Is an AI receptionist right for you?

An AI receptionist is your "front desk"—managing inbound inquiries such as calls, emails, and messages. It is an advanced artificial intelligence system designed to manage customer service scenarios, all while operating 24/7. It functions like an employee on your team, except it can scale to handle simultaneous inquiries and never needs to go on vacation.

How exactly is an AI receptionist built?

The most successful AI receptionists are built on top of the fast-growing large language models (LLMs) and trained to understand customer inquiries, provide relevant responses, and route messages to the appropriate personnel or departments.

Unlike traditional automated phone systems or chatbots with rigid scripts, modern AI receptionists can engage in dynamic conversations, comprehend context, and offer personalized interactions. They can greet customers, answer frequently asked questions, send information, collect customer information, and even troubleshoot basic issues—all without human intervention. In addition, the latest AI receptionist solutions, like Super, allow for omnichannel support across phone calls, text messages, and emails.

What makes it a "verticalized agent"?

In property management and real estate, there are a lot of unique scenarios and sticky areas—such as Fair Housing Laws to manage. This is why a verticalized agentic approach is necessary for the AI customer service tools you pick. A verticalized AI receptionist like Super is trained by us on Fair Housing Law, has an understanding of the local time, knows your portfolio and contacts, can respond in multiple languages, and can be trained on your preferences.

We understand that you need certain guardrails to feel secure in a solution that understands your unique industry's requirements (such as how to handle maintenance troubleshooting). We also understand that you want to customize for individual preferences and portfolio differences (such as what to do after hours, or specific property policies). This is what makes verticalized agents special, and particularly in property management where there is complexity in managing several properties, property relationships, and compliance.

When is an AI receptionist better than a person?

AI receptionists offer several advantages, making them an increasingly attractive solution for businesses of all sizes. Here’s why:

1. 24/7 availability: Unlike human employees who require breaks, vacations, and sleep, AI receptionists operate around the clock. This ensures that businesses never miss an important call, email, or text, even outside of standard working hours.
2. Cost-effectiveness: Hiring and training a human receptionist can be expensive, not to mention the ongoing training resources needed. AI receptionists provide a cost-efficient alternative, reducing payroll expenses while maintaining high service quality.
3. Scalability: A single AI receptionist can handle thousands of inquiries simultaneously, eliminating wait times and improving customer satisfaction. This is particularly useful for businesses experiencing seasonal demand spikes or rapid growth.
4. Consistency: Unlike people, who sometimes have a bad day or forget information, AI receptionists ensure accuracy in following your company's SOPs and always following your policies in how they answer questions and log customer interactions.
5. Multi-channel communication: AI receptionists seamlessly manage phone calls, emails, and text messages, ensuring customers receive prompt responses regardless of their preferred communication method.
6. Better customer service: Customers today want responses, fast. They hate leaving voicemails or wading through phone trees. They expect you to reply right away. An AI receptionist meets the demand of the modern customer's expectations.
7. Repurpose your people: AI receptionists take the repetitive grunt work off of your team's plate—reducing burnout but equally importantly allowing you to repurpose your people towards more strategic work. When they focus on solving bigger problems, you get better outcomes.

What does it take to train your AI receptionist?

Training an AI receptionist is similar to onboarding a new hire, but with a key advantage: you train once and scale infinitely. Here’s how the training process typically works:

1. Define your needs: What tasks should your AI receptionist should handle? For instance, Super's AI receptionist can handle FAQs, leasing inquiries, maintenance troubleshooting, routing requests, closing tasks, and summarizing and logging inquiries
2. Give it context: Give the AI the knowledge to do its job well. For instance, what are your operating hours? What's your leasing policy? How do you find the latest listings? How can tenants get into the portal? These are all common questions that supplying knowledge to the AI will allow it to specifically answer on your behalf.
3. Connect portfolio data: Sync over property and contact data to give your AI receptionist an understanding of who it is communicating with, and what knowledge is most relevant to supply.
4. Give it feedback: Like human employees, AI receptionists improve over time. Businesses can monitor interactions, review customer feedback, and refine the AI’s responses to enhance accuracy and relevance.

Unlike human employees who require repeated training due to turnover, AI receptionists retain knowledge indefinitely, eliminating the need for constant retraining. This allows businesses to scale customer service operations without proportional increases in staffing costs.

What can you use an AI receptionist to do?

An AI receptionist is versatile and can cover common, highly time consuming and customer-facing use cases, such as:

1. Answering repetitive questions: Property managers receive many recurring inquiries, such as “where can I see your listings?” and "how do I login to the portal?" AI receptionists handle these effortlessly, freeing up human staff for more complex tasks.
2. Routing calls and messages: Today, humans need to monitor voicemails and inboxes to see who needs to respond. An AI receptionists can intelligently route calls and messages based on customer needs. For instance, a property management firm can direct maintenance requests to the right department without human intervention.
3. Logging and summarizing issues: Instead of requiring employees to manually take notes, AI receptionists can log interactions, summarize issues, and forward reports to the appropriate personnel, automating the paper trail for every communication.
4. Troubleshooting and gathering information: AI receptionists can guide customers through basic troubleshooting steps and collect important information that can serve as context for human team members. For example, they can assist tenants in resetting a thermostat or checking for power outages before sending a maintenance technician—potentially even resolving the issue!
5. Escalating issues: The AI receptionist can be trained on what types of issues to escalate to a team member. For instance, if a customer emails about something that is an emergency—the AI receptionist can flag this needs to be escalated and call the appropriate team members to notify them.
6. Lead qualification: Answering and responding to new business inquiries quickly is a major differentiator to engaging with potential customers. AI receptionists can gather key customer details, qualify leads, and direct high-priority prospects to the right people on your team right away.
7. Multilingual conversations: If you have a customer base that speak other languages, your AI receptionist can also help them. Your team receives a translated summary so they know how to manage the inquiry appropriately and what was said.

Is an AI receptionist right for you?

If your property management company is struggling to stay on top of calls, weighed down by repetitive inquiries, and wanting to maintain a high level of customer experience as you scale, then an AI receptionist could be a complete game changer for your business. Consistent, always on, and cost-effective, an AI receptionist can greatly augment your team—and make customer interactions even more human as it knows when to escalate to a team member or ask for human assistance.

For a industry that prioritizes efficiency, consistency, and 24/7 service, setting up an AI receptionist is a strategic way to optimize customer interactions while freeing up your human employees for higher-value tasks. It's a win-win for the customer and the company.

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