Behind Great Customer Service, There’s Great Code : How Apartment List Uses Twilio

Behind Great Customer Service, There’s Great Code : How Apartment List Uses Twilio

Apartment List‘s Renters Operations Center (ROC), headquartered in San Francisco, is lovingly referred to as The Rock by employees.

It’s not the type of rock where you’ll find Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery saving the world from a nuclear weapon crisis. But, you will find Apartment List’s customer service staff doing equally heroic work: finding people apartments in San Francisco (and all over the world).

Humans Making It Really Easy To Talk To Other Humans

Real estate moves fast, so Apartment List has to move faster. They include Twilio powered phone numbers on all of the properties they list on their website so an interested renter can contact a real human at Apartment List immediately.

“If a human wants to get in contact with a human, let’s make that happen,” says Ian Medlock, Product Manager at Apartment List.

Of course, to make that happen, you need the right communications tools. To power call tracking, queueing, recording, and analytics for over half a million calls a year, Apartment List uses Twilio.

But, it wasn’t always that way.

If A Feature Breaks And A Contractor Isn’t There To Fix it, Is It Really Broken?(…Yes, For Sure It Is Most Definitely Broken)

Before switching to Twilio, Apartment List used Salesforce and InContact for everything call related. This solution was built by a team of contractors using proprietary code that Apartment List’s engineers couldn’t change themselves. If there’s anything that engineers need, it’s good documentation. If there’s anything that engineers don’t need, it’s clunky, proprietary code.

After fussing and fighting for feature changes, Apartment List decided to look for a platform that could allow the team at The Rock to make their own decisions about the technology they use to make their customers happy.

“When you have a solution with multiple vendors, responsibility becomes fragmented in terms of who is fixing what and it’s a lot of work, time and money to fix things. It’s nice to have a solution that our engineering is comfortable with and that gives us the flexibility to grow,” says Medlock.

Scaling Communications With Great Code

Now, ApartmentList is making an average of 676,000 calls a year and is fast at work on new features. With documentation that’s actually palatable to their engineers, and a scalable communication platform to work with, they’re full steam ahead.

“Our Twilio solution is less than half the cost of our previous solution,” says Medlock. “The biggest benefit we felt was that A, we could fix a problem in short order and B, we know that as our business grows, we can leverage Twilio’s feature set to allow us to grow.”