Travtus + Stuytown
Stuytown: Why America’s Largest Residential Complex trusts ADAM
On a mission to make city living happier
When Beam Living took on the management of the iconic Stuyvesant Town & Peter Cooper Village, it had a mission to create a community that thrived on trust and care. ‘Better Today than Yesterday’, these words from Kelly Vohs, CEO of Beam Living are at the center of this mission. Incremental improvements are applauded and compassion is expected. Beam Living is one of the rare property operators that understand that building trust with their customers is key to their success. The role of technology at Beam Living is crucial in providing high levels of service while improving the returns of the asset.
Adam at Stuytown
Adam is an artificial intelligence platform for property operations. It is not a chatbot or a software system. It is a collection of domain-specific machine learning models combined with layers of knowledge about Real Estate operations, the property, and users, to create actionable tasks. It’s an operating system to streamline property operations. At Stuytown, Adam is deployed as an AI member of the team. He has conversations with prospects and residents. He creates leads for the leasing team and at the same time creates tasks for the resident services team. The customer experiences a conversation of which Adam has had over 21,498 conversations at Stuytown and answered 15,737 customer questions in just one year. He has also created 455 unique leads and set 2,364 tasks for the team in the same period. During this process, Beam Living and Adam have learned together. Data generated from every customer interaction has been used to identify trends in operations, services, and customer needs. Adam is not just a tool or service but a team member.
Minimizing change
Stuyvesant Town is a community of 110 buildings and 11,000 apartments. It has over 30,000 residents and hundreds of employees. Unlike other operators, where technology is piloted on smaller properties with low impact, Beam Living’s CIO Paul Hernacki has the impossible task of embedding technology while minimizing any change for both customers and employees at scale. ADAM’s use of natural language meant that there was no UX or access barrier. He was placed on the public website like any other live agent behind a chat screen. Employees needed no new logins and residents needed to download no new apps. It was business as usual but with an AI platform embedded in the operations to bring both insight and automation to the team.
Not a chatbot
Beam Living does not treat its residents and prospects differently. Their physical and virtual real estate is open to all. This means that their website is not just a marketing tool to collect leads but also a place for the community to engage and self-serve. The ADAM Core platform allows both prospects and residents to have the same consistent experience without adding barriers to the conversation. Beam Living was an early adopter of the platform approach to adopting AI without any ‘departmental’ restrictions of single-purpose bots.
Building trust
The trust that Beam Living has created with the community is not just about the resident experience but also recruits their goodwill towards the asset. Most property operators are setting goals to reduce the interaction between themselves and their residents due to the pressure on staffing. But in doing so, they are losing the vital information that resident insight provides you about the asset and the market. ADAM’s participation in the team allows Beam Living to reduce the pressures on the onsite teams by handling 70% of interactions but not losing the intelligence. All data from customer interactions is used to create insight for the management team and information is no longer lost in the daily operations of a large community.
In 2020, when COVID-19 shut down the city, many residents looked towards Beam Living for guidance. Could they use the elevators? Could they visit the laundry? What amenities were available? ADAM helped gather live intelligence and allowed the team to react to the new expectations quickly. Through the pandemic, the Beam Living team did not break their hard-earned trust with their community. More than 1500 residents volunteered to the ‘Team Good neighbors’ and delivered groceries to the community and surrounding areas. ADAM is proud to have been a part of this exceptional team.