Customer relationship management, or CRM, software is a pivotal part of the day to day operations of property management companies—but we didn’t have to tell you that. So why haven’t CRMs caught up with the needs of modern operators? Whether it’s limited functionality, outdated user interfaces, or poor integration capabilities, property management CRMs just haven’t kept pace with the evolving needs of the industry.
That’s why we built EliseCRM, the only automation-focused CRM designed to not only enable property management companies to work more efficiently but to automate the manual, repetitive work that your teams spend hours slogging through every day. With centralized scheduling functionality, AI automation of inbound and outbound communications, omnichannel support, customizable community grouping and more, EliseCRM is purpose built for modern property management companies. Let’s dive into what separates EliseCRM from the other legacy property management CRM software on the market today.
Omnichannel Communication Means You Never Lose a Lead
Prospects want to communicate on the channels they prefer, whether that be texting, email, calling, or webchat. Many legacy property management CRMs don’t support communication across this variety of channels, limiting your ability to communicate with and collect leads wherever they come in. EliseCRM is built to enable your AI assistant to field messages across whatever channel prospects reach out on, reducing drop offs and helping you convert more leads-to-leases.
EliseCRM is built for omnichannel communication on the resident side of the equation as well, making it easy for your residents to get access to building services, file maintenance requests, and renew their leases through the EliseAI platform. With EliseCRM serving as the single source of truth for all communications with both agents and your AI assistants, you can ensure no messages are missed and every resident and prospect gets what they need.
Call Center Capabilities Eliminate the Need for Point Solutions
Many property management companies struggle with tech stack sprawl, layering expensive point solutions on top of point solutions until they end up with a frankenstein collection of various tools that don’t play well together. EliseCRM’s comprehensive Call Center eliminates the need for a variety of tools, including after-hours call answering services, VoIP providers, and mass messaging, by consolidating all the features and functionality you need to make both inbound and outbound calling simple and effective.
The Call Center makes it easy for your team to provide exactly the information your residents and prospects need on call by automatically matching the caller’s information and surfacing their guest card, while simultaneously populating knowledge from the Knowledge Base directly on the screen that your agent is taking the call from. For centralized teams, automatic population of caller and community information directly onto your agent’s screen allows them to more effectively manage multiple properties without having to manually look up information.
The Call Center also serves as a hub for AI-powered agent Call Scoring that helps ensure your agents maintain high quality standards on calls. Call Scoring can either be done based on predefined EliseAI criteria, or can be adapted to incorporate whatever call scoring metrics matter most to your organization. Using the Call Center for Call Scoring can help you avoid having to spend thousands of dollars mystery shopping your properties just to get an understanding of how your agents are performing.
Mass Messaging Keeps Residents and Prospects in the Loop
Sending mass messages to your residents via text and email is a key part of keeping everyone on the same page when it comes to day-to-day property operations. Whether there’s urgent maintenance being done, an event in the common space, or a test of the fire alarms, residents need to know—and most legacy real estate CRMs don’t make that easy. Instead, you’re stuck needing an additional tool in your tech stack - not to mention the corresponding cost just for a mass messaging platform to provide a capability that should be baseline functionality for a CRM in 2024.
EliseCRM has mass messaging capabilities built into the platform, making it easier than ever for property management teams to quickly inform residents of important information and developments about their communities. The EliseCRM team is also improving our mass messaging on a regular basis, with HTML email and automated messaging capabilities coming in the near future.
Task Management Makes Life Easy for Agents
While your AI assistant is capable of managing 90% of typical day to day property management tasks, there are inevitably some instances in which the AI will not be able to handle a specific inquiry or request. EliseCRM makes it simple for agents to know exactly what work they are responsible for by aggregating all their pending tasks in an easy to understand, actionable task management page. Every AI handoff lives directly in the tasks tab, providing agents with full chat transcripts for insights into the content of the conversations. Plus, when an agent steps in to manually answer a tricky question, EliseCRM scrapes and stores that information into your Knowledge Base to ensure the AI can handle that question moving forward.
It’s never been easier and less painful for agents to stay on top of all the work they need to complete with integrated work orders, ledger functionality, renewal offers, document storage, and associated contacts like roommates and guarantors all visible in the task management tab. Through intelligent automation with conversational AI and an easy to use task management page, your AI assistant and team members can work in conjunction to provide better, faster responses to resident and prospect inquiries.
Community Grouping Gives You the Customization You Need
The traditional property management CRM was built with a community by community management model in mind. But with the industry undergoing a shift towards centralized property management models, CRMs have to catch up in how they let teams manage multiple communities at once. New technology like AI has allowed centralized teams to effectively work at scale, and now they need a CRM designed with that new way of working in mind.
EliseCRM allows you to group your communities however you would like, whether by pod, geographic region, or assigned team member. Advanced community grouping also enables your AI assistant to cross sell other communities within the group, helping ensure you never lose a lead due to preferences or specific requirements. And with the upcoming release of EliseAI’s new AI Guided Tour capabilities, EliseCRM will soon serve as a hub for all of your tour itineraries. EliseCRM was built with the unique needs of centralized teams in mind, and customizable community grouping is a key component of that focus.
Comprehensive Reporting Enables Optimization
In a highly competitive rental landscape, making sure your marketing dollars are going as far as they should is a top of mind priority for any property management marketing team. Justifying additional expenditures for marketing is a lot easier when you can point to concrete, measurable data indicating that your efforts are paying off. EliseCRM makes reporting on your marketing spend and its impact on the leasing funnel transparent, with ILS integrations, marketing dollars reports by source and channel, and easy to analyze lead to lease conversion rates. Now, you can stop spending money without visibility into how it’s actually impacting your pipeline.
The reporting functionality doesn’t end on the marketing side, with advanced leasing and delinquency reporting capabilities built into EliseCRM. With comprehensive reports and clear indicators of what actions need to be done to collect outstanding balances, EliseCRM can help you reduce bad debt across your portfolio and ensure your residents pay on time. Leading operators have made significant dents in their delinquency rates by using EliseCRM with EliseAI’s newly released VoiceAI outbound calling for delinquency feature, eliminating the need for arduous collections processes and allowing you to maintain better relationships with residents.
A Centralized Calendar Keeps Your Team Aligned
Trying to coordinate all of your onsite and offsite teams’ schedules can be a mess in legacy property management CRMs, with appointments and tours scattered across each agents’ individual calendars. EliseCRM is built to accommodate distributed workforces and complex scheduling needs with a centralized calendar that makes tracking all tours across all your communities simple. With built in travel time calculations and blackouts in order to support offsite teams, EliseCRM’s calendar function enables centralized leasing offices to more efficiently deploy their team members.
Moving to the Automation-Focused CRM of the Future
For property management companies looking to get more out of their tech, switching to an automation-focused CRM frees up your team by automating the manual work that they spend hours wading through every day. Moving off the CRM that your team is accustomed to might sound intimidating, but the benefits of improving leasing conversion rates, delivering better experiences across the entire prospect to resident lifecycle, and reducing the amount of tedious work that falls on your team members will pay off in the long run.
"Access to housing is a global crisis," says Song. An estimated 7 million reasonably priced rental homes are needed in the United States. MeetElise helps with operational costs. Its objective is to inject trust back into the housing market ultimately.
"Technology is the core of how our world operates," Song says. She sees a future in the housing and leasing market that is economical, powered by technology, and accessible to all."