The Respage Chatbot: What Is It and Why Do Multifamily Marketers Need It?
Early last week, we officially announced our new Respage Chatbot offering. Fans of our products and services met this announcement with loads of excitement, but they also had loads of questions.
This post aims to clear the whats, whys, and whens:
What is Chatbot?
The Respage Chatbot is an artificially intelligent leasing agent. We’ve programmed it to answer all of the most common questions leasing agents receive from rental prospects. These include questions about pricing, floor plans, pet policies, etc.
Chatbot lives on your property’s website, where it will greet your site visitors shortly after arrival. Visitors can then interact with Chatbot or ignore it to browse your site’s pages on their own.
Why Does Multifamily Need Chatbot?
Respage is committed to helping multifamily properties build better, more engaged communities by providing great experiences. Chatbot represents yet another way for us to further that objective in several ways.
The first is that Chatbot runs twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This non-stop availability means your rental prospects can find the information they’re looking for even when your leasing agents are asleep or out showing units.
The second way Chatbot builds better experiences for your prospective renters involves site navigation. Let’s say you have a prospect that’s in a rush but doesn’t know where a floorplan or pet policy page is located on your site. That prospect can simply ask Chatbot for floorplan designs or rules about pets, and the bot will respond with the appropriate links or information.
Of course, there are several other reasons Chatbot will be a useful tool for multifamily. It’s worth noting, for example, that Millennials aren’t particularly big on talking with leasing agent on the phone. Chatbot provides a workaround for this generation so they can find answers to their questions without speaking to leasing agents directly. Regarding lead generation, Chatbot gives property management the chance to capture a ton of data about their prospects. On another note, we believe Chatbot will become extremely useful for hands-off web browsing and voice search, though the current version of the bot will not be compatible with these rising web trends.
When Can Multifamily Start Using Chatbot?
The Respage Chatbot is officially still in Beta. However, multifamily professionals will have the chance to meet and interact with Chatbot at the 2017 AIM Conference in May. If you want to try Chatbot but do not plan on attending AIM, you can sign up to test the Beta version on our site. Please note that the latter option is only available to current Respage users.