Customer story
A 220-unit multifamily operator deflected 1,140 tickets in Q1 with AI triage
Horizon Living swapped two offshore CSRs for AI-first triage and didn’t lose a single CSAT point.
Horizon Living • 220 units across 4 buildings • Phoenix, Arizona • Published April 3, 2026
“The AI isn’t replacing empathy. It’s replacing "did you try turning it off and on again" — which nobody wanted to be the person saying anyway.”
1,140
Tickets deflected in Q1
4.6 / 5
CSAT on AI sessions
12 sec
Avg. first response
↓ from 47 min
$68k/yr
Staffing cost saved
The challenge
- Two offshore CSRs handled a 24/7 maintenance inbox; 60% of their volume was password resets, thermostat confusion, and garbage-disposal resets.
- Real emergencies (water, gas, electrical) were getting queued behind "why is my ice maker slow" tickets because every message hit the same inbox.
- Monthly owner reports were late because ticket data and rent data lived in different tools.
What we did
- Turned on AI triage with a custom severity rubric: water/gas/electrical = instant push to on-call, everything else = AI-first.
- Fed the AI the 40 most common building-specific articles (which breaker controls which unit, where the main shutoff is per building).
- Moved both CSRs off the "reset the GFCI" work and into resident-retention work, where they’re now measurably improving renewal rates.
- Replaced the monthly owner report with the built-in TenantAssist P&L export, which now runs in 15 minutes instead of 2 days.
“We used to measure success by tickets closed. Now we measure it by tickets never created. That’s a better number.”
The results
- Deflected 1,140 tickets in Q1 — roughly 52% of total inbound — while maintaining 4.6/5 CSAT on the AI-handled sessions.
- Median first-response time dropped from 47 minutes to 12 seconds; median resolution for AI-handled issues is under 4 minutes.
- Reallocated CSR spend (~$68k/yr) to a single in-house renewals specialist who lifted Q1 renewal rate by 6.2 points.
- Zero real emergencies were stuck behind low-priority tickets because the severity router now sends those directly to on-call SMS.