Leveraging AppFolio’s AI Leasing Assistant, Lisa

How has AppFolio's AI Leasing Assistant, Lisa, impacted your business?

Using Lisa has tremendously improved and streamlined our leasing processes. The number of leads we receive daily is nearly impossible to handle by our staff. The phone calls, emails, text messages, and guest cards are simply too much for our leasing agents to respond to, let alone the showings. Lisa has allowed our team to focus on our customers, leaving the back-end administrative tasks to Lisa. Not only is she able to respond to inquiries and set up showings, but she is also able to cross-sell properties when she identifies another option for a prospect. Our customers are noticing the difference too. Before Lisa, we were hearing from our customers about our response time, due to the sheer volume of inquiries. Now, we are experiencing more positive sentiment overall and our customers have instant gratification with the information that they need. And as an added bonus, our team is much happier and less stressed because they can now focus their efforts on the customer service and their leasing appointments!

How was your onboarding experience with Lisa?

Our point person for onboarding at AppFolio has been wonderful. She answers every email and responds to every call and question and brings in developers when needed to ensure that we have the answers that we need. Having the Help Center information was great, but having a representative to follow-up with us when something wasn't clear was crucial.

The benefit of having a point person is when customizing the platform to a company's particular business model. Every company does business differently and having someone there to answer questions and help with our business-specific processes is wonderful.

How does Lisa fit into your team?

She's easy to interact with, and her level of customer service feels natural when she responds to prospects. She asks good questions, and if she doesn't know the answer to a particular question, she asks us to answer and we're able to follow up right away. As time goes by, she also learns the answers for future questions and continues to improve over time.

How has Lisa optimized your leasing process?

Her reporting gives us insight into the specific platforms our leads come from and then which platforms are performing best. From a marketing perspective, this information is incredibly valuable when we asses where we are spending our marketing dollars. She identifies which of our listings provide the most traffic and enables us to make more informed decisions on the allocation of future funds. She's also provided an added level of transparency (via her notifications) into the performance of our leasing agents. We know if our leasing agents are attending scheduled showings, canceling, declining or rescheduling them. Lisa's reporting is able to alert us and raise any red flags so we're able to follow up with an agent, give feedback on performance, and ensure that our team is functioning at the highest possible levels.

How has Lisa freed up time for you and your staff?

The number of leads we receive daily is nearly impossible to handle by our staff. Despite hiring temporary staff to try to cover the added workload, we were just not able to keep up with the volume; and in the bigger picture, we could not adequately afford to hire the staff needed to continue to handle this volume. After assessing the performance of the department as a whole and running the analysis of our profitability, incorporating Lisa was a no brainer. We are more profitable and have seen our team's performance increase dramatically with no lag time in response or missed leads. We work normal business hours, but Lisa is always on. She allows for continued those conversations after hours with our prospects, who feel like they are getting great service.

With Lisa, we're booking more showings and we're not getting bogged down with repetitive questions, lead tracking, and follow up. Our team is able to focus on higher level interactions. Lisa has access to our calendars, streamlines communication with the prospect and books the showing for us directly without any added interaction from our team.

Tell us about your experience with AppFolio service and support.

From day one through the onboarding process to today, the team at AppFolio has always done a great job helping streamline our day to day operations. We have always had good experiences with the AppFolio Support Team. Whether through submitting a request or suggesting a new feature, they are quick to respond and ready with an answer.

How has AppFolio changed the day-to-day experience of everyone on your team?

AppFolio is the hub of our operations. We have implemented nearly all features within AppFolio and in doing so, it has provided an ultra-streamlined experience for our team and for our customers--both our owners and our residents. It's always important for us to minimize administrative time, thus reducing our employee overhead, which allows our company to create a much leaner operation. AppFolio has allowed us to do that. With the recent updates to their mobile applications, the user experience has improved for our residents and our owners, and also for our employees, adding efficiencies while working in the field.

Would you recommend AppFolio to other property management companies? Why?

Yes, of all the software platforms, AppFolio is the most intuitive, has the best and most streamlined user interface, and continually stays on the forefront of future technological advancements, giving us the ability to stay at the forefront of our industry.