Meet Mark Rollag, CEO of xtDirect, an outsourced global call center service for Century 21.
Century 21 is owned by Realogy, where the name of the game is getting leads for franchisees. Mark Rollag, CEO at xtDirect, had this to say:
“The results are amazing with this particular use case. Before launching a chatbot on the Century21.com site, we managed calls and live chats in the thousands. It’s a happy problem to have. But we were managing too many chats.”
(Watch more of the interview with Mark on Youtube in our Botcopy for Real Estate segment.)
Mark understood the problem.
Too many chats. So he used Botcopy and Dialogflow to come up with a solution that instantaneously fields a request and creates that first touchpoint in a relationship.
“In my mind, it’s so simple. It’s a way to say, we’re glad you’re here.”
Once the user is engaged, the bot can adeptly find out what the user wants to do, gather the lead-generation info and forward it to the right broker nationwide, without human intervention. The value of this is obvious. Mark made some other happy discoveries along the way:
“The info we gathered can allow us to real-time adjust the marketing budget for the online ad spend, for example, who would have ever thought everybody would be moving from New York down to Florida? That’s the power of having this organized dataset being generated and stored by the bot. My agents don’t have to manually key in anything. The bot pulls the info needed and punches it through to the Google Sheet we use to organize the leads, which auto-sends to the right agent associated with the zip code.”
The value of a lead
Mark explains that the value of a real estate lead is roughly one-third of the buy-side commission if you’re a licensed real estate agent, so basically, 1% of the house’s value is what a lead is worth.
“Leads are valuable, so we want to get the credit that we help generate the leads, and because customers are willingly entering their info, when the agent calls, the lead picks up because they don’t think it’s a robocall. So not only are we getting more leads, we’re getting better quality leads.”
A bot versus a form or live agent
One of the beautiful things about bots is users telling you whether they like the experience. Users will curse the bot out, tell it it’s stupid, we’ve seen it all. This kind of open data is marketing gold because once you have the transcripts showing where end users are getting frustrated, you can easily change the conversation flows to reduce those pain points. Soon your conversion rate is through the roof.
Mark explains:
“Many real estate companies, if they get a million site visits, they may capture two or three thousand leads. But we now know we can get 60%-70% conversion rates by adding the bot to the site and continually optimizing it after reviewing the bot’s analytics.”
What makes a good bot?
The variables and use cases are endless, but here are a few guidelines:
We find that users are more likely to deal with a chatbot with a rich, custom front end, which can assist with a live chat handoff and has buttons, lists, carousels, videos, form components, and more. The Century 21 bot used a combination of buttons and forms, with natural language inputs and simple text responses, to personalize the conversation as much as possible. At the same time, we also keep it on “guard rails” with buttons that sort users into the proper conversational flows.
Moreover, good web bots should have a robust natural language understanding capability that lets users say or type questions.
And last but not least, the front-end web chat UI should look and feel branded and artistically tweaked to perfection, require no logins (unless you want it to), and meet the user on their terms.
If it can do all that, you have a killer automation machine on your hands that can radically cut costs and boost productivity.
With that part mastered, you can take it a step further with bots that can read the room, detect ref parameters and language browser settings, and know what page a user’s on so that the bot can say relevant things at the right time.
It can even authenticate users, access databases, and do high-value tasks previously reserved for humans only. A solid front end to your bot can help you cross the authentication divide.
What this means for you:
You can do something similar to Century 21 with our help. You can test our software with a free trial, or look into ou, specially designed for enterprise team members in charge of spearheading bot projects. Visit Botcopy to get started, or watch the video to learn more.
