PMG | THINKBOOK
COMMERCIAL PROPERTY
DIGITAL HUMANS IN A CONTACTLESS WORLD Interview with UneeQ COO Bradley Scott How can digital humans influence the way property funds managers deliver value for tenants and investors? How does it relate to property funds management in particular, and how to use them to deliver value to tenants?
Property funds management is without a doubt a ‘people’ business – real humans talking to other real humans, be they customers, tenants or investors, about creating value from their investment or from the space they operate in. But what if we could remove the ‘people’ part of that interaction, without losing the ‘human’ aspect? A new company that specialises in creating digital humans for customer service and business interactions is trying to do just that. Over the last few decades, digital technology has increasingly focused on how it can streamline and maximise the efficiency of customer service. Be it via websites, apps or chatbots, doing business without the need for real human interaction has become more appealing simply because it saves time and cost for both companies and their customers. However, a new piece of technology is today opening up even greater customer service capabilities for a range of industries, including property management – the Digital Human. A New Zealand-based company that is leading in this area is UneeQ (formerly known as FaceMe), which has developed an intelligent digital human platform powered by AI that helps businesses create real-time interactions
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with customers using the power of the human face. In other words, customer service delivered contactlessly – useful in a social distancing world. UneeQ Chief Operations Officer Bradley Scott says the company has created interactive digital humans for telecommunications companies, banks, mental health providers and the property industry, all for the purpose of humanising interactions that would otherwise be mechanical. He says it’s about creating memorable personas who build emotional connections, as much as it is about efficiency, the speed of doing business, and the fact that real people are “expensive”. “What’s more, real people can be unpredictable when it comes to delivering customer service. With a digital human, you can be sure that any information communicated is correct and consistently delivered every time,” Scott says. Most significantly, through user feedback, UneeQ has discovered customers will have conversations with digital humans that they simply wouldn’t have with a real human, because a digital human will never be judgemental.
