August 28, 2025 • 38 mins
Ever wondered how potential residents really decide where to live? The journey isn't a simple funnel anymore, it's more like a spider web of touchpoints across search engines, review sites, social media, and now AI-powered tools like ChatGPT.
In this fascinating conversation with Carolyn Walentisch, Director of Customer Success at SOCi, we explore how multifamily operators can navigate this complex digital landscape without losing countless hours to repetitive marketing tasks. Carolyn breaks down the three pillars of digital marketing success - reputation, search/SEO, and social media - explaining how these elements have become increasingly interconnected in today's digital ecosystem.
The most eye-opening segment focuses on AI agents that go beyond basic automation. Unlike simple chatbots, SOCi's Genius Reputation agent undergoes training on your specific brand guidelines and can autonomously respond to reviews within minutes while still involving humans for sensitive situations. With 91% of potential renters checking reviews before making decisions, this capability delivers compound benefits across your entire marketing strategy.
We also discuss emerging trends in multifamily marketing, including the shift toward authentic, on-site content over heavily produced materials. Carolyn shares how forward-thinking properties are developing resident ambassador programs to encourage user-generated content that showcases genuine community experiences.
Whether you're already embracing AI tools or approaching them cautiously, you'll appreciate Carolyn's human-centered approach to technology adoption. By focusing on how these tools free up staff to focus on meaningful resident interactions rather than repetitive tasks, multifamily teams can transform their digital presence while improving workplace satisfaction.
Ready to transform your property's digital presence? Visit soci.ai to learn how your marketing efforts can become more streamlined, consistent, and effective across all platforms.
Connect with Multifamily Women®:
Carrie Antrim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carrieantrim/
Multifamily Women® Summit: https://multifamilywomen.com/
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Multifamily Innovation® Council: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/council/
Multifamily Innovation® Summit: https://multifamilyinnovation.com/
Best Places to Work Multifamily®: https://bestplacestoworkmultifamily.com/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, welcome to the Multifamily Women podcast.
I'm your host, keri Antrim.
Today, I'm excited to welcomeCarolyn Wallentisch, director of
Customer Success at Sochi.
Carolyn is a technologyleadership professional with
more than 12 years experiencespanning government, real estate
, nonprofits and now multifamily.
She's passionate about buildingand scaling teams, mentoring
(00:23):
emerging leaders and drivingtechnology adoption that truly
delivers value for customers.
She also balances all of thisher amazing career with raising
two young boys at home inCharleston, south Carolina.
We're thrilled to have her onthe show today to talk about
Sochi and the important roletechnology plays in helping
multifamily operators succeed.
(00:44):
Carolyn, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Carrie, thank you so much.
I'm really excited to be hereand thank you for the lovely
introduction.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Well, it's my pleasure and we're happy to have
you here.
Can you just give us anoverview on Soshi?
What is it that you're doing?
How are you making the industrybetter?
What's going on over there?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Of course.
So Sochi is today a fullydistributed remote team, but we
were started in San Diego,california, and, interestingly
enough, we serve multipledifferent verticals today types
of businesses but we started itwith multifamily.
So we are purpose-built formultifamily and our mission is
(01:28):
truly to make digital marketingeasier, more streamlined and,
ultimately, more successful forour customers in the multifamily
industry.
So we are a digital workforcefor marketing automation and, if
(01:50):
you think about marketing andthe really thousands and
thousands of tasks that have toget done in order to be
successful, we streamline thosetasks, bring them together in
one platform and ultimately andI'll share a little bit more
(02:11):
about this later is actually dothat work for our marketing
leaders that we work with at thecustomer side.
So we handle SEO.
So we handle SEO.
(02:49):
We handle reputation management, mundane tasks, the thousands
and thousands of them that haveto get done in order to
successfully market theirproperties and show up for their
residents and for theirpotential residents.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, that's really interesting, especially with how
quickly things change indigital marketing.
All these strategies change andthen the platforms themselves.
They change their algorithmsand their rules and things like
that.
It sounds like you are ahelpful partner in navigating
that.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, that's a big part of what we do.
Right, so we are a software.
Right so we are a software.
We're a platform.
We are also an agenticworkforce.
But if you take sort of theactual delivery of what we do
out of the equation for a moment, a big part of the value that I
see us driving for our clientsis help me stay up to date with
(03:42):
those things that are changingso fast for our industry.
Help me understand what'strending in SEO.
Help me understand what changesGoogle has made just this week,
which we know are many.
We help our customers by havingon-site experts who have kind
(04:06):
of been in their shoes and nowjust focus on telling them hey,
here's what's happening andhere's what you should think
about and change, perhaps thisweek.
Perhaps bring it to your teammeeting because it's going to
impact your life.
It's going to impact what youdo on the day-to-day.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, absolutely.
And so your role of Director ofCustomer Success.
What does that entail?
What does that look like foryou?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So I run our team of customer success managers who
work one-on-one with all of ourmultifamily customers that are
using the Sochi tools.
So my role, as I like to say,is everything that happens after
you buy Sochi.
That's me.
I'm responsible for making surethat you're hitting your goals,
(04:53):
I'm responsible for making surethat you know what your
resources are, and it's my teamthat's going to deliver
co-deliver those outcomes foryou.
You know, help you make sureyou're getting exactly what you
need out of Sochi.
Now that you are one of ourcustomers, now that you're part
of the Sochi family, so youmentioned Sochi has different
(05:15):
verticals.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
but staying with multifamily, what are you and we
kind of touched on this alittle bit with how quickly
things change and you mentionedGoogle new rules, you know,
every week, every day, whateverthat looks like, but what are
you seeing as the biggestchallenges that you're helping
solve for multifamilyspecifically?
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Sure.
So at Sochi we like to break upsort of the marketing bubble,
if you will, into three pillars.
So those three pillars arereputation, search and SEO, and
social.
So within each of those pillars, the key problems that we're
(05:55):
helping our customers solve arewithin search and social excuse
me, within search and SEO, it'svisibility.
So, at the end of the day, howam I showing up on search
accurately and how am I showingup in as many searches as I can?
Now, that's just, of course,it's not just Google, as we all
(06:17):
know.
It's within ILS, it's withinChatGPT, gemini, perplexity,
it's really anywhere someonegoes to search.
Second pillar reputation.
We are helping scale reputationmanagement for our customers by
(06:39):
ensuring that they can respondto every single review within 24
hours, that they can see all ofthe different places where they
are getting reviews, whetherthat be on their website,
whether that be on Google itselfand their Google business
(07:00):
profile, or even things thataren't directly reviews, like
how are you responding to andmanaging your engagements, your
direct messages on socialchannels?
Just a great example of howthese pillars today all sort of
cross each other.
It's not nearly as simple asjust the three pillars.
(07:21):
And then the third pillar, as Imentioned is social.
How are you showing up onsocial every day?
How are you making sure thatpotential residents and current
residents see what yourcommunity is really like?
How do they get to know theteam that works there and how do
they ultimately build thattrust that makes them say, yes,
(07:47):
this is where I want to live?
Of your potential renters,they're touching at least three
(08:10):
points of reference when they'redeciding where they want to
live.
So we talk about these threepillars, but really these three
pillars are so intertwined today, so really what we're solving
for is how do you get found?
And then how do you validatethat you're a great choice?
How do you build trust with thepotential renter when they're
looking at your reviews onGoogle, when they're jumping to
(08:33):
your website, when they're thenchecking your Instagram and then
they're validating their topthree choices on chat, gpt how
do you make sure that they getthe information they need and
that you are putting your bestdigital footprint forward when
those people are making a reallyimportant choice?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, that's a really interesting renter journey that
you just kind of outlined withall the different touch points.
I mean there's so many now and,like you said, how does?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
it.
It is all over the place today.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, how does the?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
company we all think of in marketing, like, oh my
gosh, it's barely a funnelanymore, right.
It's like a spider web.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Oh yeah, that's actually a better analogy
Because, yeah, there's so manydifferent touch points, and how
does a company even know wherethey are?
You know where they're beingmentioned.
Is it on TikTok?
Is it on Google, is it?
You know what is ChatGPT saying?
That's really interesting Forthe users of your platform, of
your services.
(09:30):
What does that look like forthem?
You know, if we can get intothe nitty gritty like how is
Sochi making their lives easier?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah, of course.
So if you imagine sort of whatsome of our users might
experience today if you don'tuse Sochi, if you have sort of
distributed platforms, you mightbe logging in one place to
manage your reviews.
Perhaps you've already takenthe really great step that you
do manage it in one place.
(09:59):
Awesome, you log in, you see.
You know, know, hey, I got 25reviews today, so you're going
in and you're trying to respondto all those reviews.
So let's imagine that's oneworkflow.
And then you log into yoursocial media.
Let's pretend you're on site.
You're, you know you have yourresponsibilities in the day, or
(10:19):
I go over here to manage myreviews.
I have to respond to 25 of themand I have to do it within 24
hours, because I know that makesa big difference.
Your social media you go in andyou're like, oh, I haven't
posted in a couple of days.
I should probably postsomething.
I have to think about what topost, when to post it, and then,
hopefully, if I'm ahead of thegame, I'm creating some sort of
(10:41):
a calendar that tells me whatI'm going to post for the rest
of the week and then you'regoing into a tool to manage your
SEO.
You want to make sure that, ifyou're just responsible for one
property, that all theinformation is accurate, that
you're connected and you're asvisible as possible.
So that's kind of thedistributed task list of a
(11:09):
marketer who's maybe responsiblefor one property.
Maybe you're a property managertoo and you're being tasked
with all of those things.
Now let's say you use Sochi.
You have one platform where younavigate.
You can navigate it on yourphone or you can navigate it on
your desktop at work, where youcan monitor all three of those
things in one place.
It's a little bit.
It's laid out the way that youwould imagine for most of your
(11:33):
softwares.
So you've got your reviews tab.
You can see what's going on,what came in in the last 24
hours or whatever, what has beenresponded to, what needs to be
responded to.
You can also look at metricshow is your property doing over
time?
You can take a look atsentiment and sentiment themes
(11:55):
so that you can report out toyour team members about what is
going well and where you mightneed to dig in, because you've
got some themes popping up thismonth about, say, maintenance.
So you're looking at themes andyou're responding right there.
You click over one tab.
You've got all of your SEOinformation right there.
Is everything synced, iseverything up to date?
(12:18):
Then you click one other tabdown.
There's your social mediacalendar.
You can build content, schedulecontent and get suggested
content right there, and that'skind of the core functionality
and experience for a user in ourplatform.
What we have evolved to and whata lot of our customers are
(12:39):
using and what I'm most excitedto really talk about and I spend
a lot of my days talking to ourcustomers about this and
working on it with our teams isour agentic workflow.
So Soshi now has an agent thatis essentially going from this
property manager I just talkedabout doing their own work in
(13:02):
the platform to an AI agent whoessentially is doing the work
for that team member.
So that's kind of where ourplatform has most recently
developed and I'll pause there,but I'm excited to share more
(13:22):
about, like, what is an agent?
Because I think sometimes wehear a lot about it but we don't
necessarily dig into what itreally means.
It's like a fun buzzword, butI'll pause because that's sort
of where we're going as acompany and what's the latest.
But I want to make sure thatthe way the platform works and
(13:42):
the things that we touch ontoday make sense.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And that's funny that youpaused, because that was the
exact next question I was goingto ask you is what are you
excited about?
What's on the frontier, what'scoming?
What is Sochi doing?
So, please, you've got thefloor.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Cool and clearly I'm excited about it.
I jumped right to it.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
No, I love it.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That's great.
It that's great.
So we're hearing about AI somuch in our day-to-day lives.
We're hearing about it at work,we're hearing about it at home.
It is everywhere.
And I, at least, also feel likeI'm hearing about agents.
And until we started talkingabout it and really diving into
it and I was able to experienceit through my work, I kind of
(14:30):
didn't fully grasp what an agentmeans and how it can kind of
change our day-to-day.
So an agent really requires I'dsay it's like five real things
that you need to have to be areal agent to have a real
(14:50):
agentic workflow built into yoursolution.
So what an agent is going to dois you're going to be able to
autonomously give that agent agoal and it should be able to
execute and understand the stepsthat are necessary to reach
that goal, the steps that arenecessary to reach that goal.
So let's give an example ofgenerative AI.
(15:12):
That's chat, gpt, that'sperplexity.
You can ask it a question andit can generate that answer.
That's one piece of what anagent does.
(15:36):
So with an agentic workflow,you will be able to feed
information into a smart system.
It will have a reasoning enginethat takes that information,
makes decisions about what to dowith it.
It has enough training toactually take the action that
you need it to take, and thenit's also going to have a
learning feedback loop.
So the more guidance andtraining you give it, the
(15:58):
smarter it's going to be when ittakes that action.
So, as an example, I think ourreputation, our genius
reputation agent at Sochi, is areally good example.
So let's start with the classicplatform management of
reputation and reviews.
You get a review, you see itpop up in your platform, you
(16:22):
write your proposed response andyou say click and you send it
off and off it goes.
And you say click and you sendit off and off it goes.
Now, if we fold in generativeAI, you might get a proposed
response using AI.
You can say make it friendlier,and that's pretty cool.
You can tell it to make theanswer friendlier.
(16:44):
It rewrites it for you and yousay okay, great, I like that.
Click and off it goes.
What the Sochi Genius Reputationagent will do is when you first
hire your agent, you're goingto go through a training where
your agent is going to scour theinternet for all of the
(17:06):
information it can learn aboutyour brand and your brand
guidelines.
You can upload any training youhave for your teams about your
brand and your brand guidelinesand you're going to continue
through like a 10, 15 minutetraining with that agent to give
them more information about theway you want to show up for
(17:29):
your residents or potentialresidents in your review
responses.
Your agent is now trained.
You tell that agent when it'sokay with you for it to
autonomously respond to thosereviews and you also tell them,
hey, agent, and you also tellthem, hey, agent, under these
(17:53):
few circumstances I actuallywant you to come tell me because
I want to vet what you'reproposing that we say in certain
situations.
So you're putting guardrails inplace of when a human needs to
be involved and otherwise you'retelling your agent through
training and rules that you'reokay with it going and doing
every other step of that processfor you.
(18:14):
So you can now know all of myreviews are being responded to
in my brand tone, the way that Iwant it to be responded to, and
within, say, two minutes ifthere are special circumstances.
I can trust that my agent iscoming to me and I'm going to
(18:34):
handle those sticky situationswith the guidance of my team.
So we're going from I respondto every single review and I
have to find time in my day todo this to hey, I've actually
kind of got this team member.
He's my genius reputation agentand he does this for me,
(18:54):
following my guidelines andrules and getting humans
involved when need be.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's really interesting.
So I would imagine you know,just going off the example you
gave, you know if a propertygets a five-star review, that's
great.
You know that response might bea little easier than the sticky
situations you were mentioning.
You know, maybe if there was anissue or something that needs
to be addressed a little morecarefully, that's really cool
(19:21):
that you can train it to thensay come to me first, like
propose it, but come ask me justin case.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And then over time, depending on the feedback that
you give on.
Like, let's say, you put moreguidelines in place early on and
then you give more input overtime as you propose changes to
the reviews you look at.
As you have more and moresituations where you're giving
input to that agent, it's goingto learn what you like, it's
(19:52):
going to learn what you want andit's going to become even more
efficient at managing yourreputation online for you, which
I think we all know, especiallyin this industry, is critical,
like I was talking about howthose pillars are not separate
today.
I mean, 91% of potentialrenters are looking at reviews
(20:13):
and those reviews Google hasconfirmed influence your
visibility and how you'reshowing up in searches online.
Both the volume of reviews.
Google's also recentlyconfirmed that responding to
those reviews is impacting theway you show up and how visible
you are.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, I mean, I know personally, just for myself, if
I'm going to purchase a productoff Amazon, or you know, I'm
going straight to the reviewsalways and I'm going straight to
the one and two stars, right,because I want to see what was
the issue.
Did the seller or, you know,the store, whatever I'm
purchasing did they respond?
How did they respond?
You know all of those thingsare you're taking into
(20:53):
consideration?
Um, I think, just as a consumerin general, in any yeah, it's,
it's absolutely what I look atpersonally.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Um, you know, no matter what I'm doing, if I'm
going to a restaurant,especially if I'm unfamiliar
(21:28):
that my residents are looking atchat, gpt and AI-driven engines
, will my reviews impact whatthey see there?
And the answer is yes,absolutely yes.
We're also seeing that youdon't necessarily have to do
anything fancy or different tomake sure that you're solid
(21:53):
practices of both reviewmanagement and SEO.
If your practices are reallysolid, like we're seeing we're
hearing some, like you know,keywords being thrown around
like GEO, generative engineoptimization Really, if you have
solid SEO and you have solidreviews management, you're still
(22:14):
going to show up in those chatGPT engines.
And I actually will ask chatGPT when I'm searching for
things like what do the reviewslook like?
Show me one or two star reviewsfor XYZ product and it's
pulling them in.
So those solid reviewmanagement practices just they
stay relevant and valid, bothfor the very human exercise of
(22:38):
wanting to know what otherpeople are saying and about
other people's experience, andalso in this new world of AI.
It stays relevant.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
How are you personally staying on top of all
this?
I mean, you've worked ingovernment real estate
nonprofits.
Now you're in multifamily.
You've been in differentindustries.
How does all that experiencerelate to what you're doing now?
How are you finding time tostay on top of all these trends
and things that are happening?
Speaker 2 (23:09):
That's a great question.
Sometimes I think we all wishthere was more hours in the day,
but I'll focus on themultifamily piece.
I I've been in the multifamilyspace on the prop tech side for
um about four or five years now.
Um and I.
I started with a company thatwas more on the financial and
(23:31):
operations side, so I got tolearn a lot there and I still
try and stay up to date withthat side of things because I
find that again things arebecoming more and more
interconnected.
So even though now I'm more onthe marketing side of property
technology, I am able to speakto the way that marketing tools
(24:00):
can streamline operations and ithelps me talk to COOs.
That helps me talk to peoplewho are on the more operational
side and help my direct clientson marketing teams connect with
those other departments andspeak to how their marketing
efforts are streamliningoperations and vice versa, how
(24:23):
operational goals can still beapplicable to what we're doing
and what we're trying to push onthe marketing side.
So one side of the answer tothat question I think is having
touched so many first industrieshelped me with my acumen around
technology and how it grows andhow it develops and how you can
(24:45):
successfully deploy it in anyorganization.
And then within the differentsides of multifamily that I've
been exposed to, I think ithelps me connect the dots and
help my customers connect thedots.
It also helps me to have abackground of understanding of
(25:07):
here's what's happening recentlyon the operations and finance
side.
Here's what's happening on themultifamily side.
Here's how we make connectionsbetween the two so we can make
the best, smartest decisions.
And then I guess the secondpiece to that question is how do
I stay up to date on the trendsin marketing, which my answer
(25:27):
is that's a whole job in itself.
Stay up to date on the trendsin marketing, which my answer is
that's a whole job in itself.
So I rely on my teammates.
As I mentioned, when you workwith Sochi, you're not just
working with my team, yourcustomer success manager.
You're also garnering andgetting the benefit of the
industry experts that we have onstaff.
(25:48):
So we have dedicated socialstrategists who their whole role
at Sochi is to feed our teams,who work directly with clients,
insights about what's going onin the social world, so that we
can help you stay up to speed.
We also have SEO specialistswho come from that world, and
(26:12):
that's all they do is they meetwith Google, they talk to OpenAI
, they talk to and do researchon the field and they then feed
that information to the luckypeople on the go-to-market side,
where we talk directly to ourclients and we meet with them.
A lot of our clients we havebiweekly what we call cadence
(26:32):
calls.
Some clients elect to just doquarterly business reviews and
then otherwise we work togetherasync over email.
But we are getting thoseexperts synthesizing all of
their input and then, knowingwhat we know about our clients,
we're giving them the mostimportant nuggets of information
that we know will impact theirbusiness.
(26:53):
Our clients can also choose toget that information directly.
So we have a really fun webinarcalled the SEO juice and it's
our SEO expert, basically openhours.
He comes with like what's hotthis week and, um, you can
attend that directly and you canhear right from him.
(27:15):
You can ask him questions, um,and yeah, I can't take credit
for staying up to up to speedbecause I get it fed to me from
the SEO juice, from our socialmedia experts and everyone who
we have on staff at Sochi.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yeah, no, I mean, it takes a village right.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
In a number of ways.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah, that's great that you're excited about that.
You see, within the next fewyears even, or in other
industries, just anything ingeneral that you're like this
could be big or you seesomething trending out.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Yeah, so let's see trending out two things in two
things.
One thing that is definitelytrending out is Google is
actually getting ready to getrid of their classic Q&A.
It's going to move to more oflike an FAQ functionality.
(28:17):
So that's something that we'retalking to our customers about
and that is a big change.
That's something that we'retalking to our customers about,
and that is a big change.
Another thing that I'd say istrending out is on the social
side.
We are seeing less and lesshyper curated, hyper produced
(28:37):
content.
We are seeing and steering ourclients more to organic content
that's created on site.
Um, that's, luckily, we alllove this.
It's a lower lift.
Um, it's, it's that onsite,authentic, genuine content.
Uh, that is trending and thatis getting the most uh views,
(29:03):
the best reach, the bestengagements.
It's what people want to see.
They want that authenticity and, as I talked about earlier, a
lot about social.
When you're talking about apotential renter, a prospective
resident, is about buildingtrust and giving a real view
into what is happening at yourcommunity.
(29:26):
On that same note, another thingthat actually a customer of
ours has been talking about,that's on their mind, that they
think is going to be a goal for2026 and beyond is getting their
actual residents to create morecontent on behalf of the
property, is helping theirresidents especially anyone who
(29:48):
is technologically inclined feelmore like an ambassador, and
they are exploring what thoseprograms could potentially look
like for them.
And a lot of that is becausethey're trying to capitalize on
the understanding that thisgenuine content, this content
that isn't perfect for them, anda lot of that is because
they're trying to capitalize onthe understanding that this
genuine content, this contentthat isn't perfect maybe it's a
video of your pool, but it's alittle wobbly and maybe it, you
(30:11):
know, pivots over to one oftheir friends or somebody on
site Like that's the stuff thatis really connecting and that's
a big.
That's a big trend, a big trendin yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I agree with that.
I mean, you see that everywhereon TikTok, it's you know
someone just filming themselvesin their car talking to the
camera right it's not overlyproduced.
Yeah, I think that's.
That's really interesting.
I love that perspective.
Is there anything I haven'tasked you that I should, that we
didn't get to, that you want toshare?
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Let's see Um.
I think what I would love tosort of double click on is um is
back on is back on the front ofAI.
Like we've got customers whoare really embracing AI and then
(31:11):
we've also got a lot ofcustomers who are more cautious,
and there's definitely reallygood reasons for that.
I want to encourage everyone toat least dive in to what it can
do for their properties.
I'd say that the results thatwe are seeing for customers who
(31:37):
are leaning into automation fortheir teams and approaching the
adoption of AI tools reallythoughtfully and taking their
teams along for the ride,they're seeing incredible
results.
We're seeing sort of thiseconomy of scale progress where
(31:59):
things are starting to reallytrend upwards more quickly than
we've seen them before.
We're seeing teams that aretelling us that, despite
hesitancy to adopt new tools anddespite some hesitancy that is
(32:22):
healthy around AI, when theyhave put in the groundwork to,
let's say, train that agent andgo through some of the bumps
that happen right at thebeginning and bring their teams
along for the ride by sharingthe why is.
Hey, property manager, I knowthat you have been struggling to
(32:47):
keep up with all of the leadsthat are coming your way and
handle all of the follow-up.
We're going to be implementingthis new tool.
I need your help with it for thenext two weeks to make sure it
gets off of the ground.
With it for the next two weeksto make sure it gets off of the
ground, but it is going to takeyour review responding basically
(33:08):
off of your hands.
I know you spend three, fourhours a week on that.
I'm so excited to see how thiscan help you focus on following
up with people who have reachedout this month, like via
whatever avenue, so that you canoverperform against your goals,
(33:28):
make more money, meet yourbonuses, whatever it is that
those teams like are reallydriven by.
That's where we're seeing thebest results is when teams are
implementing AI, but they'retaking a very human approach to
ensuring adoption.
They're talking about the whybefore they get to the what, and
(33:52):
I think that's been soimpactful to see the successes
that our customers have had whenthey take that approach
recently that I kind of want tojust evangelize that and that
approach, because I get a frontrow seat to seeing these really
successful launches.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
No, I think that's really important because, like
you said, you have the set ofpeople that are all in yes,
let's go, let's do it.
And then there's others thatare like, well, I don't know, I
don't know enough about it, orit's overwhelming or scary, I
don't get it.
So there's such a balancebetween humanizing, you know,
using the AI, but also beingable to humanize it, make it
(34:32):
work for you, personalize it,customize it, you know, to your
brand, your product, whatever itis you're trying to use it for.
I think that's a reallyimportant point.
I'm glad you brought that up.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, and I'd say that's another thing I've kind
of learned from being able to bein technology for quite some
time, spanning lots of differentindustries.
One thing that's universal is ifyou don't bring the human
(35:04):
element and the people elementinto any technology
implementation.
You know, ai happens to be thetool of the day, the tool of the
year, maybe the decade, but ifyou don't bring people along the
way, you'll never be assuccessful as you could be, and
that is something that has beensomething I've learned, you know
, across industries, and I'd saymaybe I see it almost even the
(35:28):
most in multifamily.
What I've learned and lovedabout this industry is how
people and human oriented it is,which, of course, we're dealing
with people's homes.
It's incredibly important workand it's, you know, very human
work.
Like a lot of us, or some of usnow today, work remotely and
(35:48):
sit in their offices, but somany people that I get to work
with now that I work inmultifamily, they're interacting
with people in their homesevery single day, so what they
do is incredibly important tothem.
Interacting and having the timeto interact with their
residents and give residents anexcellent experience is very
(36:12):
important and core to what theydo every day.
So we have to keep that humanelement there to really be
successful and help people toadopt whatever technologies
we're bringing to the table toreally be successful and help
people to adopt whatevertechnologies we're bringing to
the table.
Yeah, absolutely, and so I knowyou're going to be attending the
Women's Summit Very excited.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
This is just coming up here around the corner, so
obviously our attendees can meetyou in person and talk more
about this there.
For those who are listening andthey want to learn more about
Sochi and you and what you'redoing and what's exciting,
what's the best way for them toget in touch?
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I would love if they emailed me personally, so
hopefully we can share thatacross the podcast world and
then I'll also be there inperson.
But that is the best way to getin touch.
I would love to hear fromanyone who wants to hear more
about Sochi, learn more aboutwhat we do.
(37:06):
We have some clients who willbe there, so I'm really excited
about that.
But please shoot me an email.
We also have really easy intakeforms on our website, sochiai,
but selfishly, I would love tohear from you.
Please send me an email.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Okay, absolutely, we will make sure that all of that
information is in the show notes.
Um, so, sheai is the website.
Carolyn Wallentisch, thank youso much for spending the time
today.
Uh, I appreciate you being herewith me and I look forward to
meeting you at the summit and,uh, we will actually see each
other very soon.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
Yeah, I can't wait.
I'm so excited for the summit.
Scottsdale, here we come, and Iwill see you soon, keri.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
All right, thank you.
Thanks for tuning in everyone.
Make sure you get registeredfor the Multifamily Women's
Summit.
You can do that atmultifamilywomencom.
Thank you for listening andwe'll see you in the next
episode.
All right, welcome to the Multifamily Women podcast.
I'm your host, keri Antrim.
Today, I'm excited to welcomeCarolyn Wallentisch, director of
Customer Success at Sochi.
Carolyn is a technologyleadership professional with
more than 12 years experiencespanning government, real estate
, nonprofits and now multifamily.
She's passionate about buildingand scaling teams, mentoring
(00:23):
emerging leaders and drivingtechnology adoption that truly
delivers value for customers.
She also balances all of thisher amazing career with raising
two young boys at home inCharleston, south Carolina.
We're thrilled to have her onthe show today to talk about
Sochi and the important roletechnology plays in helping
multifamily operators succeed.
(00:44):
Carolyn, welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Carrie, thank you so much.
I'm really excited to be hereand thank you for the lovely
introduction.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
Well, it's my pleasure and we're happy to have
you here.
Can you just give us anoverview on Soshi?
What is it that you're doing?
How are you making the industrybetter?
What's going on over there?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
Of course.
So Sochi is today a fullydistributed remote team, but we
were started in San Diego,california, and, interestingly
enough, we serve multipledifferent verticals today types
of businesses but we started itwith multifamily.
So we are purpose-built formultifamily and our mission is
(01:28):
truly to make digital marketingeasier, more streamlined and,
ultimately, more successful forour customers in the multifamily
industry.
So we are a digital workforcefor marketing automation and, if
(01:50):
you think about marketing andthe really thousands and
thousands of tasks that have toget done in order to be
successful, we streamline thosetasks, bring them together in
one platform and ultimately andI'll share a little bit more
(02:11):
about this later is actually dothat work for our marketing
leaders that we work with at thecustomer side.
So we handle SEO.
So we handle SEO.
(02:49):
We handle reputation management, mundane tasks, the thousands
and thousands of them that haveto get done in order to
successfully market theirproperties and show up for their
residents and for theirpotential residents.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Yeah, that's really interesting, especially with how
quickly things change indigital marketing.
All these strategies change andthen the platforms themselves.
They change their algorithmsand their rules and things like
that.
It sounds like you are ahelpful partner in navigating
that.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yeah, that's a big part of what we do.
Right, so we are a software.
Right so we are a software.
We're a platform.
We are also an agenticworkforce.
But if you take sort of theactual delivery of what we do
out of the equation for a moment, a big part of the value that I
see us driving for our clientsis help me stay up to date with
(03:42):
those things that are changingso fast for our industry.
Help me understand what'strending in SEO.
Help me understand what changesGoogle has made just this week,
which we know are many.
We help our customers by havingon-site experts who have kind
(04:06):
of been in their shoes and nowjust focus on telling them hey,
here's what's happening andhere's what you should think
about and change, perhaps thisweek.
Perhaps bring it to your teammeeting because it's going to
impact your life.
It's going to impact what youdo on the day-to-day.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Yeah, absolutely.
And so your role of Director ofCustomer Success.
What does that entail?
What does that look like foryou?
Speaker 2 (04:32):
So I run our team of customer success managers who
work one-on-one with all of ourmultifamily customers that are
using the Sochi tools.
So my role, as I like to say,is everything that happens after
you buy Sochi.
That's me.
I'm responsible for making surethat you're hitting your goals,
(04:53):
I'm responsible for making surethat you know what your
resources are, and it's my teamthat's going to deliver
co-deliver those outcomes foryou.
You know, help you make sureyou're getting exactly what you
need out of Sochi.
Now that you are one of ourcustomers, now that you're part
of the Sochi family, so youmentioned Sochi has different
(05:15):
verticals.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
but staying with multifamily, what are you and we
kind of touched on this alittle bit with how quickly
things change and you mentionedGoogle new rules, you know,
every week, every day, whateverthat looks like, but what are
you seeing as the biggestchallenges that you're helping
solve for multifamilyspecifically?
Speaker 2 (05:34):
Sure.
So at Sochi we like to break upsort of the marketing bubble,
if you will, into three pillars.
So those three pillars arereputation, search and SEO, and
social.
So within each of those pillars, the key problems that we're
(05:55):
helping our customers solve arewithin search and social excuse
me, within search and SEO, it'svisibility.
So, at the end of the day, howam I showing up on search
accurately and how am I showingup in as many searches as I can?
Now, that's just, of course,it's not just Google, as we all
(06:17):
know.
It's within ILS, it's withinChatGPT, gemini, perplexity,
it's really anywhere someonegoes to search.
Second pillar reputation.
We are helping scale reputationmanagement for our customers by
(06:39):
ensuring that they can respondto every single review within 24
hours, that they can see all ofthe different places where they
are getting reviews, whetherthat be on their website,
whether that be on Google itselfand their Google business
(07:00):
profile, or even things thataren't directly reviews, like
how are you responding to andmanaging your engagements, your
direct messages on socialchannels?
Just a great example of howthese pillars today all sort of
cross each other.
It's not nearly as simple asjust the three pillars.
(07:21):
And then the third pillar, as Imentioned is social.
How are you showing up onsocial every day?
How are you making sure thatpotential residents and current
residents see what yourcommunity is really like?
How do they get to know theteam that works there and how do
they ultimately build thattrust that makes them say, yes,
(07:47):
this is where I want to live?
Of your potential renters,they're touching at least three
(08:10):
points of reference when they'redeciding where they want to
live.
So we talk about these threepillars, but really these three
pillars are so intertwined today, so really what we're solving
for is how do you get found?
And then how do you validatethat you're a great choice?
How do you build trust with thepotential renter when they're
looking at your reviews onGoogle, when they're jumping to
(08:33):
your website, when they're thenchecking your Instagram and then
they're validating their topthree choices on chat, gpt how
do you make sure that they getthe information they need and
that you are putting your bestdigital footprint forward when
those people are making a reallyimportant choice?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, that's a really interesting renter journey that
you just kind of outlined withall the different touch points.
I mean there's so many now and,like you said, how does?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
it.
It is all over the place today.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Yeah, how does the?
Speaker 2 (09:03):
company we all think of in marketing, like, oh my
gosh, it's barely a funnelanymore, right.
It's like a spider web.
Speaker 1 (09:10):
Oh yeah, that's actually a better analogy
Because, yeah, there's so manydifferent touch points, and how
does a company even know wherethey are?
You know where they're beingmentioned.
Is it on TikTok?
Is it on Google, is it?
You know what is ChatGPT saying?
That's really interesting Forthe users of your platform, of
your services.
(09:30):
What does that look like forthem?
You know, if we can get intothe nitty gritty like how is
Sochi making their lives easier?
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yeah, of course.
So if you imagine sort of whatsome of our users might
experience today if you don'tuse Sochi, if you have sort of
distributed platforms, you mightbe logging in one place to
manage your reviews.
Perhaps you've already takenthe really great step that you
do manage it in one place.
(09:59):
Awesome, you log in, you see.
You know, know, hey, I got 25reviews today, so you're going
in and you're trying to respondto all those reviews.
So let's imagine that's oneworkflow.
And then you log into yoursocial media.
Let's pretend you're on site.
You're, you know you have yourresponsibilities in the day, or
(10:19):
I go over here to manage myreviews.
I have to respond to 25 of themand I have to do it within 24
hours, because I know that makesa big difference.
Your social media you go in andyou're like, oh, I haven't
posted in a couple of days.
I should probably postsomething.
I have to think about what topost, when to post it, and then,
hopefully, if I'm ahead of thegame, I'm creating some sort of
(10:41):
a calendar that tells me whatI'm going to post for the rest
of the week and then you'regoing into a tool to manage your
SEO.
You want to make sure that, ifyou're just responsible for one
property, that all theinformation is accurate, that
you're connected and you're asvisible as possible.
So that's kind of thedistributed task list of a
(11:09):
marketer who's maybe responsiblefor one property.
Maybe you're a property managertoo and you're being tasked
with all of those things.
Now let's say you use Sochi.
You have one platform where younavigate.
You can navigate it on yourphone or you can navigate it on
your desktop at work, where youcan monitor all three of those
things in one place.
It's a little bit.
It's laid out the way that youwould imagine for most of your
(11:33):
softwares.
So you've got your reviews tab.
You can see what's going on,what came in in the last 24
hours or whatever, what has beenresponded to, what needs to be
responded to.
You can also look at metricshow is your property doing over
time?
You can take a look atsentiment and sentiment themes
(11:55):
so that you can report out toyour team members about what is
going well and where you mightneed to dig in, because you've
got some themes popping up thismonth about, say, maintenance.
So you're looking at themes andyou're responding right there.
You click over one tab.
You've got all of your SEOinformation right there.
Is everything synced, iseverything up to date?
(12:18):
Then you click one other tabdown.
There's your social mediacalendar.
You can build content, schedulecontent and get suggested
content right there, and that'skind of the core functionality
and experience for a user in ourplatform.
What we have evolved to and whata lot of our customers are
(12:39):
using and what I'm most excitedto really talk about and I spend
a lot of my days talking to ourcustomers about this and
working on it with our teams isour agentic workflow.
So Soshi now has an agent thatis essentially going from this
property manager I just talkedabout doing their own work in
(13:02):
the platform to an AI agent whoessentially is doing the work
for that team member.
So that's kind of where ourplatform has most recently
developed and I'll pause there,but I'm excited to share more
(13:22):
about, like, what is an agent?
Because I think sometimes wehear a lot about it but we don't
necessarily dig into what itreally means.
It's like a fun buzzword, butI'll pause because that's sort
of where we're going as acompany and what's the latest.
But I want to make sure thatthe way the platform works and
(13:42):
the things that we touch ontoday make sense.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And that's funny that youpaused, because that was the
exact next question I was goingto ask you is what are you
excited about?
What's on the frontier, what'scoming?
What is Sochi doing?
So, please, you've got thefloor.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
Cool and clearly I'm excited about it.
I jumped right to it.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
No, I love it.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
That's great.
It that's great.
So we're hearing about AI somuch in our day-to-day lives.
We're hearing about it at work,we're hearing about it at home.
It is everywhere.
And I, at least, also feel likeI'm hearing about agents.
And until we started talkingabout it and really diving into
it and I was able to experienceit through my work, I kind of
(14:30):
didn't fully grasp what an agentmeans and how it can kind of
change our day-to-day.
So an agent really requires I'dsay it's like five real things
that you need to have to be areal agent to have a real
(14:50):
agentic workflow built into yoursolution.
So what an agent is going to dois you're going to be able to
autonomously give that agent agoal and it should be able to
execute and understand the stepsthat are necessary to reach
that goal, the steps that arenecessary to reach that goal.
So let's give an example ofgenerative AI.
(15:12):
That's chat, gpt, that'sperplexity.
You can ask it a question andit can generate that answer.
That's one piece of what anagent does.
(15:36):
So with an agentic workflow,you will be able to feed
information into a smart system.
It will have a reasoning enginethat takes that information,
makes decisions about what to dowith it.
It has enough training toactually take the action that
you need it to take, and thenit's also going to have a
learning feedback loop.
So the more guidance andtraining you give it, the
(15:58):
smarter it's going to be when ittakes that action.
So, as an example, I think ourreputation, our genius
reputation agent at Sochi, is areally good example.
So let's start with the classicplatform management of
reputation and reviews.
You get a review, you see itpop up in your platform, you
(16:22):
write your proposed response andyou say click and you send it
off and off it goes.
And you say click and you sendit off and off it goes.
Now, if we fold in generativeAI, you might get a proposed
response using AI.
You can say make it friendlier,and that's pretty cool.
You can tell it to make theanswer friendlier.
(16:44):
It rewrites it for you and yousay okay, great, I like that.
Click and off it goes.
What the Sochi Genius Reputationagent will do is when you first
hire your agent, you're goingto go through a training where
your agent is going to scour theinternet for all of the
(17:06):
information it can learn aboutyour brand and your brand
guidelines.
You can upload any training youhave for your teams about your
brand and your brand guidelinesand you're going to continue
through like a 10, 15 minutetraining with that agent to give
them more information about theway you want to show up for
(17:29):
your residents or potentialresidents in your review
responses.
Your agent is now trained.
You tell that agent when it'sokay with you for it to
autonomously respond to thosereviews and you also tell them,
hey, agent, and you also tellthem, hey, agent, under these
(17:53):
few circumstances I actuallywant you to come tell me because
I want to vet what you'reproposing that we say in certain
situations.
So you're putting guardrails inplace of when a human needs to
be involved and otherwise you'retelling your agent through
training and rules that you'reokay with it going and doing
every other step of that processfor you.
(18:14):
So you can now know all of myreviews are being responded to
in my brand tone, the way that Iwant it to be responded to, and
within, say, two minutes ifthere are special circumstances.
I can trust that my agent iscoming to me and I'm going to
(18:34):
handle those sticky situationswith the guidance of my team.
So we're going from I respondto every single review and I
have to find time in my day todo this to hey, I've actually
kind of got this team member.
He's my genius reputation agentand he does this for me,
(18:54):
following my guidelines andrules and getting humans
involved when need be.
Speaker 1 (19:00):
That's really interesting.
So I would imagine you know,just going off the example you
gave, you know if a propertygets a five-star review, that's
great.
You know that response might bea little easier than the sticky
situations you were mentioning.
You know, maybe if there was anissue or something that needs
to be addressed a little morecarefully, that's really cool
(19:21):
that you can train it to thensay come to me first, like
propose it, but come ask me justin case.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
And then over time, depending on the feedback that
you give on.
Like, let's say, you put moreguidelines in place early on and
then you give more input overtime as you propose changes to
the reviews you look at.
As you have more and moresituations where you're giving
input to that agent, it's goingto learn what you like, it's
(19:52):
going to learn what you want andit's going to become even more
efficient at managing yourreputation online for you, which
I think we all know, especiallyin this industry, is critical,
like I was talking about howthose pillars are not separate
today.
I mean, 91% of potentialrenters are looking at reviews
(20:13):
and those reviews Google hasconfirmed influence your
visibility and how you'reshowing up in searches online.
Both the volume of reviews.
Google's also recentlyconfirmed that responding to
those reviews is impacting theway you show up and how visible
you are.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
Yeah, I mean, I know personally, just for myself, if
I'm going to purchase a productoff Amazon, or you know, I'm
going straight to the reviewsalways and I'm going straight to
the one and two stars, right,because I want to see what was
the issue.
Did the seller or, you know,the store, whatever I'm
purchasing did they respond?
How did they respond?
You know all of those thingsare you're taking into
(20:53):
consideration?
Um, I think, just as a consumerin general, in any yeah, it's,
it's absolutely what I look atpersonally.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Um, you know, no matter what I'm doing, if I'm
going to a restaurant,especially if I'm unfamiliar
(21:28):
that my residents are looking atchat, gpt and AI-driven engines
, will my reviews impact whatthey see there?
And the answer is yes,absolutely yes.
We're also seeing that youdon't necessarily have to do
anything fancy or different tomake sure that you're solid
(21:53):
practices of both reviewmanagement and SEO.
If your practices are reallysolid, like we're seeing we're
hearing some, like you know,keywords being thrown around
like GEO, generative engineoptimization Really, if you have
solid SEO and you have solidreviews management, you're still
(22:14):
going to show up in those chatGPT engines.
And I actually will ask chatGPT when I'm searching for
things like what do the reviewslook like?
Show me one or two star reviewsfor XYZ product and it's
pulling them in.
So those solid reviewmanagement practices just they
stay relevant and valid, bothfor the very human exercise of
(22:38):
wanting to know what otherpeople are saying and about
other people's experience, andalso in this new world of AI.
It stays relevant.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
How are you personally staying on top of all
this?
I mean, you've worked ingovernment real estate
nonprofits.
Now you're in multifamily.
You've been in differentindustries.
How does all that experiencerelate to what you're doing now?
How are you finding time tostay on top of all these trends
and things that are happening?
Speaker 2 (23:09):
That's a great question.
Sometimes I think we all wishthere was more hours in the day,
but I'll focus on themultifamily piece.
I I've been in the multifamilyspace on the prop tech side for
um about four or five years now.
Um and I.
I started with a company thatwas more on the financial and
(23:31):
operations side, so I got tolearn a lot there and I still
try and stay up to date withthat side of things because I
find that again things arebecoming more and more
interconnected.
So even though now I'm more onthe marketing side of property
technology, I am able to speakto the way that marketing tools
(24:00):
can streamline operations and ithelps me talk to COOs.
That helps me talk to peoplewho are on the more operational
side and help my direct clientson marketing teams connect with
those other departments andspeak to how their marketing
efforts are streamliningoperations and vice versa, how
(24:23):
operational goals can still beapplicable to what we're doing
and what we're trying to push onthe marketing side.
So one side of the answer tothat question I think is having
touched so many first industrieshelped me with my acumen around
technology and how it grows andhow it develops and how you can
(24:45):
successfully deploy it in anyorganization.
And then within the differentsides of multifamily that I've
been exposed to, I think ithelps me connect the dots and
help my customers connect thedots.
It also helps me to have abackground of understanding of
(25:07):
here's what's happening recentlyon the operations and finance
side.
Here's what's happening on themultifamily side.
Here's how we make connectionsbetween the two so we can make
the best, smartest decisions.
And then I guess the secondpiece to that question is how do
I stay up to date on the trendsin marketing, which my answer
(25:27):
is that's a whole job in itself.
Stay up to date on the trendsin marketing, which my answer is
that's a whole job in itself.
So I rely on my teammates.
As I mentioned, when you workwith Sochi, you're not just
working with my team, yourcustomer success manager.
You're also garnering andgetting the benefit of the
industry experts that we have onstaff.
(25:48):
So we have dedicated socialstrategists who their whole role
at Sochi is to feed our teams,who work directly with clients,
insights about what's going onin the social world, so that we
can help you stay up to speed.
We also have SEO specialistswho come from that world, and
(26:12):
that's all they do is they meetwith Google, they talk to OpenAI
, they talk to and do researchon the field and they then feed
that information to the luckypeople on the go-to-market side,
where we talk directly to ourclients and we meet with them.
A lot of our clients we havebiweekly what we call cadence
(26:32):
calls.
Some clients elect to just doquarterly business reviews and
then otherwise we work togetherasync over email.
But we are getting thoseexperts synthesizing all of
their input and then, knowingwhat we know about our clients,
we're giving them the mostimportant nuggets of information
that we know will impact theirbusiness.
(26:53):
Our clients can also choose toget that information directly.
So we have a really fun webinarcalled the SEO juice and it's
our SEO expert, basically openhours.
He comes with like what's hotthis week and, um, you can
attend that directly and you canhear right from him.
(27:15):
You can ask him questions, um,and yeah, I can't take credit
for staying up to up to speedbecause I get it fed to me from
the SEO juice, from our socialmedia experts and everyone who
we have on staff at Sochi.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Yeah, no, I mean, it takes a village right.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
In a number of ways.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
Yeah, that's great that you're excited about that.
You see, within the next fewyears even, or in other
industries, just anything ingeneral that you're like this
could be big or you seesomething trending out.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Yeah, so let's see trending out two things in two
things.
One thing that is definitelytrending out is Google is
actually getting ready to getrid of their classic Q&A.
It's going to move to more oflike an FAQ functionality.
(28:17):
So that's something that we'retalking to our customers about
and that is a big change.
That's something that we'retalking to our customers about,
and that is a big change.
Another thing that I'd say istrending out is on the social
side.
We are seeing less and lesshyper curated, hyper produced
(28:37):
content.
We are seeing and steering ourclients more to organic content
that's created on site.
Um, that's, luckily, we alllove this.
It's a lower lift.
Um, it's, it's that onsite,authentic, genuine content.
Uh, that is trending and thatis getting the most uh views,
(29:03):
the best reach, the bestengagements.
It's what people want to see.
They want that authenticity and, as I talked about earlier, a
lot about social.
When you're talking about apotential renter, a prospective
resident, is about buildingtrust and giving a real view
into what is happening at yourcommunity.
(29:26):
On that same note, another thingthat actually a customer of
ours has been talking about,that's on their mind, that they
think is going to be a goal for2026 and beyond is getting their
actual residents to create morecontent on behalf of the
property, is helping theirresidents especially anyone who
(29:48):
is technologically inclined feelmore like an ambassador, and
they are exploring what thoseprograms could potentially look
like for them.
And a lot of that is becausethey're trying to capitalize on
the understanding that thisgenuine content, this content
that isn't perfect for them, anda lot of that is because
they're trying to capitalize onthe understanding that this
genuine content, this contentthat isn't perfect maybe it's a
video of your pool, but it's alittle wobbly and maybe it, you
(30:11):
know, pivots over to one oftheir friends or somebody on
site Like that's the stuff thatis really connecting and that's
a big.
That's a big trend, a big trendin yeah, I love that.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
I agree with that.
I mean, you see that everywhereon TikTok, it's you know
someone just filming themselvesin their car talking to the
camera right it's not overlyproduced.
Yeah, I think that's.
That's really interesting.
I love that perspective.
Is there anything I haven'tasked you that I should, that we
didn't get to, that you want toshare?
Speaker 2 (30:49):
Let's see Um.
I think what I would love tosort of double click on is um is
back on is back on the front ofAI.
Like we've got customers whoare really embracing AI and then
(31:11):
we've also got a lot ofcustomers who are more cautious,
and there's definitely reallygood reasons for that.
I want to encourage everyone toat least dive in to what it can
do for their properties.
I'd say that the results thatwe are seeing for customers who
(31:37):
are leaning into automation fortheir teams and approaching the
adoption of AI tools reallythoughtfully and taking their
teams along for the ride,they're seeing incredible
results.
We're seeing sort of thiseconomy of scale progress where
(31:59):
things are starting to reallytrend upwards more quickly than
we've seen them before.
We're seeing teams that aretelling us that, despite
hesitancy to adopt new tools anddespite some hesitancy that is
(32:22):
healthy around AI, when theyhave put in the groundwork to,
let's say, train that agent andgo through some of the bumps
that happen right at thebeginning and bring their teams
along for the ride by sharingthe why is.
Hey, property manager, I knowthat you have been struggling to
(32:47):
keep up with all of the leadsthat are coming your way and
handle all of the follow-up.
We're going to be implementingthis new tool.
I need your help with it for thenext two weeks to make sure it
gets off of the ground.
With it for the next two weeksto make sure it gets off of the
ground, but it is going to takeyour review responding basically
(33:08):
off of your hands.
I know you spend three, fourhours a week on that.
I'm so excited to see how thiscan help you focus on following
up with people who have reachedout this month, like via
whatever avenue, so that you canoverperform against your goals,
(33:28):
make more money, meet yourbonuses, whatever it is that
those teams like are reallydriven by.
That's where we're seeing thebest results is when teams are
implementing AI, but they'retaking a very human approach to
ensuring adoption.
They're talking about the whybefore they get to the what, and
(33:52):
I think that's been soimpactful to see the successes
that our customers have had whenthey take that approach
recently that I kind of want tojust evangelize that and that
approach, because I get a frontrow seat to seeing these really
successful launches.
Speaker 1 (34:12):
No, I think that's really important because, like
you said, you have the set ofpeople that are all in yes,
let's go, let's do it.
And then there's others thatare like, well, I don't know, I
don't know enough about it, orit's overwhelming or scary, I
don't get it.
So there's such a balancebetween humanizing, you know,
using the AI, but also beingable to humanize it, make it
(34:32):
work for you, personalize it,customize it, you know, to your
brand, your product, whatever itis you're trying to use it for.
I think that's a reallyimportant point.
I'm glad you brought that up.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Yeah, and I'd say that's another thing I've kind
of learned from being able to bein technology for quite some
time, spanning lots of differentindustries.
One thing that's universal is ifyou don't bring the human
(35:04):
element and the people elementinto any technology
implementation.
You know, ai happens to be thetool of the day, the tool of the
year, maybe the decade, but ifyou don't bring people along the
way, you'll never be assuccessful as you could be, and
that is something that has beensomething I've learned, you know
, across industries, and I'd saymaybe I see it almost even the
(35:28):
most in multifamily.
What I've learned and lovedabout this industry is how
people and human oriented it is,which, of course, we're dealing
with people's homes.
It's incredibly important workand it's, you know, very human
work.
Like a lot of us, or some of usnow today, work remotely and
(35:48):
sit in their offices, but somany people that I get to work
with now that I work inmultifamily, they're interacting
with people in their homesevery single day, so what they
do is incredibly important tothem.
Interacting and having the timeto interact with their
residents and give residents anexcellent experience is very
(36:12):
important and core to what theydo every day.
So we have to keep that humanelement there to really be
successful and help people toadopt whatever technologies
we're bringing to the table toreally be successful and help
people to adopt whatevertechnologies we're bringing to
the table.
Yeah, absolutely, and so I knowyou're going to be attending the
Women's Summit Very excited.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
This is just coming up here around the corner, so
obviously our attendees can meetyou in person and talk more
about this there.
For those who are listening andthey want to learn more about
Sochi and you and what you'redoing and what's exciting,
what's the best way for them toget in touch?
Speaker 2 (36:46):
I would love if they emailed me personally, so
hopefully we can share thatacross the podcast world and
then I'll also be there inperson.
But that is the best way to getin touch.
I would love to hear fromanyone who wants to hear more
about Sochi, learn more aboutwhat we do.
(37:06):
We have some clients who willbe there, so I'm really excited
about that.
But please shoot me an email.
We also have really easy intakeforms on our website, sochiai,
but selfishly, I would love tohear from you.
Please send me an email.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Okay, absolutely, we will make sure that all of that
information is in the show notes.
Um, so, sheai is the website.
Carolyn Wallentisch, thank youso much for spending the time
today.
Uh, I appreciate you being herewith me and I look forward to
meeting you at the summit and,uh, we will actually see each
other very soon.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
Yeah, I can't wait.
I'm so excited for the summit.
Scottsdale, here we come, and Iwill see you soon, keri.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
All right, thank you.
Thanks for tuning in everyone.
Make sure you get registeredfor the Multifamily Women's
Summit.
You can do that atmultifamilywomencom.
Thank you for listening andwe'll see you in the next
episode.
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