HelloSpoke cuts apartment call volume by 30% with voice agents

HelloSpoke is redefining how residents access information in the multifamily housing industry. By combining a proprietary resident communication and maintenance automation platform with ElevenLabs’ voice agents, HelloSpoke reduces operational workload, increases resident satisfaction, and drives retention on both the resident and staffing side.

The core innovation: replacing voicemail systems and phone trees with an AI voice agent that answers every call.

From IVR frustration to real conversations

Traditional property management messaging platforms rely on ”Leave a message and we’ll call you back” interactions.  Whether it is an outsourced contact center or an interactive phone tree, the results are the same. The inability of these systems to provide immediate resolution to the caller’s needs, forces the caller to either leave a message or to hang-up and call back at a later date for assistance.  Across the industry, roughly 35% of callers will opt to leave a message and a staggering 65% of calls are abandoned. When the call is abandoned, no information is collected, no work order is created, and no call resolution has occurred.

This is where HelloSpoke’s AI Agent, Lou, transforms how property managers interact with residents. 

When a resident calls, they are greeted by Lou — a conversational AI voice agent powered by ElevenLabs. Lou speaks 32 languages, understands intent, answers questions, creates work orders, and screens emergencies automatically.  Best of all, Lou is individually trained at the property level and fully equipped to begin meeting caller’s needs on day one.  As Lou learns more from property staff, he will elevate his game to become even more productive. Residents will be more satisfied by these high-quality interactions and property management staff will get back more hours of their day.

The impact

For a 50-property portfolio of 10,000 units (~8,750 calls/month per industry data):

5,688 of those calls are abandoned under the old messaging model. Lou cuts hangups by 30% meaning ~2,625 additional calls every month are actually handled instead of abandoned.

Additionally, 30% of all calls are automatically resolved by Lou without any human involvement -
another 2,625 calls per month fully handled end-to-end.

Which returns ~219 hours of staff time every month (= 2,625 automated calls × 5 minutes each)

Built for staff satisfaction & resident experience

HelloSpoke layered its own maintenance emergency classification model on top of ElevenLabs' platform. Lou determines whether issues like no hot water or a broken fridge should trigger an emergency dispatch or defer to business hours. This technology mitigates an additional 40% of maintenance calls from reaching maintenance unnecessarily. 

Lou automatically sends a follow-up call within 30 seconds to the resident, confirming next steps, all in the residents preferred language.They found that when combining voice agents with proprietary technology, residents are happier, and property staff have far less busy work. 

Why HelloSpoke chose ElevenLabs

Before selecting ElevenLabs, HelloSpoke trialed other real-time voice providers — including Vapi, Retell, and BlaBla. Each had limitations that made scale difficult:

Customer support that scales
Other providers offered limited or pay-per-ticket support, slowing rollout.

Production-ready reliability
Some solutions required custom engineering to stabilize, while ElevenLabs worked out-of-the-box in production environments.

Latency and voice quality
ElevenLabs’ in-house models delivered faster responses, multilingual accuracy, and more natural conversation flow.

“We’ve tested OpenAI, Deepgram, even open-source models. Nothing came close to ElevenLabs voices.”
- Jeremy Wiley, COO at HelloSpoke

What’s next

HelloSpoke is building toward a new generation of outbound voice agents powered by ElevenLabs.

Soon, these agents will proactively reach out to residents - reminding them to pay rent, checking satisfaction, or following up on recent maintenance requests. Instead of waiting for inbound calls, property teams will be able to maintain ongoing, natural conversations with every resident at scale.

In parallel, HelloSpoke is exploring ElevenLabs MCP servers to give these agents complete communication context. By connecting voice calls, texts, emails, and work orders, each conversation will be informed by the resident’s full history.

To learn how you can build voice-first platforms with ElevenLabs, explore our agents platform.