HOA Management Technology

As a manager, I get pitched all sorts of software, devices, technology, etc, designed to make my job "easier". Some of it is useful; yes it's easier to do a violation drive with a table that integrates a photo into the letter, populates the fields, etc. All I have to do after a drive is print and mail. Great! A website with basic info, documents, meeting minutes, answers to FAQs - great!

But I've been pitched services that will add bots to the website, or apps that allow owners to ask questions to a bot. Or text to a bot. And I just don't get that at all. This is very much a people business. As a consumer, I want my questions answered by a live human being, not a bot. And as a manager, I want homeowners to communicate with me so that I can establish a relationship with them. If for no other reason than they are more likely to cooperate when I'm not an anonymous "HOA lady" but "Barbara, the nice person who answers my questions and has dog treats and candy in her office."

Maybe I'm a Luddite. Or maybe I think the goal of all this technology isn't to make a managers job easier, but to make it cheaper for management companies. Anything that "saves time" is just an excuse to add more properties to each managers portfolio. It's much cheaper to pay someone to type up FAQs for a bot than it is to pay an experienced and credentialed manager.

Do that many homeowners have burning HOA questions at 11pm that have to be answered immediately? Do people really prefer messaging a chatbot instead of a real person?

Personally, I hate chat bots. I think they remove an element of control that should be present in all owner-HOA communications. Given how hack-able everything on the internet is, I'd be concerned that a bot could be spewing all sorts of nonsense - by contract, it's pretty obvious when a plain vanilla info-only web site is hacked.

If the information is general enough to offload to a bot, then it's general enough to be put on the community web site. Anything nuanced should be handled by people. The only thing I can think of that may be useful would be an automated after-hours emergency response system, especially for condos - because of the amount of damage that can occur if there are delays.

I do think that people's expectations are somewhat a function of their age. A university professor friend of mine says that her students are so used to instant communication that they get upset if she doesn't respond promptly to a text message, no matter how non-urgent the topic or how late in the day. An IT person from that same university once mentioned that the university servers experienced their heaviest load at 2 AM, and the vast majority of users are students. Older folks who didn't grow up with the internet tend to expect that things will take time, although even their expectations are changing.

I'm an IT guy. Chat bots are a joke. Move on.

Maybe off topic a bit, but we use SmartWebs to great positive effect.

I think chat bots are a waste of time, people still end up finding other ways to reach out to management anyways