Josh Gampp, senior vice president and CTO at UDR, Inc. (NYSE: UDR), says technology plays a leading role in improving the customer experience at the apartment REIT. Having completed the initial push toward centralization of operations, the key for UDR now is how to move beyond early gains and focus on the potential to improve resident interactions and building management, he says.
Gampp spoke to REIT.com about the tech priorities for UDR, strategic partnerships, the potential of AI, recruitment, and more.
What is a key technological focus for UDR today?
If you look across the industry, there’s been a lot of attention on centralization. We were early into the centralization journey; we started about five or six years ago and so we’re through that initial push. We’ve rolled out SmartHome across our portfolio which has enabled self-touring and have focused a lot of effort on how we operationalize customer relationship manager (CRM) tools to support centralized organization.
We’re on the second iteration of that now, what I would consider the next generation of centralization. Much of the focus of the initial centralization phase had to do with cost savings, but it’s not enough to just go after that. It’s also about gaining efficiencies, improving systems, and looking at how to use those resources to improve the customer experience.
We’re doing a lot with data and understanding what our residents are telling us. Where are people on their journey with us, are they satisfied, and can we change their trajectory to a more positive UDR experience? I think for the next couple of years our focus is going to be how do we improve the customer experience and utilize all the work we have put into centralization so far to better enable that experience.
Does the multifamily industry take inspiration from other sectors when it comes to technology?
At UDR, we look at the hospitality industry and how they care about the customer experience. We also look across retail at what companies like Amazon and others are doing. At the same time, we never want to be so far ahead technology-wise that we’re having to train our customers to do something they’re not already used to doing. We just want to meet them where they’re used to doing business.
How is UDR integrating AI into its daily activities?
I think it’s still early days on AI. We use more “traditional” non-generative AI. We have employed a virtual leasing assistant with chat, text, and voice capabilities to answer customer inquiries, which has essentially eliminated the entire concept of the call center. As for generative AI, at times it can be a solution looking for a problem. It’s not quite there yet. We continue to be open and to explore, but we’re also taking a bit of a cautious approach and not jumping in just to jump in.
That said, we are expanding the use of AI in both our cybersecurity arena as well as in fraud prevention. The impact of the newer tools on detecting fraudulent IDs and income documents has been big for us this year as they’ve helped reduced the number of fraudulent move-ins. It’s still early days, but we believe there are benefits we can capture over multiple years from utilizing these tools.
