Real estate support at scale: AppFolio’s AI transformation
“What I’m imagining is three years from now, my frontline will be more like AI leaders versus agents.”AppFolio is a property management business. It’s a platform where we bring all our customers together to give them one comprehensive real estate management solution. We have about 20,000 plus customers, which have millions of tenants and millions of residents actually living in those properties. So customer service is the heartbeat of why customers are actually buying the software itself.
We were struggling with how to scale our human support because demand was going through the roof, and the biggest thing is cost. The only way to scale traditionally has been through humans, so when we go down that route, the cost amplifies. We cannot scale with that model.
The biggest piece was low code, no code. I could give it to my content experience folks, or to my customer experience team and say, “Let’s go and launch it.” That was a moment of, great – this is the right partnership, which we need to invest in.
Fin definitely was a game changer for us. If I look over the last couple of years, 60–70% of my conversations overall that are happening, Fin is involved in. And then out of that, 60 to 65% resolution – Fin is kind of helping me. And that is incredible, because that means that customers are actually getting, in that moment, answers.
They don’t need to wait. I’ll give you an example. Customers are coming up, “Hey, my lease is coming up for renewal and everything else. I’m unable to process this for X, Y, Z.” Instead of giving them a canned answer or help articles, Fin is actually interacting with them. “Which unit are we talking about? Which part of the lease are you struggling with?”
Purely from an experience standpoint, right now our CX score is around about 93%. That’s the biggest impact. I can talk about financial impact, but again, that’s minimal when you compare to the experience that customers are getting.
When we were looking for a solution to move off from our previous partners, we were looking at somebody who is actually not only a tech provider, but more of a co-creator. The Intercom team, they come in, they understand the OKRs, they understand the goals, and proactively keep me updated.
I think we’re still scratching the surface. I don’t see AI or tech purely as a cost play – I see it as scale.
Because where humans cannot scale, AI is actually amplifying that human capability. It’s enabling humans to become AI supervisors or AI leaders.
