doing your best to fill your bot with details. Simple things like opening hours and daily deals can make the experience more enjoyable.

If you have a customer base that needs data-rich answers, use the example above to inspire your chatbot dreams.

There is also the issue of personalization. And in this case, we’ll make it up to your best judgment. Several tools allow you to personalize the chat environment with variables such as name or location, and if it comes from a bot, it can veer between helpful and annoying. Use with caution.

10. Make sure to promote your chatbot, so people know you have one

It might seem obvious, but it’s probably one of the most important tips we’ve covered so far. Your robot will only be successful if people find it and use it. To learn about it!

This can happen organically when people visit your Facebook page and are redirected to you via Messenger. Or you can be proactive.

A couple of our favorite ways of promotion are:

• Mention your bot in the list of all your customer support channels
• Add a call to action to your blog or website to get in touch
• Advertise your bot on social media for those who want to sign up for it. This could work well for the messenger newsletter we talked about.

Have you checked out our Media Chatbot yet?

It helps you keep your website is in tip-top shape. Check it out now here: Media Chatbot

Read More: What Chatbot Marketing Is and How to Use It In Digital Marketing

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What Chatbot Marketing Is and How to Use It In Digital Marketing

What Chatbot Marketing Is and How to Use It In Digital Marketing

With much of the world turning to automation, it’s no surprise that bots are ubiquitous, especially in the marketing world. While any marketing strategy needs to be practical, bots and automation certainly don’t hurt when managing processes and generating leads and customers.

One great automation strategy is chatbot marketing. This digital marketing strategy helps automate customer communication to a certain degree before referring the customer or user to a natural person to help them.

But that’s not all.

What Are Chatbots?

Chatbots are computer programs or software that can automatically talk to users, and they can be programmed to respond differently depending on the user’s choices or requests. For example, a chatbot can ask a user which company’s services they would like to know about and, depending on their choice, give them an answer or direct them to better information.

Advanced bots are supported by AI (Artificial Intelligence), but most chatbots are programmed with specific answers and well-designed conversation trees. Many third-party services make it easy for marketers and business owners to create their chatbot conversation trees without the need for specialist programming or development skills.

The conversation tree covers every possible customer response and tells the chatbot what to say based on that response. Here is an example of a simple conversation tree:

These questions will relate to your specific business and the questions you want your bot to ask your customers.

What Is chatbot marketing?

Chatbot marketing is a strategy that uses chatbots for marketing your business. This tactic caught on when Facebook opened up the possibility of integrating bots into Messenger features. Previously, many Facebook Page messengers were not used at all. Occasionally, customers would send in questions or concerns, and it was much less common for businesses to respond.

The marketing strategy of chatbots can ensure that your customer service queries don’t go unanswered, and many can even help create sales opportunities.

How Can You Use Chatbots in Marketing?

There are various ways in which can use chatbots for digital marketing strategies. Bots can be beneficial for automating basic processes, answering common customer questions, and even making sales.

Let’s find out more.

Chatbots for Customer Service

If your business receives many customer service requests via Messenger (or if you want to use Facebook Messenger as a customer service channel), bots can be a great help. You can create a chatbot that helps customers narrow their customer service questions to a specific category before directing them to the right contact or answer.

Chatbots for Sales

Chatbots can help direct people to your sales channel. Whether you use it to make consultation appointments or collect emails for your newsletter, it can be a great entry point into the customer journey. Many customers are hesitant to pick up the phone, and therefore, it can be helpful to offer them an easy way to communicate online.

Chatbots for FAQ

Let customers or potential customers ask frequently asked questions on your chatbot. Programming your bot with question options and associated answers is a great way to convey information to your audience in a more interactive environment. Your customers will enjoy interacting with your chatbot, making them more likely to choose your business over the competition.

Chatbots for Shopping

Facebook Messenger chatbots even allow your business to offer an in-app shopping experience. You can customize chatbots to allow your customers to browse products and make purchases directly from the chatbot.

Chatbots for Marketing

Of course, there are so various marketing strategies using chatbots. You can use it as a lead nurturing tool. Once someone willingly sends a message to your chatbot, you can continue to send them helpful information to make a purchase or sign up for a service. This can be a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal (even more powerful than email marketing) as it is a more direct form of personal communication.

What Not to Do in chatbot marketing

It is essential to keep in mind that there are still some reservations regarding chatbot marketing. While this can be a powerful and effective strategy, it still requires some work from your marketing team or agency.

Firstly, you should not allow your bots to take over your marketing completely. For a strategy to be successful, it needs to have some human touch. While automation can be beneficial, it should not be the only way to communicate. Whether you have your chatbot start conversations that lead to humans or have your team regularly check to ensure the bot is working correctly, it’s important to remember that chatbot marketing is not a set it and forget it strategy.

Secondly, when using chatbots as a marketing or nurturing tool, don’t go too far. Remember that it’s a fantastic tool, and it’s helpful to send messages directly to your customers. So you don’t want to abuse this power. If you send too many messages to your audience, everyone will unsubscribe, and they won’t want to see spam from your business in their Facebook Messenger inbox.

Chatbot marketing is a popular, high-converting digital marketing strategy. It requires some preparation, especially in creating conversation trees and using third-party software to program your chatbots. Still, the initial time and cost investment are worth it if you get this strategy right.

Have you checked out our Marketing Chatbot yet?

It helps you keep your website is in tip-top shape. Check it out now here: Marketing Chatbot

Read More: Chatbots – The Future of IT Support

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