← Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast
#173 - "We Booked 400 Calls a Week": How Avoca AI is Shaping Home Services
00:43:07
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- [00:00]
Tyson Chen
The vast majority of folks were very hesitant, and we had to show them this is empirically better. They were booking at a 43% rate, and we instantly were able to bump that up to the low 90s. Not only do we want the AI to be the best in class in this industry, but we also want the best in class human component as well.
- [00:27]
John
We're about eight months into using Avoca, and Evoca has been an awesome partner for us in our call center. So what Evoca does for us is they do two different things. One, they have their Coach product, and Coach has been helping us do what it says, Coach our csrs every single day. It listens to every call and uses AI technology to basically pick apart that call and tell us where we can improve. And for the last eight months, we've been consistently improving our scores, which has been awesome. The other product they have is just conventional booking, and it's an AI tool that books over the phone. A customer calls in and it either handles overflow, as in our phones are full, or it does nights and weekends for us. And a customer will call in and actually deal with an AI agent all the way through booking. And the savings inside call center has allowed us to ramp up our marketing to continue to grow even more. Thank you, Avoca, and thank you, Tyson, for your partnership.
- [01:17]
Jack
Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today we've got a return guest. We have Tyson Chen from Avoca. Welcome back to the show.
- [01:27]
Tyson Chen
Thanks so much, John. Great to be here.
- [01:29]
Jack
Yeah, this will be fun. I your. There's a couple podcasts and I'm not even just saying this to, like, Brown knows you because you're here. Like, there's a few episodes that I've had where, like, I refer so many people to. And our last one was one of those episodes mainly around the whole idea of, like, right call, right csr. So if you haven't heard that one, I wish I remembered what number it was. But search Tyson Chen and check back through the feed because it. That made a real impact on how we thought about call center staffing and routing. So, yeah, that was awesome. But I'm excited to have you back. I'm looking forward to whatever nugget we get out of this one.
- [02:10]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I appreciate it. And yeah, excited to be here. Great to see you again, Jack, as well.
- [02:15]
Jack
All right, for. For people that didn't catch the first episode, I'm also going to encourage you. Just listen back. How about you just describe your background really briefly and just what Evoca is all about, and then we can get into the meat and potatoes.
- [02:26]
Tyson Chen
Yeah. In summary, Evoca is the leading AI agents platform for, for the home services focused on call center. First and foremost. We have two main product lines. Coach, which listens to every single call that your CSRs take and gives them feedback and allows them to be the best version of themselves. And then we have Responder, which is essentially an AI CSR that takes incoming calls, books them directly into service center, whatever, CRM at a higher rate than any answering service you've ever used. And then also now we have some more features which I'm excited to share a little bit later on.
- [03:04]
Jack
I think we're about a year in March, I think of last year we started working with you guys. So yeah, we're a user and it's been awesome.
- [03:15]
Unknown
It's crazy because it feels like that, it doesn't feel like that episode was that long ago. I mean it was one of the first two that we actually dove into AI and the capabilities of AI outside of just like ChatGPT to help us out with emails or something like that.
- [03:30]
Jack
Yeah, well, I guess that would be an interesting place to start is just from AIs obviously move fast in every industry but home service, it's really felt like it's moved very fast. Like obviously you guys are at the forefront of it, but what else are you seeing in industry? Like how else is AI being implemented?
- [03:53]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I think there's a lot of different places. I mean, you know, I think there's a lot of other builders in the space that we're very close to. Obviously there's the folks doing the ride along software, Rilla, Ciro and many others in that space. There's a lot of exciting stuff happening in the world of dispatch as well. And ProBook, automating the role of a dispatcher. There's also text automations, so software like Chirp and Hatch. Yeah, I think there's a lot of different things coming and I think also especially in the last three months, even within all of these different domains, us included, there's been an influx of additional entrants as well. So I think it's one of these things where folks are starting to think, see the impact that AI is making and there's, there's an abundance now of folks that are trying to enter the space after see how well these are doing.
- [05:01]
Unknown
How do you view this competition? Is this competition more along the lines of all the boats in the harbor rise together or is this direct competition stealing market share? Just out of curiosity.
- [05:12]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I think for us it's it's kind of like when the first CRM cloud CRM came into play like Salesforce. And we view it a very similar way where right now if you look at the percentage of any home service industry that is using AI, although it may sound like a lot because a lot of big players are adopting it in terms of overall fraction, it's still very, very low, like probably significantly lower than 1% of the entire industry. And so for us we still feel like it's still completely kind of wide space. So we view the competition as validating more than anything. You know, we're the first really to have a kind of clean and production ready product in market. And so we see like all these new folks coming in really as validation and that this market is really going to grow. And I think for us it's just about continuing to push our lead and capitalize on that.
- [06:10]
Jack
Yeah, I remember, I remember. You know, it sort of like feels like back to CRMs, it feels like service titan has this like dominant share of the market. And I think, I don't remember where I read this, but they only have like 10,000 customers, which is a lot. Like I'm not, that's not like you know, small, but out of millions of like potential customers they have like a percent. And it was just, it was, it was crazy how it does feel like heavy adoption.
- [06:45]
Tyson Chen
But yeah, at the end of the day we, we feel like, yeah, the thing that's, that's definitely going to be displaced in a very, very big way very soon is after hours answering services. So there's hundreds of legacy answering services.
- [06:59]
Jack
Yeah.
- [06:59]
Tyson Chen
Those businesses, unless they adapt in a very significant way are probably going to be fading pretty, pretty quickly. And we feel that competition generally, it's also very good for the consumer. Right. And then the businesses like, like, like the ones that you guys own. Right?
- [07:17]
Jack
Like, yeah.
- [07:18]
Tyson Chen
Continue to push each other to improve and raise the quality bar.
- [07:24]
Jack
It has been interesting to watch more and more use cases come out. I think, you know, we're starting to see some movement in like sales apps that have an AI component which I, I think that's kind of interesting. Yeah, Pro book has been cool. Just like general shout out. They have been really cool. I think they're in New York too. Right? Like are you guys like. Yeah, yeah, they're, they're a good group. But yeah, it's just interesting as more and more. It's wild. I always think back to it. I was on a ski trip last February probably a year ago and Jack and I did an episode. And the episode was like, what do we think? I will change in the trades? And I think about that freaking episode all the time because like a lot has happened. It's, it's been fun to look back to as you're, as you're bringing on these, as you're bringing on like clients into aoka. What's a, what's a win? Like, what have you seen been the big victory out of like implementing AI and call center?
- [08:23]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I mean that's really the thing that gets me excited to wake up every day. I think are, are some of the ways and we've really kind of transformed and impacted customers. I think two come to mind super kind of recently. One is we did an implementation for a large company in Tennessee and within the first week, the previous answering service, which is a big recognized national brand, they were booking at a 43% rate and we instantly were able to bump that up to the low 90s. And that's just booking. Right. That's not even impacting abandonment rate. And so when you think about net booking rate, it's even higher than that. You know, over 2x increase. It got so. It was, it was so immediately tangible that when you looked at the actual boards of how full it was the week previous and then after implementing evoca, it was ridiculous. And they got so much. It was so many jobs that they had now booked that they had to hire new technicians, they had entire new personnel to be able to keep up with the demand. So I think that was one of the ones that, that was immediately like recently a huge win. The other one was before we, before.
- [09:45]
Unknown
We jump from there, Tyson, I'm not going to ask you who it is, not just because I'm in Tennessee, but killer.
- [09:54]
Jack
One of the big ones.
- [09:57]
Unknown
But on a serious. Yeah, rhymes with Miller. But on a serious note, what, what, what aspect did they. Are you referring to specifically? Is this the automated after hours service or is this the coaching? Where are you seeing the most?
- [10:16]
Tyson Chen
This was purely the AI responder. And I think the interesting part is I think last time we spoke, maybe around nine months ago, John, it was. We were focused predominantly on I guess what we would consider that the biggest pain point, which is everyone's after hours overflow answering service sucks and we can provide a much better version of that now. I think the AI has gotten to the point where we've iterated on so much. We've improved every little detail every time. The AI. It's very similar to my time in working in autonomous vehicle industry where every Single mistake the autonomous vehicle made. We would figure out why it made that and then correct that. And so that's kind of the same level of intensity and kind of iteration we've applied to voca. So now it's significantly better. And we're able to not only take just your after hours overflow calls, but a significant portion of your day to day. And even for like large like $100 million companies, we're able to take sometimes 80 to 90% of their entire call volume. But yeah, anyhow, to answer your question originally, Jack, it is the AICR product called Responder.
- [11:30]
Jack
I visited this was in August, I think of last year. I visited Josh down at Rescue. Josh Campbell.
- [11:36]
Tyson Chen
Yeah.
- [11:37]
Jack
And I think they had just a month or so pre. It was like right around that time I could have my timing off, but like they had just switched over to like full AI answering. And I was like, what the. That's, that's, that's a lot. Or like they still had a few. But their call center, like high teens, low 20s, business somewhere in there and they had like two call takers or something. It was like an outrageously low number, maybe three, I don't even remember. There was only one there that day.
- [12:09]
Tyson Chen
I just got an email from one of the kind of larger customers that we had onboarded around four months ago and he was like, yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. We're able to run an entire 100 million dollar business with just 9 CSRs through utilizing Avoca, which like before they would have needed 40, 50. Right. So I mean, John, like I think, what's your experience?
- [12:32]
Jack
So we've had two really big changes to our call center in the past year. One of them's been evoke and one's been like a compensation change that we've really championed. So I think like a combination of those two things. But right now we're running the leanest call center that we've ever run team wise. And like our abandon rate is obviously very low because we set. If we don't pick it up in seven seconds, then I think we said it. So Avoca picks up at seven, like basically no call goes past seven seconds.
- [13:02]
Tyson Chen
Yeah.
- [13:03]
Jack
Because that's a number that I'm unreasonably passionate about. But I think we're down to seven, maybe. I mean it might be eight, but like at one point we're at 18, 19. So it was significant. And now some of that's like a bunch of. That was overflow in weekends. That's where we saw a ton of our Dynamic changing because we had. I don't know if our daytime changed much. We might have tightened that up by two, but we had a ton of people set for like 24 hours. We had them set up for weekends, and we just don't have to do any of that anymore.
- [13:42]
Tyson Chen
And I think the interesting thing there is, it's like the types of things that CSRs are spending their time on is a little bit more aligned to what you want them to be, which is like all of the things where 50% of calls are not at all revenue sensitive. Right. It's an inquiry about billing. It's someone wanting to perhaps reschedule. Ask about an ETA is an extremely common one. All of those different things where you don't need an amazing CSR to sell the brand can be automated now by the evocative agent. And so I think that's really where kind of. There's been a pretty large inflection. And so, yeah, great to see the results that you're experiencing.
- [14:25]
Jack
Well, and it's like. It's sort of like right time, right. Like, everyone's looking for savings, everyone's having pressure on their top line. Everyone's having margin compression. So, like, being able to. For us, it was like 30 grand a month of savings. So it was like. It was a lot. That's a lot of money. So being able to just add that back in and use it for marketing or literally anything else was a win.
- [14:47]
Tyson Chen
And then even patching the holes as well in terms of the booking rates, too. Right. Like, usually, again, like, we. With just the fact that we are able to pick up every call in the first ring, that just adds so much to your true. Getting rid of any abandonment rate. And then all of these other things that we've added on top in terms of callbacks, text backs, like, all these things. And really, I don't even know if we're using.
- [15:12]
Jack
I don't even know if we're using that stuff. I gotta follow up with Lori. Yeah, maybe you would know. Am I using. Am I using.
- [15:19]
Tyson Chen
You're using some of the callbacks, but yeah, that's interesting.
- [15:24]
Unknown
But.
- [15:25]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, well. Well, we have actually just launched a few new functionalities as well.
- [15:29]
Jack
So what else have you guys. What else. What else have you guys pumped out? I'm gonna follow up with Laura on the callback and text back. That sounds cool.
- [15:36]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, big thing. I'll say one thing on both responder and coach. So on the responder side, one of the new things we've launched is outbound calling. So Being able to.
- [15:46]
Jack
Dude, that's crazy.
- [15:46]
Unknown
That is wild.
- [15:47]
Jack
I'm gonna. I'm gonna ask the first question that came into my head that probably came into everyone's head. Is that legal? Because I thought there was some restrictions on what T. TCPA or whatever it is. But like, I thought AI Agents outbounding, I know there's some limits there, right?
- [16:02]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, there's a lot of limits. It's different state by state. Generally speaking, if you're allowed, if you've gotten written consent to market to them, and if we're announcing that it's an AI agent, that it is legal. And then beyond that, there's already a lot of folks that do AI Text campaigns and stuff like that as well.
- [16:26]
Jack
Okay, walk us through the AI Outbounding. That's wild.
- [16:32]
Tyson Chen
Yeah. So with AI Outbounding, there's really a few different use cases. The first two that we're focused on is one is pretty simple one, happy calls. So being able to automatically trigger a happy call after a visit, seeing how well, you know, you did, getting actual feedback. I think the nice part is it's actually an advantage that it is AI because folks we found are actually a lot more receptive to telling actual feedback as opposed to if it's a real person. Sometimes people don't give the real because they're afraid of hurting their feelings. And then we have. We're building this out where if the person gives a 10 or 9, we actually ask them to then leave a review. So it helps in getting more 5 star reviews as well.
- [17:18]
Jack
Are you tracking that for like mps? Because I feel like that would. Yes, you'd be able to like. Yeah, record that, almost print it into mps, like, hey, you got a. It's not an influencer. I'm remembering what. Forgetting what nine and tens are. They like market for you. What's the right word here?
- [17:35]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, promoter, I guess.
- [17:37]
Jack
Yeah. Thank you. Promoter. So they're a promoter, so.
- [17:39]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, exactly. And we show all of that in a dashboard exactly like that. Directly you can see your mps. Then the second thing is routine maintenance. So for members, when you need to fill up, the board, automatically scheduling an outbound call and saying, hey, you know, we, you know, you're on your member membership, you get a free, you know, checkup, you know, when do you want to schedule that? And then we can schedule that directly into your CRM as well. So that's the second use case. And then the third one is actually running promotions. So let's say you guys are really, you know, not. Not getting much business in the month of February, the month of March, you can use our outbound to actually provide promotions like, hey, we're doing a, you know, $55 off, you know, drain cleaning, something like that.
- [18:31]
Unknown
And is there any success stories with this? Because, I mean, not, not to, to be the, the Debbie Downer in the room, but I'm trying to, to wrap my head around me receiving an AI phone call, and I don't know if I'd be as receptive to AI versus a person.
- [18:48]
Tyson Chen
Yeah. So we've seen, again, we've only launched the first two things. We've seen pretty good success with the first one, happy calls. That's actually a lot more successful than even a human calling. And then around routine maintenance. We've only been beta testing this with three folks, but it's been pretty good in the sense that because it's free, people aren't, it's not like they're, it's not like a tough sale. It's not like, hey, like, convincing you to pay money to an AI. It's, hey, this is a benefit that you have. We can schedule it for tomorrow if you want. And we're directly integrated into acp, so we can see exactly the availability as well.
- [19:25]
Jack
I kind of want to hear it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm just sitting here like, that's crazy. I want to hear it, but I mean, I can see the huge amount of leverage. I mean, at this point. Yeah, I mean, that would be crazy. I, I, it's almost like I could, I could see it being like, like too much. Like, what's the limit? Too much is in, like, you could burn out a whole list in like 10 minutes. Like, because there's no limit. Right. Like you just, yeah, hey, let's call a hundred thousand, Call the list right now.
- [19:57]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, you, we could exactly do that. Yeah, there's, there's really no limit with like the amounts that we're talking about here.
- [20:07]
Jack
How do you deal with, you know, one of the things that we dealt with as we like ramped up our outbound discipline maybe a year ago was because, I don't remember exactly why, it has something to do with like, how many calls you make that don't get answered or something like that. But our, our number was showing up as spam and we had to like, we had to bring on this extra software to like unspam the, the phone number. How are you dealing with that? Especially with AI because you're like pumping out more volume than humans basically ever could.
- [20:42]
Tyson Chen
Absolutely. So, great, great question. And yeah, the pickup rate just, like, for email influences the stuff a lot. We do monitor that quite a bit and make sure that we're always basically using new numbers so that the numbers are not making it to spam. So that's kind of the way that we're able. We're essentially cycling through these new numbers in the back end so that it always shows. And also, we always use a local area code, so whatever area code you're in, it'll call from that area code. And then, you know, as soon as we notice that the numbers are being marked as spam, we'll swap it to a new number.
- [21:21]
Jack
You know, it'd be sweet. Yeah, yeah, it's like speed delete.
- [21:26]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, we actually.
- [21:27]
Jack
That would be, like, absolutely sick. Or like. Or even, like, rehash, like. Oh, like, I. We just did a home show and we got like, 300 contacts, and I think we got 85 or 90 appointments. But, like, the big thing you optimize there for is you have your contacts, appointments, and then what's your demo rate or your sit rate? And, like, how do you fix the gap? So, like, if we. If we booked 100 appointments, but 40 canceled, so we only demoed 60 of them. Well, how do we. How do we get another 10 on the books? And it's all through, like, persistent outbounding, basically. To the point of obnoxious outbounding.
- [22:07]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, no, that's actually something we also have. So for Yelp, Angie's List, Google assay, being able to instantly respond and then initiate an outbound call to that person. So that's something that. Yeah, we have that functionality and, yeah, we'd love to. Love to have you test it out as well.
- [22:28]
Jack
I will literally do that today. That would be huge.
- [22:32]
Unknown
I know that it's. It's an issue for our team as well. It's like when you. When you're running all these aggregators, right. You can get bombarded with calls at any point or, excuse me, with leads at any point in time. 9, 10, 11, 12pm and if you do not get back to them, the somebody is somebody to it. And we've tried to automate me. It's John. John's personally, if you. If you go on Angie's and you go to Wilson, you'll find John at 10 in the morning.
- [22:59]
Jack
Yep. How do you deal with. How do you deal with the. Like, with Angie specifically? It's sort of like how it interfaces with Hatch. Right. So. And we've talked to Hatch about this, but I, I don't really know about the other ones, but with Hatch, the way it works and they're, they're actively fixing this, I think they, they might have just fixed it, but it's not like a pipeline. So like I get a lead and the lead comes in and there's automatically. I don't know if it's an API. I don't know exactly how the lead connects, but it connects somehow. And then we send a message out and then it doesn't become a conversation until they respond back. And the problem is that we can't outbound that person because we don't actually have their data inside Hatch. It's only native to whatever the lead AG is. So have you, have you guys? Like, how would that work? Because that's a part of the problem we're trying to solve is. And, and like, I think Hatch launched like a pipeline thing, so now we can manage that a little bit better. But like, okay, if I, if I got a hundred leads from Angie this week. We sent all the messages we sped to lead for text, but only 50 of those hundred responded. How do we get the other 50 on, on the board if they're not inside Hatch already? So you guys think you could somehow interface, like, put yourself in the middle.
- [24:25]
John
Recently we've been experimenting with lead aggregators. And one of the ones I'm most excited about is a company called Modernize. So what Modernize does is they do direct inbound calls for home improvement. So it's a direct phone call booking, which is way easier to book and has a much higher book rate than an Angie's List or something like that, where you have to sort of recontact them and try to find that, that customer. Modernize has a direct connection to our call center. So that's been a huge win.
- [24:53]
Jack
It also has some of the services.
- [24:55]
John
That we've really struggled to get good leads for. Water heater replacements, H vac units, and water damage restoration and water quality. Those ones have been challenging for us to get leads and Modernize has been a really great partner for us. So make sure you check out modernize.com.
- [25:09]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I mean we're able to directly access Angie's in Yelp through either our API, it depends customer, customer depends on their API level access. And then otherwise we can even use computer control to directly kind of read this stuff off. And so in that case with the hundred, as long as they're in there and we can read it off, you can actually develop sequences. So basically being able to, you know, first Shoot a text. If they don't respond within a certain, you know, call it 12 hours, then you can fire a phone call as well. So you can essentially initiate sequences within the speed to lead capabilities for, you.
- [25:55]
Jack
Know, a couple minutes ago you said like the big probable loser in this, like next year or so is going to be a traditional call center model. Have you seen some of these traditional call centers pick up AI in a meaningful way?
- [26:10]
Tyson Chen
I've seen a few. I've seen a few try. I think the issue is that it's just fundamentally a very, very different paradigm and a very different business structure that they're used to. So, you know, anyone can build something very basic that sounds, that sounds like cool for a demo, but to actually get the AI well and also to build in the human and the loop component that is able to continue the conversation, not drop context and give the human all of the things that have happened in the conversation a very fast way. So the conversation is smooth. All of those individually are extremely difficult engineering challenges. And so the issue with traditional call centers is that they just don't have the talent really necessary. And then even on the onboarding front, right, there's just so many things that we've learned and refined and how do you figure out onboarding, the change management associated with it? There's just so many layers to it that in order for an old like BPO or traditional cost owner to do this effectively, they'd have to completely transform their organization.
- [27:21]
Jack
Yeah, what, what I've seen start to happen is this like, I mean eventually like disruption disrupts. Right. So like it, it is what it is. But I've seen almost like a dissection of like, hey, over here, like we're going to adopt AI and do the thing. And over here the opposite argument is, hey, our advantage is that we're not AI. Like we're a human component that's been like, their argument is like, oh yeah, we're, you know, more hands on. Is has that been something that you guys have like dealt with or competed against or like, have you, has it just been all signs go recently?
- [28:00]
Tyson Chen
I mean, yeah, in early days I would say the vast majority of folks were very hesitant and we had to show them, you know, case studies and all this to kind of show them that this is empirically better. Recently the, we've, we've been getting more and more interest. Like, I think it's really in terms of the adoption. You have the, the, you know, innovators, the early adopters, the early majority. I think we're squarely in the early majority now where folks that want to get a leg up are actually thinking about this. I think the nice part with Avoca in particular is that we're not just AI, we have AI, but we also have a staff of highly trained staff as ours that are actually very much trained in a sales way so that they're always trying to book the calls. And so our whole idea is that not only do we want the AI to be the best in class in this industry, but we also want the best in class human component as well. And so that way, yeah, even for customers that really are in, let's say really rural parts of the country that they're able to also have an amazing experience.
- [29:08]
Jack
Yeah, it'll be interesting over the next few years and, and like how long does an advantage last to an early user? Because I think right now like there's a, there's a cost savings component but what happens in two or three or five years when more of the industry's on there? Like is that cost saving component gone for some reason and now there's like downward pressure because our overhead's lower. Like is this like, you know, are the next few years the years to win?
- [29:35]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I mean we absolutely feel like it. I think for us again as I mentioned there's, there's definitely a lot of competitors, new competitors that are entering now. I think in terms of our advantages, you know, one is that even on the go to market side we're you know, capturing a lot of, and working with a lot of the leading industry leaders that's going to help the product forward. And then yeah, realistically I think technology, you know, we have a multi month advantage. But the thing is about the industry that's so interesting that because the technology is moving at such an incredible pace, where we are now versus three months ago is light years different. And where we want to be in three months, our model is the Avoca. Three months later is going to put the Evoca today out of business is how much that, you know, just a few months difference makes. So that's kind of how we see it. And yeah, I think exactly the next two years is really when I think we'll start to see a clear market leader emerging. I think in these kind of industries it's really like, you know, the number one player, if you look at for example Service Titan versus HubSpot Pro or if you look at Salesforce versus HubSpot, there is such a massive difference between the number one and the number two players.
- [30:58]
Unknown
Well, speaking of of Evoca three months from now. What, what do you see or what can you talk about that's on the horizon that are going to be just these awesome projects you guys are working on or awesome features that you see coming to fruition?
- [31:10]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I mean there's, there's a variety of things, but I think, you know, our thing has always been focused. We want to create the number one AI csr. We want to, you know, not just on the concept. Right. Like our primary value proposition is we want to build a CSR that's able to book your jobs at a higher booking rate than anyone else. So that's still going to be our kind of top insane focus. I think there's some interesting things that we're also doing upstream so on bringing AI into marketing and kind of helping to operationalize and improve your, you know, where your marketing dollars are spent and so. Yeah, well, I won't share too much about that, but that's something that's coming.
- [31:54]
Unknown
I mean the outbounding thing is huge in itself. I mean if, if that can be locked down and works well, I mean that's an absolute game changer.
- [32:02]
Tyson Chen
Yeah.
- [32:03]
Unknown
So that's so neat.
- [32:06]
Jack
Yeah, I think it's cool because it's up and downstream. Like it, it's almost, you know, one of the downsides of service. I'm curious how you think about this. One of the downsides of service titan is it's like literally too big. So I don't even know what the minimum size is anymore but it's probably like 10 trucks or something which is still like big. So I, I don't even know if they onboard you under that, but maybe they do. But it feels like you can. There's a use case here for like 100 million and there's a use case here for like I'm a one dude and maybe even a better use case for the I'm a one dude because like they literally can't support of a human.
- [32:44]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I think you, you hit the nail on the head. And the interesting thing is in this industry, home services, while there's, you know, more and more aggregation, we hear about all the private equity roll ups. We were just talking about that a little bit before the show. If you look at where most of the revenue is actually it's still aggregate. It's still in that long tail and. Exactly right. Like we are able to service. And so if you're a man in the vet before you even get a CRM, you're probably going to need to get someone that can pick up the phone for you 247 and just, you know, put, put them on, like, you know, confirm a time. And so that's exactly what we can do. So I think, I think you're exactly right. The use cases are a little bit different, but I would almost argue the upside is even larger because. Right for you, John, you had an after hours answering service before. So the value for you is a, you know, cost reduction of whatever the $30,000 a month. But B, we're able to increase your, your revenue a bit. Maybe like, you know, booking rate increased by around 15, 20%. For a man in the van who goes to voicemail, that increase isn't 15%. That's from voicemail. That has like an efficacy of 5% to all of a sudden, you know, 85% from. With our booking rate. So that Delta is just so much bigger with the smaller guys.
- [34:06]
Unknown
Is that typical of what you're seeing, Tyson? Is that going from a after hours booking service to Avoca will save you that kind of money?
- [34:16]
Tyson Chen
Save you the money and service. So I'll give you, I'll just kind of, I'll give you the high level, right? Like save you probably around, you know, anywhere from, you know, 30 to 40% based from your previous answering service and also increase your booking rate by around 15 mic drop.
- [34:37]
Jack
Yeah, I mean it's a big. I know, I know. It was for us like we were, we were using probably schedule engine, I think, and they went through just a show of an acquisition with Service Titan. I mean it was a good, it was a really good, like the, like the product itself, the widget or whatever is still good. Like we're still users of that. But their after hours at one point was better than our internal call center. Like we, we like downsized our call center because it was just, they were better and then they got acquired by Service Titan and that was just absolutely awful. I don't, I don't think anybody that was with them prior is like still with them. But, but yeah, that was our experience. We saved a ton of money. It was awesome. And just frankly better experience because it was really very, very bad. Scheduling was very bad.
- [35:29]
Unknown
Tyson, can you talk a little bit about specifically like what does onboarding look like for something like that? What's the lift that it takes say for me? So I don't, we don't have an after hours service. We, we use, we utilize people. But if we were going to switch to Avoca, what, what does that look like for me? How do I, how do I get onboarded. What does that look like?
- [35:54]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, this is a pitch we should totally get you guys on.
- [36:00]
Jack
But Jack, you're actually not using the platform Avoca, dude, I've been telling you about it for like a year. Okay, all right, all right, continue. I couldn't tell if you were, like, joking or not.
- [36:11]
Tyson Chen
Yeah. So basically, two weeks total onboarding process. We start by understanding your general scheduling. We have a few templates, like best in class templates that we've worked with a lot of our customers based on. So based on the size of your business, whether or not you do emergency, whether or not you do weekends, what type of services that you guys do, we'll have a, you know already a general template that should get you around 90% of the way there. Then you just give us access to your service titan. A use service titan, right? Yeah, you give us access to your service titan. You fill in the knowledge base of questions. You give us a job type mapping, and then we take all of that, we train the system, and then we give you an initial number to test with in the first week. And then we have structured testing, which is like, hey, here are all the different types of paths that a customer can go down so that you're completely covered. We do a mutual testing plan. So like your team has said 20 times. We test it 20 times and then make any iterations. And then usually that's one more turn. And then the second week we'll do a final kind of testing call. And if everything works well, it'll go live. So, yeah, it usually just takes like with your call center manager, around three to four hours. And yeah, you get a dashboard. But yeah, if you're using voicemail right now, that's. There's a lot of upside that I can see from using us.
- [37:44]
Jack
I'm sure you have the data, but, like, what do you think the percentage of your clients that are using, like, the full AI phone service? This is just like industry vibes. How many people are like, yes, AI take over my call center versus the hybrid. Right, right. Like, because I think we're still hybrid. But I, I, I'm sure people would, I know, I'm curious of just like, all right, how many of my competitors have AI running their call center?
- [38:08]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, I would say out of, you know, out of our customers, it's typically what we recommend is that larger customers use hybrid, because hybrid, you're just going to get a higher booking rate. And again, that's the number one thing, full AI. The booking rate is actually Significantly higher than it was before because of how human, like we've gotten it and how well we've been able to engineer the conversations. But it's still probably around 5% lower overall booking rate. And so usually it's like, yeah, I'd say companies that are under 10 million, under 5 million, there's a larger percentage that use full AI, maybe like 60, 70%. And then for the companies that are larger than 10 million, the vast majority we recommend. And also they do use hybrid because they want every single percentage of that booking rate matters to them.
- [39:01]
Jack
What percentage of clients are like fully.
- [39:04]
Tyson Chen
I of overall clients. It's still, it's probably around 30, 30%.
- [39:12]
Unknown
That is a lot more than I would think. That's incredible.
- [39:15]
Tyson Chen
We've gotten recently, we've gotten a lot more of the smaller, like under 5 million shops.
- [39:20]
Jack
Yeah, one. And I think for them just the, the argument's so good. I, I actually, I'm sort of kicking myself that I didn't think about this a couple days ago, but I was talking with a friend of mine and he was like actively trying to solve this problem and for some reason I don't, I don't know why I didn't think about it, so I'm gonna have to text him. But he was like, yeah, dude, what do I do about this? And he's like a four truck operation.
- [39:44]
Tyson Chen
What was, yeah, what was the main problem that he was trying to solve? Like the fact that he did after hours.
- [39:49]
Jack
So, so he, so, so he called me up and he's like, hey man, I'm talking to the csr and like, she's, she's great, she's amazing. And, and she said she can pick up the phone after hours and like, I can make that a part of her job. And I was like, yeah, I don't, I don't think that's really going to work the way you think it's going to. Like, she's going to be busy with her life. It's going to go to voicemail, you're going to lose it. Maybe you should bring on additional staff or you should do something and. But yeah, for him, like, he literally just can't do it. Like, you know, it's a, it's a four per. It's a four truck operation. It's a very small operation. So.
- [40:20]
Tyson Chen
Yeah, and I imagine even during the day if folks are busy, like he, I guess he's the only one that's taking calls, right?
- [40:27]
Jack
Yeah, he doesn't have, yeah, he has one. He has a call Taker now, but they're like replacing with the new one. Yeah, I, I don't. Maybe he, he must have asked me. It must have been hiring related. I. I don't even know. I'm like, really? I'm like, how did that not cross my brain? A full AI thing would be. I like obviously just make a ton of sense for that size of a business.
- [40:45]
Tyson Chen
For that size of business. Significant improvements from, from voicemail and then.
- [40:50]
Jack
Just like huge profit win.
- [40:52]
Tyson Chen
Huge profit win. I mean, and again, like I've said before, even if, if he's on the job, like if he's taking like 30 seconds to pick up or you know, his one CSR, if you only have one CSR, if they're on a call, you're done, right? Like you're gonna. If another call comes in. Yeah, you know, there's a busy time, then you might miss two or three calls. And so even, and even if you, you know, pick up in 40 seconds, that's still quite a while. You're already leaving the customer feeling in kind of not a great place. So imagine being able to take pick up each of these calls on the first ring and, and be able to book them.
- [41:27]
Jack
This was awesome, dude. I feel like I'm really walking away excited as hell about this outbounding thing. Like, I'm about to look into this. The speed delete especially, like, I think I. The happy call is really interesting. The routine main is really interesting, but the speed delete is like, that's an actionable. Like I would win today with, with that feature. So Lori will be calling you in 20 minutes to get that set up. That sounds amazing. All right, if people want to learn more about Avoca, how do they, how do they get it? Where do they find it?
- [42:05]
Tyson Chen
Yeah. So easiest way is to just book a demo on our website, www.avoca.AI. avoca is spelled a V O C A. And then yeah, otherwise happy to folks for to email me as well. I'm just Tyson Voca AI.
- [42:21]
Jack
All right, dude, thanks for coming on again. This was fun. I'm looking forward to bringing you back on in like another three to six months and be like, what changed Evoca.
- [42:29]
Unknown
Three months from now.
- [42:29]
Tyson Chen
Excited. Yeah, we'll have, we'll have, I'm sure, a variety of interesting things. Yeah, always a pleasure, guys. And yeah, Jack about to get you set up. Yeah. Yeah, Cool.
- [42:43]
Jack
All right. If you like what you heard, check out owned and operated.com and make sure you look. Check out our upcoming workshop. Avoca is going to be there. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk about best in class call centers. Ownandoperated.com.