This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, James Matte of BuilderChat joins Greg and Kevin to discuss the advantages of using home builder digital AI-powered customer service.
Today’s home buyers want information immediately, and they want the data to be accessible online. James says,
“We’re kind of moving out of an era in the home building industry where, you know, everybody was focused on inbound leads and gatekeeping a lot of their information. Buyers are a lot more savvy. They expect access to information, and speed to reply has a huge impact on how a potential buyer perceives your brand and company as a whole. Contractors and home builders are notorious for being slow to reply and spotty with communications.”
Digital AI-powered customer service offers smaller home builders the opportunity for instant communication with home buyers. James explains,
“The affordability of a digital assistant has the potential to level the playing field for a builder that maybe doesn’t have the budget to hire full-time OSCs to man their website. Not every builder can afford to pay full-time wages for one to three, five humans to manage out on their website. So, for those builders, we aren’t really replacing humans. What we’re doing is we’re giving them an opportunity to add that layer of customer service without the costs that aren’t attainable for them.”
Larger home builders can also benefit from using digital AI-powered customer tools. James says,
“You know, on the flip side of that, if you’re a company that does have the bandwidth and budget to have human OSCs, that’s amazing. We’re not here to replace them, but we do have an opportunity to again elevate that level of service. Of course, humans, they need days off, they get sick, they have specific working hours. Adding a digital layer to your human OSC team can expand your coverage to 24/7.”
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about how digital AI-powered customer service can benefit your home builder business.
About the Guest:
For more than two decades, James has stood at the intersection of construction and innovation. His career began on the job site with a tool belt and progressed through business development, sales, and project management for residential subdivisions, commercial builds, and multifamily communities—giving him a true 360-degree view of how projects are financed, built, marketed, and sold.
An entrepreneur at heart, James has co-founded several ventures, shepherded real estate developments from raw land to handover, and now serves as Co-Founder & Head of Growth for BuilderChat—the AI-powered customer-experience platform built specifically for homebuilders. Under his leadership, BuilderChat enables sales and marketing teams to engage and convert buyers around the clock while plugging seamlessly into existing CRM, tech-stack & workflows.
When he’s not refining BuilderChat’s roadmap, you’ll find James in the great outdoors—staying active with his amazing wife and two daughters and forever scouting the next big idea in homebuilding.
