AI tools offer various benefits across different departments, enhancing efficiency and productivity at Rentec Direct. While our team understands that clients want to speak to a real person, there are other ways that our human team members can enhance efficiency and provide better service with a few AI tools. Find out how our customer-focused property management software company uses AI-powered tools, and what pitfalls we avoid.
The useability and ease of access to programs like ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools have influenced nearly every industry. From real estate transactions to code hacking and image generation to inventory management for retail, AI’s potential is endless as new products and use cases are announced regularly.
When used well, these tools can help businesses thrive, but putting those ideals into action can prove challenging for some businesses. Within our industry of property management software, our tech company stayed ahead of the curve by becoming the first to introduce AI technology into our software, allowing clients to instantly generate rental listing descriptions to make their marketing messaging sound more appealing.
Our team has found additional uses for implementing different AI tools and it’s positively influenced every department. While every sector has their own unique needs, many of these use cases are easy to apply within your business.
Our company, Rentec Direct, consists of 17 team members who support or develop our software and educational blog. Top competitors have teams of 1500+. For us, finding the best tools to streamline work while effectively supporting our clients is a key value. I asked members of each of the departments at my software company how they had used AI for a work-related task. AI tools can help with efficiency, improve tone for client messaging, cure writer’s block, and improve accuracy in development tasks.
AI for Marketing and Public Relations
ChatGPT is a great tool for kicking off research on a topic and helping with outline creation. Our marketing team will write dozens of articles each month, and after 15 years there is rarely a topic we have yet to cover.
I use ChatGPT to provide ideas when I am facing writer’s block. While I always write and research on my own, I will use AI prompts as a springboard and inspiration for my own adjacent topics or ask it for talking points within a related subject that I may not have considered, previously. – Rentec Direct Blog Editor, Brentnie Daggett
AI for Administration
AI detection software, like Winston, can help companies verify the likelihood if content was written by AI or a human. AI detection software uses AI to identify markers in written content that would indicate if a tool like ChatGPT was used to write the content.
New for 2024, we plan to use an AI detection software to verify if essays submitted for the Tech Mastery Scholarship were likely generated by AI. We might need to shift our scholarship’s focus to accomplishments over essay content. We also use AI detection software, like Winston, to verify if our writing sounds human or AI-generated. We value human written content as part of our brand’s voice, and an AI detection tool will help us accomplish this goal and improve our writing. -Rentec Direct Tech Mastery Scholarship Chair, Kaycee Miller
AI for Software Development
Almost all the members of the development team have an AI autocomplete tool built into their code editors. Some developers find it helpful while others prefer the manual process. Besides a department-wide adoption of AI autocomplete, our developers have found individual use cases like improving written instructions and instantly providing answers to coding questions.
I’ve used it a couple times to fine-tune some wording. Like, I’ll write a paragraph of explanatory text or something for a tooltip and then I’ll ask ChatGPT to fix it up. – Rentec Direct developer, Jeremy Smith
I just used it for a pretty handy use case yesterday. I didn’t wanna read a bunch of documentation to figure out how to get an in-browser text editor to do what I wanted, so I asked ChatGPT for the code to do it. – Rentec Direct developer, Travis van Couvering
AI for Website Development
AI has made the image selection process for our website more efficient by using an AI image generator, like Midjourney.
We used to spend hours sifting through stock photos trying to find images that would work for our website and digital content. These images needed to get approved by management and purchased to meet copyright usage laws. Now I utilize AI image generation, which allows me to input keywords and unique images are created for me to use. It saves a ton of time. -Rentec Direct Webmaster, Erich Mosier
AI for Customer Service
For customer service, we’ve used AI to help us improve notification and update emails we send our clients. These messages are routine and simple, so AI can help enhance the tone. With customer service messaging, it’s essential that we diligently proofread the suggested edits so we can still personalize the communication we send our clients.
I’ve used the AI assist feature in Helpscout to make messages friendlier. – Rentec Direct Client Success Team, Kevin Swiger
However, we are finding some clients are fatigued with AI in the form of chatbots when it comes to customer service, so be careful when outsourcing too many tasks to the machine.
I’ve had clients want me to prove we don’t use AI or bots for our customer service live chat tool. I think a lot of other systems use AI, so they almost expect it from companies and are impressed when I verify it’s a real person responding to them every time. – Rentec Direct Product Advisor, Sha Lehmberg
Understand AI’s limitations
It’s true that creating a highly effective team requires early adoption of any tools that will increase efficiency and employee productivity while keeping client satisfaction high. AI is a great example of this kind of tool, but only when used appropriately. While helpful, it’s important that everyone understand AI limitations and use its tools to enhance your own abilities and processes, rather than replace them.
It is essential to be cognizant that in spite of AI’s relative newness to the business space, burgeoning less-effective tools have already contributed to consumer fatigue. Customers will be wary of AI or chatbot tools and might want a personal and human touch when seeking assistance. In spite of our personalized customer service, clients are still skeptical that our chat is connecting them with a real human support professional. For this reason, it is imperative to remember that AI’s assistance should be mitigated or eliminated as an option for customer-facing interactions.
As it stands today, AI cannot replace the skillful creativity of your expert team members, but AI can certainly enhance their value to your business while streamlining their workload. Improving your employees’ experience and ensuring quality service to your key stakeholders will likely require AI implementation in the near future, adaptation now can be linchpin to success.
