Lesson 3
Case Studies and Best Practices
Real-world examples and best practices for designing and implementing Pathways
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Learn from case studies
Understand best practices
Apply best practices to improve performance
The use cases for Bland Autonomous Phone Agents are endless. To help you get some ideas for AI Agents for your own industry’s challenges, we’re going to walk through a few of our favorites.
Case Study 1: Initial Job Screening
Industry
Recruitment and Staffing
Business Case
A staffing agency is trying to increase their retention of new hires for their clients. During the screening process, after sorting through hundreds (or thousands) of online profiles, the biggest ‘lift’ for their team is to schedule phone interviews, conduct them, and then analyze the responses.
Current Process
This agency uses multiple assistants to send out bulk email campaigns and follow-ups to schedule the interviews, and then junior recruiters conduct the initial calls to ask the screening questions. The junior recruiters rank each applicant in a shared excel spreadsheet. Finally, a Senior Recruiter reviews the spreadsheet notes (and listens to the recordings if necessary), to determine the top applicants.
Problems With Current Process
This agency struggles with several aspects of this approach:
Both steps take a lot of manhours and are very mistake prone.
The more candidates the screen, the better their results, but the higher their costs. This eats into their fees.
It can take multiple weeks for this entire process to finish (due to scheduling and processing difficulties).
Bland Pathway Strategy
Bland Agents fit perfectly into a more automated process for this staffing company. Here are a few of the architecture notes we’d change to revamp the screening process.
Allow candidates to call in immediately and start their own screening process with a Bland Agent (this eliminates scheduling latency and delays)
Have the Agent conduct all the questions, and record all responses
Have the Agent use an integration to export the candidate’s answers to a shared spreadsheet (for Senior Recruiters to review)
Results/Labor Saved
With this architecture and use of Bland Agents, the staffing agency now has:
Removed the need for junior recruiter’s labor hours making the calls
Shortened their process due to appointment scheduling and email chains
Open up their interview data for further automated processing (and ranking of candidates).
Case Study 2:
Property Manager - Lease Renewals
Industry
Property Management – Real Estate
Business Case
A property manager manages over 10,000 rental properties across a major city. On any given month, they have at least several hundred of their tenants’ leases up for either renewal, or termination. If a tenant wishes to renew, the manager needs to clarify the terms with them, and issue a new lease electronically for signature. If the tenant does not want to renew, move out dates need to be confirmed and the manager has to begin immediately marketing the property to new tenants. Ontop of that, some tenants use these calls to ask questions, or make special requests (like multi-year leases, add parking spaces etc.).
Problems With Current Process
Property management is always a labor intensive, and organizational mess. Usually with multiple systems to juggle repairs, complaints, leases, and payments, most property managers phone in the leas renewal process by simply mailing out copies of updated leases. This can lead to:
Many tenants getting ‘lost in the shuffle’ and not understanding their lease terms or move out-dates
A lower percentage of tenants willing to renew their leases because they weren't offered a renewal early enough
A mad scramble by the manager to get the property listed with their rental/leasing agents in time
Bland Pathway Strategy
With any reasonably integrated property management system (or even Excel!) we can almost completely remove the management company’s team from the renewal process for their tenants month after month.
This is how we designed the Pathways for this company:
Trigger all calls through a Zapier integration with the leasing system
Use a Conditional Pathway to determine if the tenant has interest in renewal, or moving
Pass their lease terms (from the PDF of their lease or directly from the leasing system) to the Agent so it can answer basic questions about the terms
Create a global node, to allow easy escalation to the management’s in-person team if there is an issue that needs to be addressed
If the lease is to be renewed, a renewal is sent via webhook to the leasing system
If the lease is to be canceled, the leasing system is updated to serve the notice, schedule the move-out date in the calendar, and notify the leasing team to begin marketing that particular unit
Results/Labor Saved
On labor costs alone, the savings are substantial. If conservatively estimating at least one hour of paperwork, notifications, and processing per lease, that’s seven to ten thousand man hours saved per year.
Additionally, the profits made from renewing (without having to market and sign new tenants) at a higher rate could top into the hundreds of thousands for just a few percent increase of lease retention.
%22%20stroke-linecap%3D%22round%22%20stroke-linejoin%3D%22round%22%20stroke-width%3D%2216%22%2F%3E%3Cpolyline%20points%3D%2256%20112%20128%2040%20200%20112%22%20fill%3D%22none%22%20stroke%3D%22rgb(255%2C%20255%2C%20255)%22%20stroke-linecap%3D%22round%22%20stroke-linejoin%3D%22round%22%20stroke-width%3D%2216%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E%0A)