How Chatbots Can 10x Your Lead Generation in Real Estate | with Hardik Makadia

Chatbots help to digitize and automate the business lifecycles to acquire more leads. In this video, we speak with Hardik Makadia, co-founder of WotNot, to discuss the benefits of chatbots in real estate and how you can use them for your business.

Transcription

Ariel Herrera 0:00

Are you looking for a way to automate your lead generation than implementing chatbots is your solution. And this video I interview Hardik market dia, the founder of whatnot, he has over five years of experience running a business for chatbot services in the real estate industry. His team works with over 3000 clients a year and is able to convert traffic into leads 10 times more than traditional methods. I hope you receive as much value as I did, and how to automate and digitize your business lifecycle. All right, let's get to it. Today on tech and real estate podcasts, we have a special guest Hardik is going to be giving us an overview of chatbots. He is a co founder as well as growth hacker, and he's going to give us really great insights into how to add automation, as well as up your marketing within real estate. Welcome Hardik to the channel.

Unknown Speaker 0:54

Thank you so much for having me.

Ariel Herrera 0:57

Yeah, super excited that you're one of your posts on your site for real estate strategies using chatbots. I thought it was absolutely fascinating. I would love to get into it more. But before we dive into that, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and how you got into this space.

Unknown Speaker 1:15

Sure. So my name is Hardwick Mokoia. I'm the co founder of whatnot. So we basically help businesses just like yours and automating their conversations at scale. As you know, the start of COVID, every business is trying to go digital. And this was the first place where millennials and the new buyers that will come in the market looking for new things would find you. So we enable businesses like yours in automating all these digital conversations at scale so that you don't need to have a human mentor doing all these mundane things for you, but rather utilize them only when that's absolutely necessary. Right. Oh, yeah, that's awesome. How

Ariel Herrera 1:53

long have you been doing this for?

Unknown Speaker 1:56

Yeah, we've been doing this for the past four years. Now. It's a few running and it's going well, the market is exploding because of COVID. And we we are adding almost like 500 to 600 new customers every month. So it's growing at a crazy space.

Ariel Herrera 2:10

This? Yeah, I can imagine. And definitely a lot of people were probably in a more manual sense before COVID. And then once the pandemic, they really want to digitize correct

Unknown Speaker 2:19

100%. And real estate has been our biggest sector through which we have most of our customers, mainly for multiple reasons, right? Because a you sell very high value goods. So the value for lead is quite high. Yeah. Secondly, like a lot of within real estate, there are a lot of different set of audiences that would want to use bots. In the US. Typically, you find a lot of brokers or agents, right? Because there are 1000s of them. So every agent nowadays has its own website, but it's a matter of how do you make your website talk to the audience coming? Because having a bot on your website is it's like, you know, having a person speaking on behalf of you each and every single course. So not only a few, but every single person coming to website gets, you know, engaged in a chat with the board. The board, then asks you a few questions and takes the conversation from there. Yeah, exactly.

Ariel Herrera 3:13

I think it's absolutely amazing. And say if someone's not really hasn't had too much knowledge and chatbots. And maybe they've only used it before when going to Verizon and selecting a new iPhone on the website. And they've been asked questions there. But could you explain a little bit more of a use case for chatbots and real estate and how they work?

Unknown Speaker 3:35

Sure. So the biggest use case for tackling real estate is leads and because that's that's what every business wants to do in the world and generate more revenue for one company. But while you want to generate more revenue, you need to have a bigger pie. Because not every opportunity gets converted to a deal. So that's where a board comes in. So you have a website, you've done doing a lot of things to bring traffic to it. Maybe you have holdings at these places, which you are representing or running Facebook ads, or Google ads, etc. So all these traffic comes to your website, they are looking at properties and they're going away. Now, the job of the Chatbot is to try and engage each and every person coming to your site by saying here looking for a property to buy in Arizona or you know, a specific location. So that way, the bot, you know, takes up your attention because there is a thin sound effect comes with the board's message. It comes on your screen when you're looking around properties. And obviously the board is sending these messages which are in context to what you're looking at. So if you're looking at a property to buy, it shows you a message which is relevant to if you're looking to rent it shows you a message which is you know, matching that. So obviously like people who get these messages are more likely to open it because they are looking for, you know, so and so things and that pop up just triggers that engagement triggers what they were looking for, and that the board pops up. The conversations are quite calm, you know, easy, intuitive, and it has a lot of images gifs make it makes it very friendly. So it's as though you're speaking with your friend, but it's obviously a bot, and compositionally managed to capture a lot of videos, which sales representative would on the finish a few calls? Like, what do you want to do? Where do you want to buy a house? How many beds do you need? How many baths duty so it doesn't feel like you're filling a form, but you compositionally giving the data which in a way is doing so that data is being added to your CRM, or it helps in nurturing the details that you want. We have that person.

Ariel Herrera 5:44

Excellent. Yeah, a lot of benefits here. So the first part is that the chatbots immediate, so instead of the person just browsing through your website, maybe deciding to contact you that contact was happening right away? That's right. On the second, it's

Unknown Speaker 5:59

what you expected? Yeah, it's like your, it's like your sales guy, when you typically work to anymore. You know, the sales rep comes to you, and asks you like, what are you looking for? On the website, that doesn't happen. So this is like a way to say it, gets ahold of you and tries to probe you ask some questions.

Ariel Herrera 6:18

That's the part that I love the most. And me being just like a data geek, the fact that the bots able to ingest all this information, and actually, you said possibly enter into a CRM system. So now, when you have that lead, you're empowered have all this information of what the customer is actually looking for. Right?

Unknown Speaker 6:35

Exactly. And it's automated. So 24 hours a day, doesn't matter how many people are coming to your website, could be a few 100 for small people, or could be like hundreds and 1000s of people coming to your website, what speaks with each and every person, there is no discrimination between person a person B, which could happen, we'll use what is completely reliable, and stays within its boundaries. So it doesn't go over those boundaries and do some nonsense stuff, which is expected. So what are we defining the flow? That's, that's what the board executes. And that's what it does to achieve the objective, which is to generate qualified leads for your sales team, or, you know, book site visits for specific properties to your website. Got it? Like? Can

Ariel Herrera 7:18

you give a little bit more detail on the flow? So say someone's very new to chatbots? And they want to understand how does the Chatbot know to ask the next question, how does that flow actually occur?

Unknown Speaker 7:28

Yeah, so usually, chatbots are quite rule based. So what I mean by that is, think of a chatbot as a sequence of conversational blocks, where, when me and you speak, we are exchanging set of dialogues. That's what you want to define when you build a bot. So bot starts by, you know, let's say greetings. We are a greeting book. And after that, it shows you a list of options that you can choose. So that's where you add a list of buttons define what each button does. So depending on what people choose, it'll have different parts pricing from there. So if we choose buying a house, you may have a different list of questions which the board asks, if you choose sell a house, vote me ask them different set of questions. Because these are two different parts, which require two different set of questions. And depending on how you what kind of questions you want to ask, you can frame it and make it look very simple and intuitive. So it could be a list of buttons, it could be an open ended question. It could be a slider where you're adding your budget, or, you know, the kind of range that you have, is this house, or could be just very simple like set of cards, just like how we have these cards on MLS websites, which agents do embed, you have the image of the property, the name, the address, and some key selling points, like how many beds, how many baths, which school district nearby, etc. So you can have these small cards which have the image. So it's very easy for me to just scan through. And I just choose which one I like, set up the site visit and it's completely automated. I don't need to speak with anyone, just takes a couple minutes of my time, because there's no human involved at the backend typing in here. So I get all the answers. My job is done on your website. Yeah.

Ariel Herrera 9:15

Right. So you're able to have a lot of flexibility in the type of questions that the Chatbot can ask and say if someone wants to come over and take what their current flow is, and create a chat bot with your services, do you have ready made templates? Or is it more so that walk them through their current process and then develop it from scratch? How does that work?

Unknown Speaker 9:37

Right? Absolutely. We work on both models, do it yourself as well as done pre service, swim, do it yourself. We constantly keep adding a lot of templates because frankly, every business is quite different, even though you're similar, but you may have different kinds of questions you want to ask. So we have a ton of templates, like lead generation for brokers, lead generation for agents, regions, leasing companies, ton of them Choose whichever template you like, make a few changes here and there to just make it personalized to your company. So you can have your messages, say, Welcome to ACME Corp, or something of that sort, just make it live. So that's more of a templatized approach. But say you won't make any changes, you can always use the template and override it. So not necessarily, you're having that same template on your website, but you're making changes you have their weeks. And the second approach where we build a portfolio. So usually companies chatbots is fairly new technology, it's not something that's been around for years. So you won't find a lot of professional people that have experience in boiling water. And as a real estate person, you may definitely not have such experience. So that's where our team comes in. We just understand what your objectives are, what kind of questions your salespeople ask. And our team the resources, they present the board, the build the portfolio, so you don't need to even lift a finger. So everything is done from now on. And then it's as easy as that.

Ariel Herrera 11:01

Yeah, it's incredible. You have the expertise already, and the whole framework set up. So one of the questions that I have is how come now, so you did mention COVID, the push to digital for a lot of real estate companies, but how come chatbots are more effective today than say 10 years ago?

Unknown Speaker 11:19

The main answer would be like the digital push, every company in the world has been pushing a lot more digitally. Because honestly, like every person is has started living a little bit longer in this digital world. You go to office, you come back home, what do you do, you go to netflix, you go to Facebook, you go to Instagram. And businesses know that this is the routine life of every person. So it's more easier to push digitally and physically because people don't move around a lot. And since everyone is used to core protocols, everyone most likely likes to stay at home. So and second reason to that is the buyers are changing. So so far, you would have older people that say 40s to 60s, who would be buying a house, but now that buyer buyer persona as age has steadily been reducing the kind of pain involved these days, as well as, you know, a lot of other reasons. So these are primarily two, the two reasons why we see a lot of results that you can expect through chatbot, because of the disease push that has been going,

Ariel Herrera 12:25

got it that helps to know, and then say if someone comes to you, and I say Hardik, I'd love to implement this, but I don't really even have a great lead generation pipeline right now, is that something you would be also able to help with or things that you can consult about?

Unknown Speaker 12:41

Definitely we do. So we get sort of sort of requirements, companies that have, you know, not a lot of traffic coming to your website, as well as people, companies that have a lot of traffic, but they're unable to convert these traffic into opportunities. So even going both ways, obviously like to get a significant result from the bot, you would want to have a lot of people coming to your website. And because the general formula is more people coming to your website, more people speaking on the board. So the more people speak with the board, the more chances you have of getting lead from that. So if your input is quite small, chances are that your results also would be quite small, right? Because the conversion rates BFC is about 20 to 25%, which is still quite great comparing two forms because definitely having a form is it's just two to 3% conversion rate. So that's 10 times that, which is way, way better. But that's what we see. And secondly, we also see, the second way we help increase their pipeline is also through broadcasting. SMS and texts are also predominantly you know, quite old, since the 1990s. Everyone has been using them to broadcast what your offerings or send out offers or any new showings that you may have. So our platform, we built a new feature recently, which allows you to broadcast a message to a group of people. And you can define a cadence structure. Think of it this way that you are manually texting me on my number. And I feel that it's you texting me, but even what actually happens is you're sending it to 1000s of people. And not just any random people but they are your own leads that talk with them at some point in the past, but you're just trying to nurture them and engage them more than they would be in the market looking for a new property or an opportunity that you want to present. So you create that kid is structured, the board keeps reaching out to them keeps nudging them once in like three days, two days. You can define your own rules that if someone does not reply back, send them another follow up is dumb. Someone doesn't clarify. Obviously you have the bots there as well. Because bots are nowadays you know, trying to expand their reach. So it's not just a website where you can automate your conversations but Practically anytime you will, there's an exchange of dialogue between WhatsApp, B, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, texting, as I said, and I think we are also seeing a lot of surgeon voice calls as well. Oh, really having a lot of voice bots going around these days as well.

Ariel Herrera 15:20

Wow. And they still sound just like humans too, right? So it has that personalization,

Unknown Speaker 15:25

exactly the end of machine learning and has become quite hard for you to know whether it's actually human that you're speaking with, or it's, you know, some form of cyborg. Right?

Ariel Herrera 15:35

And is there a specific technology that you use behind day like in terms of using dialogue flow, or Microsoft or AWS Lex is there one specific that you focus on?

Unknown Speaker 15:46

Very, so predominantly from our pool of customers, which is quite high around 3000, what we have seen is 80 to 90% of businesses are quite happy with a simple rule based call. What I mean by rule base is a simple board, which has just buttons, you click on the button and go through the flow. The reason why we see that is because, you know, people don't want to think a lot, you don't want to add a lot of cognitive load to a person, if you keep it open ended, people can just anything, right. And you want to have some boundaries defined, you don't want people to type just any random thing. So that's why we've seen a lot of adoption in simple rule based bots. But also like for more advanced use cases, like let's say support, support is an area where you know, people may be facing some unique issues. So, the options, which you may have listed may not be the problem that that person may be facing, he may be facing something else, because as a company, you may have not found out that problem, but he is still facing. So that's where we make use of something called as AI based and bots, where, like you said, we make use of natural language processing engines, where between the board that, hey, these are the possible phrases or queries that people may ask. These are the different ways in which people could ask these questions. And this is the response associated with it. So the more you train the board, the more smarter the board becomes, and the more capable of orders of understanding your question and giving you an answer. But you need a lot of data to be able to do that. More detail you have smarter and becomes. And there are a lot of players out there. Like you mentioned, Google dialogflow is one, IBM Watson, which is doing a good job. And you also have like nucleus like Microsoft, blue is Amazon, which is something the game with its next product. And there are a lot of other players, but these four are predominantly the biggest VAV systems that we use.

Ariel Herrera 17:38

Yeah, it's really helpful to also just know that the section that you just mentioned, when you need to choose maybe a role based model over an AI based model, and how support versus something like real estate where no one's gonna say I want 4.33 bedrooms, like it's very discreet in terms of options. So it makes sense that a rule based model would work more.

Unknown Speaker 17:59

And what we also suggest the LEGO The face was, of course, there's no point in spending a ton of money in building a smart board, just because the school, a lot of companies do that mistake, they end up spending, you know, 1000s of dollars, yes, just investing small bit of time in creating rule based flow doesn't take more than a few hours. From what we have seen. Let's pay a monthly fee of $100 or $500. That's what we usually charge. Just having one set of grounded for a month or two, see the results. And you can evaluate and you know, take the plunge later on. But get started with a simple bot this you don't need to spend a lot of time efforts as well as one.

Ariel Herrera 18:35

Excellent. And before we go into your contact and how people can reach you just want to be able to ask, is there anything that you'd like to say about the future of chatbots, or the type of customers that helps you did mention that you can help people from the beginning phases of their real estate company to a larger real estate company as well, as anything else to add on to that?

Unknown Speaker 18:58

No, I would just like to say that, you know, the world is definitely moving to a digital world. So you'll find a lot more decision making being done online. Be it from you know, choosing the product or being able to shortlist apart from because there are 1000s of computers nowadays it becomes extremely difficult to make a choice, right? So you want to be as personalized as available as you can. Because companies these days are expanding. They have multiple offices, they have 1000s of people in this sense of support teams. So it may be a bit hard for you to be in that queue to this competition. So being available digitally is really important. And the best way to do that is to have a bot because it helps automate your entire lifecycle of customer from the stage that he was a prospect where they were just you know, probing your company to being the lead to being a customer because all these lifecycle stages of customer You want to automate. We've seen that trend going on for the past three years now. And that trend is just, you know, increasing its pace with COVID. So you'd better not be left behind. Rather better just try that technology out and see for yourself, but I'm pretty sure that you would have a good result because we've seen at least for the real estate space, that the conversion rate of visitors converting to leads is quite high. But 27% is what we have seen as our average conversion rate as compared to any other two. Definitely, yes.

Ariel Herrera 20:34

Thank you so much. Hardik. I really appreciate your time. And how would the audience be able to reach you for your services,

Unknown Speaker 20:41

you can just visit our website, it's wotnot.io W, OT and ot.io. And just book a meeting with our team and someone will get back to you as quick as possible. Or you could just sign up for the tool. Will the board platform was completely no code so you don't need any engineering or IT team just need to have a couple of hours of your time and a creative mind. Those define those dialogues.

Ariel Herrera 21:05

Excellent. Great. Well, thank you so much for your time. I've learned so much and I bet the audience has as well really appreciate it.

Unknown Speaker 21:11

Thanks so much area

Transcribed by https://otter.ai