Tech in Real Estate: 3 Tips for Boosting CX using AI-Powered Tools

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There’s no denying the huge impact that artificial intelligence (AI) has had on our professional and personal lives, especially over the past few years. AI-powered assistants such as Siri and Amazon, self-driving cars, and smart recommendations on Netflix have become less of movie items and more of normal facets of life.

In the business world, AI has its most impactful effects on CX and overall customer relations, largely because automation has long been the dream for businesses owners and managers for decades. AI-powered automation has been shown to improve the effectiveness of employees, especially those that are tasked with customer service and CX.

It helps take away the monotony of repetitive and boring work, enabling workers to concentrate on developing their skills and ultimately becoming better conduits for delivering premium experiences to customers.

Like every other customer-driven industry out there, CX is a crucial differentiating factor for the real estate industry. It determines whether a customer will become a buyer or renter or run to your competitors when you don’t offer one or more elements of a good experience.

And because CX and AI are quickly becoming inseparable, it’s vital for every real estate professional and business to identify how they can integrate AI-powered tools to ensure they’re not left behind.

Here are a few guiding tips to help you boost CX with AI.

1.) Identify specific areas that would benefit from AI

With everyone adopting AI-powered tools, it’s easy to get baited into bringing in AI without first understanding how it can help you boost CX for your real estate business. Real estate agents are using elements of AI for everything from finding or managing storage units to automating listings on websites for simpler and accurate property searches.

However, businesses that quickly take up AI without first analyzing where in the business the technology can be used to add value often buy into expensive AI-powered platforms and tools that eat into the business’s finances without any meaningful impact on CX.   

For instance, while every real estate business – and every other business for that matter – would love to deploy an automated system to answer emails in a way that improves the customer’s experience, a typical business would need thousands of email conversations per month to unlock the full potential of an AI-powered email assistant.

This is simply because the machine learning algorithms needed to make email draft suggestions would need to learn from a huge dataset of emails. So, if you don’t deal with high volumes of emails, you’d be better off using AI for some other purpose.

2.) Make sure your intelligent tool or platform has a human backend   

While we’d like to think of AI as an intelligent god, it isn’t – at least not yet. According to some studies, AI-powered chatbots can only resolve up to 35% of customer queries without human participation. And even if this number goes up to 40 or 50 percent in future, it’s difficult to ignore the value of another human being when dealing with customers.

This is why 86 percent of your customers will always expect a human representative on the other end in case they want to chat with a live person. For players in the real estate space, this is critically important because overall CX is based on personalized intelligence and elements of personal relationships like emotional IQ.

So, if you’re planning to bring on board an AI-powered chatbot to augment customer service at your real estate practice, always make sure your customers can access a real person whenever they need to.

3.) Be wary of chat UIs

Chat-based user interfaces (UIs) are a popular implementation of intelligent chatbots on websites and product pages. They can easily pass off as live chat agents even when in reality the user is speaking to a chatbot. While this approach may work in some setups, you risk setting unrealistic expectations for your clients when they truly believe there’s a real estate agent on the other end, which may have a negative impact on CX.

Always avoid chat-based UIs if you’re only linking the chatbot to a bunch of articles on your knowledge base. Go for something like a search box UI – something similar to the Google search box – that is helpful and intuitive for better CX.

Bottom Line

Real estate agents and agencies have a lot to gain from AI-based technologies, especially in areas such as customer service, engagement, and experience. Consumers are always looking for intelligent ways to interact with providers and often reward tech-savvy providers who put their needs first.

When implemented correctly, AI is a big differentiating factor for real estate businesses and others that rely heavily on the customer.

Vikas Agrawal
Vikas Agrawal is a start-up Investor and co-founder of the Infographic design agency Infobrandz.com, He is a highly influential research analyst and strategic marketing consultant.Vikas advises and plans the visual marketing campaigns of Medium to Large companies. Vikas has worked globally across multiple industries including retail, financial services, logistics, manufacturing, telecoms and pharmaceuticals deploying effective strategic marketing plans and methodologies. A renowned blogger on the subject of Technology, Marketing and Entrepreneurship.

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