Our first pilot customer

Is a retail shopping centre!

It turns out that the facility and maintenance issues that store tenants lodge in shopping centres can be as much of a communication bottleneck as in the residential sector.

Rental Heroes partnered with Stockland’s Wetherill Park shopping centre in Sydney to pilot our new Facility and Maintenance chatbot to a small number of stores.

We had a lot of fun working with the Stockland team to design a simple and intuitive way for stores to log and resolve facility and maintenance requests. There were nice challenges to solve for:

• Triaging requests into tenant vs lessor “responsibility”,

• Efficiently on-boarding store staff in new engagement approach,

• Providing helpful self-serve tips to tenants - without “owning the issue” when it’s a tenant responsibility, and

• Optimising communications.  

We are pleased to report that stores were actively engaging in this new way of communicating and over 90% of stores rate their experience as “excellent”.

What was our biggest learning?

Chatbots are clearly no longer just the domain of millennials! We found that demographics of all ages were just as willing to engage via the chatbot channel compared to their younger counterparts.

Facilities Management staff reported productivity benefits and also liked how simple it was to keep stores informed on job status.

We are now going to extend the pilot at Wetherill park and trial some new features and channels. Oh, importantly our natural language AI engine is already growing :)