Choosing between Live Chat and Meet Elise for a property website depends on the specific needs and goals of your property management strategy.
Live Chat for Multifamily involves handling online communications with live centralized leasing agents, trained to serve prospects and residents.
Meet Elise is an AI chatbot software used to handle online communications in an automated way.
Here are a few reasons why someone might opt for either Live Chat or Meet Elise:
1. Real-Time Interaction
- Live Chat: Provides immediate, real-time communication between prospects, residents and centralized leasing consultants. It can be setup across property websites, ILS services, and social profiles. Live Chat allows customers to get instant responses, and can be served in the same way that would with an in-person meeting at the property office, or over the phone when calling an office.
- Meet Elise: While Meet Elise offers instant communication, it is between a prospect/resident and an automated multifamily chatbot. It can certainly respond quickly, but it may not always provide the same level of communication provided by a Leasing Consultant. Depending on the depth of service you’d like to provide, it may not be sufficient.
2. Personalized Customer Experience
- Live Chat: Allows for a more personalized and human-based interaction. Prospects and residents can engage in real conversations with live agents, making it easier to build rapport and grow trust. This can be a game changer in terms of the prospect experience and how they align that experience with the property and company brand. It also leads to much deeper interactions, better lead generation and data capture, and helps prioritize prospects and move them through the funnel.
- Meet Elise: Uses AI to track conversations with prospects and refine responses over time. While efficient, these interactions may lack the personal touch that live human operators can provide. The automated responses are good at providing some of the basic essential details about a unit or how to schedule a tour, but the depth and ability isn’t there yet.
3. Flexibility and Integration
- Live Chat: Can be easily integrated with various CRM systems, property management software, and marketing tools. Because it’s human based, it’s a versatile solution that can be tailored to meet the specific needs of a property or management portfolio. No matter the tech stack, or the processes and protocols of customer interactions, it can be adapted to work seamlessly and support the entire organization.
- Meet Elise: While Meet Elise does integrate with major property management systems they also provide their own CRM system, and it can be setup independent of the other systems you already use. If you are already a user of a leading PMS system it may not be necessarily providing additional functionality or capabilities above and beyond the automated chatbot systems those PMS’s already provide. If your primary goal is enhancing real-time communication, Live Chat may offer more flexibility.
4. Cost-Effectiveness
- Live Chat: Often comes with a range of pricing options, from basic coverage options to more advanced capabilities and extended hour coverage. It can be accessible for properties of all sizes, and works great across portfolios, particularly when the software requirements of properties within a portfolio are different. Additionally, many Live Chat platforms offer scalable solutions that grow with your business (like ours).
- Meet Elise: Generally offers a flat per unit cost which may be a little bit cheaper than Live Chat for smaller portfolios. But for larger management companies the cost differences can be negligible.
5. Ease of Use
- Live Chat: Typically easier to set up and use because it’s all done as part of the onboarding process, and the technical end is handled 100% by our in house team. An account manager will handle all the day to day tasks, management, and reporting to the management team.
- Meet Elise: Meet Elise’s platform is also simple to integrate, but depending on in-house tech staff, you may need to hire additional help for the integration and setup process. It will also be managed mostly by your own in-house teams, so it requires training, oversight, and in-house management (more-so than Live Chat). This could be more complex to manage depending on capabilities of your team.
6. Focus on Communication
- Live Chat: Designed primarily for communication, making it the go-to choice for property managers who want to focus on enhancing their customer experience and the quality of interactions with prospects and residents.
- Meet Elise: Designed to fill a set of specific needs for a specific type of user. It has helpful capabilities that are improving all the time. However, keep in mind that prospects and residents can become frustrated when the automated tools don’t understand them correctly, or aren’t providing the information they requested. It’s still difficult for AI to provide the nuance, understanding, and conversation of a Live Leasing Agent.
Conclusion
Live Chat is a great choice for property management teams looking for a straightforward, real-time communication tool that enhances customer interaction and service personalization on their property website. If the priority is direct engagement between prospects and leasing agents, and if you want a cost-effective, flexible solution that’s easy to integrate and use, Live Chat may be the better option compared to Meet Elise. However, if your needs extend beyond communication to include advanced leasing automation and analytics, Meet Elise might be worth considering.