How Vinci Immobilier Résidences Gérées Optimized Its Customer Relationship with Salesforce Einstein AI Agents
Vinci Immobilier Résidences Gérées, a major player in the French real estate sector, specializes in operating serviced residences. The group manages three brands: Student Factory for students, OVELIA for seniors, and Bikube for co-living spaces for young professionals.
Positioning itself primarily as a creator of living spaces, the group currently operates around sixty residences across France, offering experiences and services tailored to each tenant profile.
At the heart of the group’s growth strategy lies the need to continuously optimize the customer experience for prospective tenants by simplifying their housing search while ensuring optimal living comfort. Christophe Valverde, Head of Customer Relations at Vinci Immobilier Résidences Gérées, shared insights in an interview about the actions taken over recent years—with the support of Cloudity—to achieve their customer satisfaction goals while respecting HR constraints.
Customer Relationships in Serviced Residences: Hyper-Responsiveness, Seasonality, and Personalization
Anyone looking to move into a serviced residence—whether a student, young professional, or senior—is not just searching for housing; they are embarking on a life project. Naturally, this type of tenant has questions, expectations, and specific needs.
Our business requires us to be extremely responsive to incoming requests and to have the empathy needed to understand our customers’ life plans in order to personalize their experience. But those are not the only challenges. If we take the example of our Student Factory brand, we also face strong seasonality each year, as most students contact us between May and September. This previously led us to double our customer service workforce during peak periods.
At the launch of its customer service transformation project, the group faced several simultaneous challenges:
- The need to communicate with three distinct target audiences across three brands via multiple channels (phone, email, contact forms, chat);
- A decentralized customer relationship management system, with data and interactions spread across different platforms (Outlook, Salesforce, telephony, website, etc.);
- The need to handle a growing workload due to the opening of new residences each year, without compromising employee well-being;
- Activity peaks requiring seasonal hiring.
Centralization & Transformation – Optimizing Customer Relationships with Salesforce
To address these challenges, Vinci Immobilier Résidences Gérées launched an ambitious customer service transformation project in 2024, initially focusing on the Student Factory brand. Following a discussion and analysis phase with Cloudity to clearly define team needs, the project continued with three scoping workshops, leading to the validation of specifications and the project timeline.
“I joined in 2022 to create the customer service department and the Customer Relations division,” explains Christophe Valverde, “at a time when Vinci Immobilier Résidences Gérées was already using Salesforce for sales. We had a choice to make: either leverage Salesforce’s native features or combine it with other tools so our teams could manage both customer interactions and case follow-ups from a single interface across our three brands.”
The decision was made to centralize operations. The group continued investing in Salesforce and leveraging its ecosystem to meet all its needs.
“On Cloudity’s recommendation, we implemented Aircall to create a call center and Email-to-Case (within Service Cloud) to manage emails. Both tools are centralized in Salesforce and connected to customer data, allowing us to have all information within a single platform.”
The deployment phase was completed on schedule, with regular check-ins to monitor progress, conduct pre-production testing, and implement necessary adjustments.
Result: improved management of business growth and optimized monitoring of customer satisfaction, enabling Vinci Immobilier Résidences Gérées to maintain the same level of service quality – even during peak periods. However, centralization alone would not have been enough to achieve such results. The key factor? AI agents supporting the company’s human teams.
Leveraging AI Agents to Support Growth Without Compromising Team Comfort
From the start of the project, we identified a number of repetitive and time-consuming tasks that we were able to optimize and automate by creating AI agents using Agentforce. The goal was to enhance the added value of the customer service team, allowing simple tasks to be handled by these agents while our advisors focus on cases requiring human input (special cases, case follow-ups, etc.).
Connected to the Knowledge base (Salesforce’s tool for building and continuously enriching a knowledge base), the AI agents developed by Cloudity made it possible to:
- Better qualify requests by generating comprehensive summaries of customer inquiries (case files, customer accounts, emails), linking them to the relevant customer record, and surfacing knowledge base articles to help agents respond effectively;
- Generate new articles to enrich the Knowledge base based on processed customer requests, and enhance the Student Factory website FAQ;
- Generate complete and personalized draft email responses based on the customer’s case and existing Knowledge base answers.
3 Key Lessons from This AI Agent Project with Salesforce
1. Immediate and Long-Term Benefits
“We are already seeing internal benefits following the deployment of these AI agents,” confirms Christophe Valverde. “It is much more convenient for teams to handle everything within Salesforce daily and to have a history directly linked to customer records. This represents significant time savings and improved comfort, while allowing teams to focus on higher-value tasks rather than those automated by the agents.”
This also simplifies recruitment, as the company can now handle a higher volume of incoming requests (notably due to new residence openings) with more targeted hiring, without overburdening teams.
“We’ve improved both working comfort and efficiency. Feedback from teams has been positive after five months of using the new solution, and customers have not noticed any difference in service quality – even though we are handling more requests without increasing headcount compared to last year. Response time targets are met 98% of the time, and advisors are more available by phone, which is highly appreciated.”
2. AI Solutions Are Evolving Rapidly – Salesforce Included
CRM platforms like Salesforce continuously evolve, and one of the main challenges of such AI-driven transformation projects is keeping pace with ongoing developments. Christophe Valverde’s testimonial on this point is particularly compelling.
“As we were among the first to work on these AI topics with Agentforce, we sometimes collaborated with Cloudity on integrations that had to be updated the following week because Salesforce had released new features. We were truly moving in parallel with Salesforce at a time when AI agent development was just beginning and the ecosystem was still refining its technology.”
Yvann Virvaire, a Cloudity consultant involved in the project, confirms:
AI agents are set to revolutionize how we work in the coming years. However, we are still at the early stages of these technologies, which requires extensive analysis, testing, and adjustments to create high-performing agents that deliver real value. One thing is certain: companies that start experimenting with these agents now gain a significant competitive advantage over those that will discover them later. This is a developing skill set that will grow exponentially and must be mastered as early as possible.
3. Partnering with an Expert AI Integrator Is Essential
A customer relationship optimization project based on AI agents requires deep expertise and full mastery of the ecosystem. Christophe Valverde shares his experience: “It was important for me, beyond my own vision, to benefit from expert advice to determine what was truly a priority in order to maintain the right balance between budget and added value.”
“We have worked with Cloudity for many years, so their consultants have a clear understanding of our needs and business, which is a major advantage. But I also appreciated the human aspect of their support. Communication with the project manager and consultants was smooth, and we were able to work in an agile way, with evolving needs, while easily interacting with the project team to request adjustments or propose ideas.”
Final Thoughts – Christophe Valverde’s Advice for Future Customer Service Transformation Projects
The overall outcome is very positive. In my view, we should not be afraid of how fast these technologies are evolving—that’s a reality that isn’t going away. But it is equally important to tailor solutions to your specific needs and to take the time to carefully consider the benefits of AI for your organization.
“Thorough preparation and a deep understanding of your needs are essential for this type of project. Avoid spreading yourself too thin and focus on high-value impacts and data quality. Artificial Intelligence cannot perform miracles with insufficient or unreliable data. I personally spent several months optimizing data quality and reliability in Service Cloud to ensure that AI agents could rely on rich, contextualized data to deliver real results.”
