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To The Point - Home Services VIP Room Podcast
TTP Micro Episode: A.I vs Human: Call Handling Revolutionized in Home Services
00:53:10
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A
Welcome to to the Point Home Services, the podcast where real contractors share real strategies. We cut through the noise and get straight to the point with the contractors that are working in the field right now. If you run a home services business and want to lead, better, grow faster and stay sharp, you're in the right place. Now, before we get started, I need you to do one thing. Only 30% of our listeners are following the show. So stop what you're doing, hit follow, and let's get to the point. This is to the Point a Rhino experience voted one of the top home.
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B
Services, marketing and operations podcasts.
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A
Cutting through the and getting to the point. Hey, what's up to the Point listeners? It's your boy Chris, along with my good friend, my dear friend John Chatty P in the place to be rocking his wabash little Giants gear today.
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C
I see.
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A
May you. You prep a little football or what? Football season.
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D
We are off the first week. They don't start till next weekend. But yeah, we're getting ready to roll, dude.
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A
Mason has his first freshman football game next week, so Perfect. Yeah. So ball season, baby. Let's go.
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D
It is exciting. Thank God.
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A
I am excited for some football season. And we had a nice little. If you saw these guys all, even our guests, you guys might saw. I saw. It was national news. I don't quite understand why, but we had a big haboob here in Phoenix, Arizona. Do you know what haboob is?
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C
Nope.
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A
Yeah, it's basically a dust storm, but it's like a wall of dust. So when you get off here, Google haboob H A B O O B and you'll see that's kind of what we dealt with. But people were reaching out to us, like, hey, you guys, okay? I'm like, it's just a dust storm, man. Not a big deal. But it is always interesting here. Like, that's the only natural disasters we get in Phoenix, Arizona. So, like, I'll take it. Chad, I know you're going to be really disappointed, man. I know you're gonna be disappointed because I am going to skip the dad jokes today, all right? And we're just going to get down to business, okay? And we have a great podcast today, and I'll tell you why. This is a question that I know you, both you and I, Chad, have been asked question quite a bit is just like, who? What. How does. How was the. How is anything AI call. AI related? Call answering AI related? Like, what is. Who do I go with? Why? What's the, you know, upside? What's the downside, I'm nervous. What's like, all the questions, we figure, well, let's just bring Tyson on and answer the questions directly on what the contractors have given us. So we literally gathered a group of, of questions from contractors from not only our, our group of friends, but a bunch of other contractors to ask you, Tyson. So we're going to put you on the spot today, bro, and just hammer you with some of the questions that these guys have. And you know, one of our good friends, Chad and I's good friends, Aaron Gaynor, I know that you guys are working with him and Eco, and he kind of gave me some of his perspective on, like, what he loves about, like, what he likes about this so far is, you know, with his experience and what he's kind of went through. And I think it's, it's pretty cool, man, to have some, like, real life experience from one of our buddies, you know, talking about it. But we have Tyson Chen, who's a founder of Evoke AI, which I think I met you first time for the first time, Tyson, at Pantheon. If it wasn't last year, it was a year before, I think, so maybe 2020. Because you started this. It started in 2022, right?
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C
Yeah, so we started in 2022. And my, our first year of Pantheon was actually last year, so I think I came to find you at your booth last year.
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A
Yeah. But there was a little bit of wonkiness there too, because at the time we still had our sister company, Nexa, which has since, you know, sold and then it allowed us to actually, you know, do something together. So here we are. I appreciate your, I appreciate your persistence, bro.
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C
I think I, I think I messaged you like, like, must have been a dozen times. But yeah, glad we were able to make this happen.
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A
You're on it. And MIT grad, right? Yeah, yeah. Class 2017. Could have done without that, but whatever. And we got Paul Barth on here from Turnpoint too. And Paul's going to be able to share a little bit of his experience as a client who oversees many, many brands. The Turnpoint name, everybody knows who it is, and there's lots of brands within it. So to kind of have your perspective, I think is cool. Paul. So, so welcome to the show to both of you. I'm ready to get after it, man. We're not going to waste any time. We're just going to, to dig right in and, and, you know, the biggest takeaway I, I, you know, that I can. That will get from this podcast to understand not Just what it is. But the how and the experience, the client, the, you know, the, the customer experience, the homeowner experience with using AI, the challenges, everything has challenges because half the battle is figuring out the challenges and how to overcome them. And then the upsides too, right? Because there's great upside to it. How maybe it works with CRMs, you know, how does it, you know, book into CRMs? Like just. I think we're going to ask some great questions so I'm going to jump into it. And Chad, I will steamroll this one because I have so many questions. So you know the drill, dude. Just trying to chime in when your brain does what it does like normal. So if you guys are ready, let's just kick it off with the basics. Tyson, this is my softball to you. Okay, so maybe just explain to our listeners right now what all does Evoca AI offer to the contractors.
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C
Awesome. So Evoca AI, we are a voice AI platform for the trades dedicated for residential home service businesses. Our core product is the AI CSR. So basically being able to 24, 7 handle every call in a human like way. And we have the best in class booking rates. So usually people start using its two phases. Phase one, we're going to be the best answering service you've ever had. And then phase two, over the course of three to six months, as the AI gets smarter and smarter, it will get to the point where it's on par with your average in house csr. And at that point folks switch it to first line of defense. So be able to handle every call on the first ring and usually at that point we can get to around 80%. And Chad, obviously we just spoke about this a week or so ago with Matt over at Kaldad who uses this. So yeah, that's really what we are known for. And over the last six months we've also expanded quite a bit. We have a coaching product. So be able to coach csrs, listen to every call and coach them and then also being able to outbound. So being able to do things like scheduling, outbound, routine maintenance, follow ups and unsold estimates, happy calls and do that in an intelligent way that is able to fill up the board. And so that's really the two things. Fill up the board and clo and close every lead are the, are the two main things that Boca does.
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A
Hey, quick question. I'm already going to go off my own script. The coaching tool, I'm assuming you're using a tracking, like a tracking number to be able to do the coaching off of is that how that works? How just how's the coaching tool work? Because I'm, if I'm a contractor I'm thinking, well I have all my tracking numbers in place. Do I have to change, I have to change providers? Like is there something like that? Like what is it? What, what's it, what's that look like?
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C
Yeah, no, not at all. So we integrate with a lot of telephony systems and so we directly pull the calls based on them. So the popular one obviously is just folks that use Service Titan directly. We're able to directly connect into Service Titan and we're able to, yeah, you don't have to change any numbers. We're able to grade every call and we're also able to do things like reclassify because there's oftentimes misclassifications when you let CSRs grade their own cause and a variety of other other issues, we're able to correct and correctly disposition those.
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A
We are well aware of that at Rhino Strategic Solutions on the lead attribution being changed by csrs and have been impacted by that. Which is now why we have a service type product specialist in house to help support that. Yeah, obviously that's, that's a big deal because when that happens it jacks up all the numbers. Right. And we're making big, you know, contractors making big decisions based on data integrity. Right. So anyway, that was just one thing immediately popped into my, into my mind. Now I'm going to ask you this question, this is what you'd ask all the time. But when I'm asking my friends or my group of friends and just to give you some perspective, this is roughly about 20 different contractors or decent sized contractors that are friends of mine and you know, they use some of your competitors. Right. And so it's like, hey Mike, an easy question to you is like what is it that makes evoke it different than everybody else? Is there something that like sets you guys apart? Is there something that you do that they don't do? Like this is a good chance to let everybody know like why, like what's Evoca about and what's the difference?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. So I think I'd say it's multifaceted. You know one thing that is a huge differentiator is that we actually have our own in house team of CSRs that is, allows us to do human loop. So, so when calls get, when calls come in, we're able to actually understand when the caller needs a human and transfer it to the human at the same time. Preserving conversational context so that the calls get closed at the highest rate possible, I think. But yeah, actually this question is probably a good one where Paul can chime in a bit as well because he did a pretty lengthy evaluation. Sure.
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B
So, hi everybody. We took an approach that we didn't know what we didn't know and there are a lot of vendors out there in this space and it's very hard to distinguish what's real and what's not. So we set out for kind of a design of experiments where we tried multiple vendors concurrently and evaluated them on. On kind of qualitative and quantitative. Like, is the booking rate better? But also is like the voice experience as good? How does it handle interruptions? How does it do with rebuttals? So there's an art and a science to this and it is very difficult to see when you're looking at the webpage. And I mean, every vendor is going to give you a number to call, but there's only so much you can do with that. So how do you know how it really works? The only way is by putting it with your customers.
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A
Yeah, so you were testing multiple providers at the exact same time. And which is like really typical with any of our private equity partners is typically you're kind of testing and kind of, you know, playing them against each other and whoever has the best results wins the game. So sounds like Avoca won the game. So well done, Tyson.
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C
And yeah, I guess to just finalize the thought there, I think, yeah, the final thing I'll say is that really I think the enterprise readiness is something we pride ourselves on and we have a bit of a unique model where we actually offer four deployed engineers that are able to take that next degree of customization so that our bots aren't just a generic off the shelf bot. It truly understands the business. And then the final thing is risk. Right. You're a guy in Paul's seat. You want to take the solution that is the least risky for your business. And given the number that the enterprise customers we have, the logos and the history, I think, you know, the risk is by far the least with Avoca.
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B
The way we describe it internally is it's the front door to our business. So we care very deeply about the customer experience. And as I've talked to both other vendors, but also a lot of other brands outside of the Turnpoint family that are interested in exploring AI csr. The counsel that I've given to folks is think about who can integrate and who can iterate the best for your culture. Because it is not just a technical integration with ServiceTitan, but it's also, there are so many nuances if you understand the difference between a plumbing problem and a drain problem. Not everybody quite understands that. So how do your vendors, how do your partners work with you on that? That's the integration piece and then the iteration as you uncover, as you look at the booking rate of the AI versus your people, how are your vendors able to incorporate your feedback to close and match the performance of your human CSRs? So it's integration and iteration. That's how we think.
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C
And I'll leave you with the last line I always say is like the Evoca three months from now will put the Evoca of today out of business. That is the speed at which we are iterating and it's in large part due to the amazing kind of product team. Like my co founder and I, we met at the Voice AI Lab at MIT and I think one of the things we really pride ourselves in is an incredible bar as it pertains to engineering and product talent. So that, you know, we're ahead now and we want, want to continue to increase that lead in the future.
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A
Yeah.
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D
How do you guys look at, or I guess maybe Tyson or can answer this. I think the biggest thing with AI is the fear, right? It's like, you know, yeah, it is the front door of our business. What if I answer it with AI and no one books with me? So like what have you heard from customers? And then more so, you know, what, what are the things that they see as like, oh, I had to get over that hurdle. It was a kind of a mental block for me and now everything is fine. Or what, like what, what do you, what do you typically see as like the objections to using this kind of tool?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. So it's definitely gotten better over time. I think one of the, the metrics we tracked pretty religiously was the amount of times a customer in the beginning, like a, like when did they discover it was an AI? In the beginning it was basically like all the time because we would announce that it's an AI. Now we actually don't even announce it's an AI until it varies because customers have different preferences. But for the ones that don't announce it in the beginning, we actually notice a pretty large portion, 83% even realize it's an AI throughout the entire three minute call. And that's like, you know, early on, like maybe even a year ago, that would number would be probably less than 5% would actually think that it's, it's a real person. But I would say exactly you do. And you know, there's still sometimes you get angry customers for those, it often takes a bit of time before they realize, wait a minute, this isn't an AI of three years ago that's just dumb and is going to like not actually do anything. Not going to handle my problem. This AI is intelligent in many ways. The, the affordances we've built into the product to be able to in real time pull customer information. Like what job did you do last time? What's the age of your equipment? What address? The AI is able to actually pull those in a blink of an eye and, and bring that into the conversation and add value in a way that a normal CSR wouldn't. And so it's usually it's those aha moments where it's like, wait a minute, I'm not talking to a dumb bot that I'm used, that I've been used to for talking to my entire life. I'm talking to a bot that actually is able to be quick and pull up information faster than any normal CSR is able to. And for the portion of customers that are still extremely old fashioned and want to speak to a human, that's why we have our world class call center that we can always transfer to.
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A
Question on that human, on the human being piece. It's cool because then you can, you mean you. If, if it does get complicated, I'm assuming it can flip over to the human being. Okay, so.
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C
I.
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A
Are they U. S based, Are they nearshore, offshore or is it a variation of combination?
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C
We have a, we have a pretty big presence in uh, in Phoenix and that's also where our, we have, we hired Amy Spence who used to run cost and operations at A1 with Tommy and then also before that Authority brands. And so we have some contingent in Phoenix, we have a contingent in Canada and then we also have a contingent in northern Mexico.
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A
Got it. Okay, good. I asked that because a million times I get asked that question because it's like oh yes, especially in the trades. Absolutely.
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C
You want to speak to someone that, that could be your neighbor. Right?
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A
So, well you. So some of the, you know, experiences that, that we've, that we've had at Rhino is that before we had, before we used AI we had human beings in here listening to every single phone call for every contractor, which is crazy. Like we're talking like 80 some odd people in the United States listening to phone calls. And you would almost always tell if somebody had overflow or after hours calls and it was even near shore. The booking rates were disastrous like and it was okay. And so you're better off paying the US based team because the booking rate and conversion rates are higher. Like so forever. Those were issues. And we know we don't, we don't do it. So it wasn't, we just would catch it and say, oh well, change the companies. Because this booking, you know, this answering service makes me want to put my head through a wall. So let me ask this question and this is kind of more like on the economic side of things. How does this end up like this might seem like a very simple question, but I, I want the listeners to think through this. How does using something like this save the contractors money on the bottom line, increase efficiency but also at the same time like not be a pain in the ass. Right. Of something that's like a problem they got to deal with as a product?
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C
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe. Paul, you probably think about this 24 7. So curious to get your Paul, I.
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A
Guess this is your wheelhouse buddy. So let it rip.
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B
Sure. So we have similar experiences with third party which is that it's expensive and unfulfilling is the word that I use often. So the first a combination of how do we think about business value and how do we think about managing the risk, both reputational and performance and all that. So we started very much with off hours and third party and that allowed us to pull that number down. Then we started going to how do we put them in line with our human CSRs and as the AI CSRs, the digital workers get to the same level as the people. Now we can start to get comfortable with attrition. And I don't know what you guys have experienced, but we have found the human CSR roles are very high attrition in most cases. So as workers attrit out and as the performance of the digital worker gets to the same level as the human worker, it becomes a safety valve for that attrition risk and managing and the cost. Now you have some of your resultant people, maybe your best performers. Is there an opportunity to do some differentiated recognition so you have fewer people that you're able to take care of? I hope you understand where this is going. Right. So you've got the third party costs, you've got the payroll line that you're thinking about managing effectively, the cost of talent acquisition, etc. That tends to go down. And then when you're at our scale, we talked about use of an IVR when you get to A place where the Digital workers, the AI CSRs, are performing as well as your humans. Then you start to wonder, can we just lead all inbound with AI? Now you're debating do you really need to pay for that ivr and what is the benefit it's giving you? So there are different steps along the way where as you're de risking the ability, you're also returning some money to the bottom line. And in our experience, the third party service was kind of a low bar to meet the booking and dollar per job booked and all those metrics. So once we got comfortable with that, those costs fell through. That's sort of the sequencing of how we're thinking about it.
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A
Got it. That's actually great. I didn't really necessarily think about the IVR piece of it and what, how that would play into it. So I'm going to, I'll be, I'll tell you guys give you my opinion because I just had a real life scenario come up with this. I am very adhd, not medicated. Just so we're just so it's out there, probably should have been, but I'm not. But I also just, I'm like, I thrive on instant gratification. Like I want to get done fast, right. And, and if I don't have to talk to somebody, I'm completely okay with that. I would much rather somebody text me and ask me a question. But I had, you know, a vendor that I needed to connect with and my only option was AI service or chatbot, which annoys me, right. Because I just want to talk to the person, tell them my thing and have them solve my problem and be done and not be asked a string of questions. Right. And so I struggle with that. Now 46, I don't know what that means. I feel like I'm still young, but I don't mind talking to AI agents. I just want to get to the end result faster. Right. Because that's the whole thing I want to do is just move on, check that box, be done and go. Now. I'm sure you deal with some like that. I mean, because our customer, you know, Chad's customers, you know, think the same way. Right. There's, there's a variation that happens and I, I know we were make. AI is making great progress. It's becoming more known that there's AI agents, I do believe. But we're also in this bubble where we kind of just know what like we're all together talking about it. Does the greater market actually really understand that? I, I don't know what's like what's your perspective on this? It seems like we still have a ways to go to kind of get people to truly understand and be okay with AI answering.
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B
I mean I, I have thoughts there. My, my first thought is a little bit similar to the IVR conversation where it used to be. It felt like you needed to know the secret code words to get to what you wanted to do or you were pressing multiple buttons and it was very frustrating. And I think as people learn that these AI powered CSRs they can handle all the questions. I want to become a technician to work for your company or I need relief on my payment plan or I have a drain that's overflowing. No matter what it is you're not on hold and you're not transferring. And I think when people start to realize what's possible I believe there'll be a bit of a shift. And then the other thing I think about is we coming into this it feels like the industry is very focused on making the phone ring and I believe that that is a declining way that our customers are going to be engaging with us. It's going to be very SMS first, very multi channel inbound and when you have an AI sitting across all those channels now if you start in a text and then something happens and you call or you started on a call and now I text you a question, you know who I am, you know what to do. I think it's going to unlock, it's going to shift. It's going to go from resistance to change to you know negative change management. I use American Express as an example. They're still on like the legacy sort of IVR and if I call them it's infuriating. Like I just want to tell you what my problem is and get to the solution.
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A
Yeah.
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D
You can't AI unlocks that.
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A
0000 customer service. Customer service and you're. Yeah.
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B
You don't get there or agent or wearing. Right.
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A
It's. It gets annoying. But I also wonder like in. At what point do people want to talk to human beings again? Like you know so there, there is still this debate right. That goes back and forth and of like I like talking to a human being but I also like getting my problem solved fast.
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C
Yeah. That's why for us like we, we give the folks the option. Right. It's like you know you can get your problem solved right now instantly by an AI that sounds you know actually very empathetic. You can like we've, there's been Cases where the customer has been extremely upset and the AI was actually able to calm them down in cases where probably a normal CSR would have gotten flustered and then, but yeah, we do have that escape valve which, which I think is important. Then the last thing I'll say is like, I would just say like the, I'm always surprised at the rate at which even general public in the US has been adopting AI. Right. Like, I think if you look at ChatGPT, that's a, that's a great proxy of like, like the, the. There's a report I think literally a couple months ago where saying 34% of Americans now use ChatGPT or have used it, like use it on a weekly basis. So. And that it doubled over the last year. Right. And so the, the increasing rate of, of this adoption I think is something that I'm quite bullish on. And yeah, I do think that it's getting to the point. It's not fully there yet, but we're seeing statistically speaking that it is starting to get on par with even your best trained in house CSRs, which like, honestly six months ago I didn't think was possible. That's why we invested so much in the humans because we're like, you know, the talking to a living soul is always going to be the gold standard. And. But yeah, I think the, the, the results we're starting to see are, are starting to kind of challenge that.
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A
Yeah. Hang on a second, Chad, real quick, to your point, Tyson. I was at a, I gave a keynote at a roofing conference last week and I asked the question on who's using chat. It was part of my presentation was chat GPT, you know, the Google space, all that stuff. So talking all things LLM. I asked the room, we're talking like 2, 000 roofing contractors who's used chat GPT on a daily basis of the room raise their hand. And by the way, roofing is much further behind than hvac.
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C
Way behind than H Vac. Yeah, exactly.
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A
I was like, damn, like three quarters of the room raised their hand. So then you talk about statistically that that's really at the end of the day, like if I'm Chad, I'm thinking, well, which one performs better? Like show me like what, what, you know, what you talked about being best in class and booking rate. Well, if you're out booking your live staff and it's a fraction of the cost. Well, it's hard to not consider that as a, you know, as, as a solution for my business to Hit that bottom line, right? It's. And performance is still high, sales are still high, but it's costing me less in labor. Like, sounds kind of good to me.
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C
Exactly. And also the types of jobs it books, right, because it's able to maintain a very clear mind. Like, sometimes CSRs, they lose attention during the day, or they're just. They're too. They. They may. They. They act a little bit more emotionally, whereas with the AI, like, it can understand when. Like, when it needs to remove a dispatch fee, when it needs to overbook something, and that's just the right decision. So it's like, okay, like, a lot of times CSRs don't book jobs because they. It's like, oh, the board's full. I'm gonna book out two weeks in advance. Well, if that's an age. Equipment, you know, repair, like, you should be booking that all the time. And so the AI can understand that and just act in the. In the right game theory, optimal way. Whereas CSRs, many times, unless they're a very seasoned, really sharp CSR, they don't actually make the right decisions all the time.
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D
Yeah, well, and I think too, like, I was looking at. I got a. Doing something on AI here and an hour with Tommy, and so I had him run, like, all of these numbers. So this is interesting. So I look at AI as, like, weirdly enough, I feel like home services may be on, like, the cutting edge of something, which scares us a little bit. Right? It's like, why are we kind of leading the charge on this now? Obviously, thanks to great people like Tyson and who are really, really smart and are developing this stuff. But our number. So on an average day, 40% of our calls are booked with a live CSR. 38% of them are booked online, and then the other 22% of them are booked by AI. So what I. When I look at that, I say, okay, online booking, you would have never thought in a million, like, what, five years ago, like, I book a. Like a restaurant reservation online. Like, I don't need to call the restaurant and do this. I just get online and I book it. And like, to me, it's like AI in. I think even in shorter order will be that thing that, like, that's just how people understand that they want to. That's how you do business. And so, you know, we get. We've had it live for. Call it. Maybe call it three months, maybe four.
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A
Ish.
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D
I don't know what month it is now. Yeah, maybe three or four. And, like, it's amazing. The like buddies of mine who will call, they'll talk to AI and they're asking me, what system is that? How do I get that in my business? Because it was super fast and efficient and so on and so forth. But I still think there's a role for the CSR where there is an issue that you, I need to talk to somebody. Like, I need to explain what's going on. But the vast majority of our calls are, I know I have a problem, I don't know what's going on. That's why I'm calling. You send somebody out here and fix the damn thing. So I think it's like understanding why your customer is actually calling. Yes, there is a small, there's a percentage of customers who are calling to explain their situation, voice their, you know, their frustration, whatever it is. And to me that's why you have live people who can do that. Not that an AI agent can't, you know, show the empathy and do all of that. But, you know, you may just be at that breaking point where I need to talk to a live person, like get me to a manager. So, yeah, I think it's, I think it's coming. I mean our data is showing that people are using it and it, they're having a feedback that I get is they're having a good experience. And I think you still get the people, you know, our technicians are like, oh, the customer, you know, they didn't like talking to AI and I'm like, well, did they want to hold for an hour, like, or just book the appointment? We're there. So obviously they were cool with it. So I think it's an interesting kind.
- [31:21]
C
Of dynamic for sure, that's actually cool.
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A
Like real time feedback on the difference between the three things. You know, I'd be curious to see how. I mean, I guess the online booking piece of it is obviously something I've chased for over a decade at this point. You know, trying to get people to book online and chase it down and get them to adopt like, you know, E commerce and stuff like that. But this one seems to be being adopted much faster. So that was interesting. I know Aaron mentioned the same thing about, because I was asking him, like, how many, I mean, what's a drop off rate on like some of these calls that AI are answering? Like, what are you finding? What are you listening to? As a digital marketing guy, I think Paul, both you and Tyson can appreciate this. I want as many calls booked as I possibly can of leads that I generate because it certainly helps me too, right instead of the contract.
- [32:05]
C
That's so true. Like, a lot of times the funniest thing is we, we realized this around like six to nine months ago is like, at the end of the day, the. Our biggest champion in the business wasn't the director of call center operations. It was actually the director of marketing. Because it was like, okay, wait, my cost per booked lead has just gone down by 50%. And it's like, yeah, wait, I mean, the fact that you're able to handle calls and convert leads at a much higher rate is actually just like, you know, it's just very helpful for them.
- [32:37]
A
Yeah, it's helpful to all of us. Jesus. I mean, especially the ones who don't know to what statistics to look at. They just look at close revenue. Yeah, it's helpful there. Hey, I want to ask a question. I don't want to forget this kind of along the lines of what you guys are just talking about. So I'm thinking more like technically, how does this work when the AI is book like Chad's multi service, multi location, multi service or multi trade, how does it know to book the right time slots, get it into the CRM, and maybe even like the right technician? Like, is it able to book the right technician? Because a lot of these sophisticated businesses have like their tech stacked, right. And ranking order on who should handle what type of lead. Is it able to accomplish these things? Is that like something that's on the horizon? Like, give me the scoop and how's it all. How does it all get into the CRM?
- [33:29]
C
Yeah, absolutely. Really, really good question. And we can. Yeah, happy to dive in a bit deeper for, for the more technical folks in the audience here.
- [33:37]
A
And I think what you should do. Tyson, cut you off, Explain it like, we're fifth graders, right? Like that we don't know. But I, what I just want to understand is high level. Does it do these things? Number one. And if it does, like, kind of. How does this thing. Like what again? Give me the fifth grade terms, man, on how that, on how that goes down. Because if you go too deep, we'll lose everybody.
- [33:56]
C
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do. We'll, we'll, we'll do. We'll do. So first of all, yes, it does do those things the way it does. This is the following. Chad calls in, he has an air conditioning problem. Our AI CSR is able to instantly, as soon as he calls in, assuming he is an existing customer, run an API call that matches his caller ID into whatever CRM you're using. Let's Say it's service titan and pull all of Chad's information. So all of a sudden I know everything about Chad's, as much as the data is in the service site or previous calls. So then it's like, okay, Chad, are you still living here? Yes, yes, yes, you have an air conditioning problem now. He's like, okay, he wants to schedule it. So when we schedule it, we then look back into the CRM again and look at what our schedule is. And so there's multiple ways to do it. You know, you can, we can look at it at the technician level or a lot of folks, the popular option is to looking at it at the ACP or adaptive or adaptive capacity level. And all ACP is saying is what are for the different job types? What is the available capacity we have on different days of the week. So let's say Chad has like a equipment that's only three years and he wants to. It's making weird noises. So you need someone to go out and repair it and inspect it. Then it'll say, okay, for that job type, here are the availabilities. It'll pull those availabilities and then it will offer it to Chad and then Chad can select one and then it books the job. And then for companies that want to, oftentimes they'll have dispatching be a separate process that happens day of as you get all of the jobs and then you can run another optimization. It's like, okay, I have all these jobs. We have one guy that's way better at selling than all my other guys. I want to make it so that he gets all of the high probability events that could be turnover. So that's kind of probably the most popular option. And then for some people, they want to do it so that the technician is already pre assigned. And we can do that as well based on their skill sets.
- [36:15]
B
Yeah. To just add on to that, we're on the same journey that Tyson just described. And as you get into this, especially at our larger brands, the distance between the contact center and dispatch gets very, very tight. And there are things you need to do to optimize for what you're trying to solve. You have to contemplate things like arrival windows. Like some businesses find it's very important to have those from a customer relationship standpoint. But the trade off is if you open up your arrival windows, you have more variables to play with and you may, your technicians and your business may in fact earn more money if you start stepping away from those. But that's a different Customer experience. So you've got different things to consider and what is important for your brand.
- [37:09]
A
Yeah, honestly, that was a, that whole explanation there was great. Because that's like some of the things we really have to think about in our businesses is like we want to max every opportunity. So the fact that Nick can automatically choose, you know, or help make it easy for us to choose the right technician to go to the right job, to max the average ticket or to max the ticket and then knowing how easy it is to actually use, like Chad's team needs to be able to easily use this tool. Right. So it doesn't over complicate, you know, the business or their job. Because if that happens, there's resistance, you know, and actually adopting the tools. I want to ask a quick, quick question. I'm going to go back on one on this booking rate thing because Tyson, you straight up said best in class booking rate. I heard you loud and clear. Do you have like a benchmark that you guys look for that you determine is successful? Like hey, our booking rate that we expect out of this thing is this or at least like a range. I get, I get there can be some variability to it, but do you have like, hey man, this is what we say, like we put our stamp on, on this is the number we're shooting for.
- [38:06]
C
Yeah. So the benchmarks is based on the, is obviously based on the company because, you know, there's two metrics that we, we are obsessing over. First is raw booking rate. That metric is the one that can't lie. That's just out of the total number of calls made. Like how many did you book? And that, you know, typically can be more in the 20s to 30s depending on the mix of calls. And then there's qualified lead booking rate. Qualified lead booking rate is something that takes a bit of education because not many people have an accurate sense of what that actually means. And so we have a whole process and this is where coach comes in as well, where it's like, hey, define with us, what do you define as a bookable call? Right? Is it, it's a call, you know, for example, it's a call that is caller expressing interest in a service that you do that's in the area that you do. That's kind of the, the general high level definition. And then we can calculate that once we establish those. Because there's so much variability, you know, if you're the dominant player in your market, if you're the less dominant, which market you're in, the benchmarks are Only as good as what you like, your, your historical numbers. So what we would do then is we go to, you know, for example, Paul, and as Paul is like, you know, running these numbers, we'll say, okay, what was your, what was historically the after hours overflow, raw booking rate and true booking rate that we hope we, you know, usually come in and just obliterate that. And, and it's, it's not even close. And then over the course of the next three to six months, as AI is getting smarter and smarter and better, then the next milestone is to have a raw booking rate and qualified lead booking rate higher than the average in house csr. And then once that milestone, two hits. That's when we flip the switch and go and have the customer use our AI as a first line of defense.
- [40:05]
B
I think we are on that exact journey. That is exactly how we're approaching it. The one additional metric that we think a lot about is transfer rate. So of the calls that the handles, what are the percentage of calls that then go to humans? And we use transfer because if it's, you know, I just don't want to talk to an AI. Is that really an escalation versus a call where, you know, hey, your technician put a hole in my drywall when they were bringing in the hot water heater. Like, okay, we probably need to have a human talk to that person. So that's why we look at those numbers.
- [40:38]
D
Yeah, I think too. Another important point, and I was talking about this not too long ago, is that, you know, one, all contractors, whether you use an AI or not, you need to know what your true booking rate is. How many, you know, we got a hundred calls, but only it's usually half. 50 of them were actually qualified leads. The one thing that we uncovered as we dug deeper into this and we're looking to implement AI and stuff like that, is one, okay, what is our booking rate? What's acceptable, what are we shooting for, so on and so forth. The interesting piece of the puzzle that we uncovered that I wouldn't have, I did not think of at first, but it proved out to be very insightful, is that your call booking rate is not all the fault of your CSR. A lot of people are like, oh my CSRs aren't any good. Our booking rates at 60%. What we learned and what I think is important is take all of your unbooked calls and usually the CSR will tell you why it didn't book and you can obviously go back and verify. But a lot of the times your Booking rate is affected by the capacity that you have in operations. You can take the best damn csr, the most well trained AI and if you don't have availability for a week, they're not, you can't book that call. Like it's impossible. And so what we learned especially with having multi location is we learned where we were deficient. So like oh shoot, I'm seeing a lot of missed. I'm seeing a lot of unbooked calls in this particular area. Oh well that makes sense. We're two technicians light. We need to hurry up and staff that and that's a high priority. So we need to get more capacity there or we need to adjust our marketing spend, maybe bring that down because we only have a couple technicians there and that's all we can take care of. So I think it's really, really important as you start to dig into this is is your operations hurting your booking rate in some form or fashion and how do you marry those two so that we can make sure we have the right amount of techs in particular area and our CSRs are set up for success. If you're telling them they gotta book a call a week out like they're not. It's going to be hard to book that unless it's like a maintenance visit or something.
- [42:53]
C
Yeah. And that's another area that we actually help with as well which is like we understand when you're gonna have peaks in demand and are able to proactively reschedule so that you're able to not be in a situation where, where you're constricted and it's like 120 degrees in Phoenix. But it's like wait, 2/3 of my board is already full and so you know you're just going to be turning away a lot of like.
- [43:19]
B
And the jobs that are filling the board are, you know, annual maintenance inspections and you're turning away new H VAC installs. Like talk about crazy making.
- [43:30]
A
Yeah. So it sounds like the coach piece would actually kind of help catch that because you have your, you have your raw booking rate and you have your qualified lead booking rate. But it's not taking into consideration that piece of the Chad just talking about. But it's an important part to know that Susie couldn't book the qualified lead because not of her a fault of her own. But it sounds like the coaching tool would be something that would catch that piece of it too because it would, it would be able to. To recognize reasoning right for the. Or for the. No, for the. No booking or non booking call. And that can be learned. Right. And to also create some metrics. Question, as you guys are talking, I was thinking about this. Have you seen brand equity impact, these booking rate numbers, even with AI, like the more well known the brand that you're seeing an impact like, like we would like in a marketing campaign. We see clearly that brand equity matters. We see our higher conversion rates, higher booking rates, higher, you know, revenue, things like that. Are you seeing any of that correlation with AI booking?
- [44:32]
C
Yeah, we do. The more well known brands, people just call it a book and it's. That's it. So whereas for the lesser known brands, sometimes it's a battle and you have, it's, there's a lot of salesmanship. So yeah, we 100 see it. I mean Paul, I'm sure, I'm sure for you guys too, right?
- [44:52]
B
Yeah. And I mean we, we were talking about this last week, Tyson, where you know, the, the, the number of customers, if you will, that don't want to talk to AI varies by region, by brand. You know how much of that is geographic, how much of that is brand reputation? I don't know that we know the answer to that. But it is definitely not a one size fits all answer.
- [45:14]
A
Got it? Yeah. I mean I just. You would think it would, right? Because it's still human behavior. Like you built a brand, made them feel a certain way and now this is just the way to capture it, whether it be human or AI.
- [45:27]
B
If I could dovetailing off that a little bit. We talk internally a lot about how we are a trust based business and we are very adamant about making it clear early in the conversation to our customers that they're talking to an AI. We don't want them to feel surprised or deceived or whatever. That said, we're smart. We do AB testing and do we see a significantly better performance by the AI when it's not. When it wasn't disclosed? We're not doing it anymore and we didn't do it intentionally. We just weren't emphasizing the need to state and we have since emphasized the need to state. But were the numbers better when we weren't disclosing?
- [46:12]
C
They were.
- [46:13]
B
It doesn't feel like the right way to do it, but it's hard not to look at that and, and, and wonder.
- [46:19]
A
Well that that was some of the conversations that I had was exactly around that about mentioning it or not mentioning it and seeing the dip and the drop off and even negative reviews that people get from, you know, and competitors will use it against you Know, against you as we still have you. Like, you know, they'll lose. Try to use it as leverage. I'm like, oh, we still have human beings answer our phones because we really care about people. It's not robots. Like this is a marketing tactic, right. But there's some reality to it too that you know, sometimes they're like, you know, people will get negative reviews because all they're, they went all AI like they took all the personal feel out of this business, you know, now it's just AI. But I still think that there's, there's stuff all over the place that can impact the business. I still think the over the big picture, it's, it's, it's minimal and it's going to continue to shrink. Right. Because it's going to become so much still very new.
- [47:11]
B
Do I think this is going to be something in a year or two from now? I, I don't think that's going to be a com. A marketing tactic for long.
- [47:20]
A
Well listen, people complain about CSRs, right? Like CSRs can make, you know, they can piss somebody off when they leave a negative review. So it's really not much of a difference. So there's still all that, that exists. Okay guys, we're coming up on towards the end of this thing too. So I'm just gonna ask like one, one question because I do want people who are kind of like, okay, cool, maybe this is something I should consider. Let's just talk about what it's like to onboard this thing. Like what does setup look like if somebody's like, cool, I think I want to do this in general, like what this setup look like, kind of getting it going, stuff like that.
- [47:50]
C
Yeah, maybe I can touch a little bit on like for smaller companies and then Paul is probably the best person to talk about what it's like as an enterprise for small company. You know, we're pretty opinionated. We work with now at this point over 900 of the top, you know, home service business across the nation. So we give you a few options that are all tried and tested bots with, you know, built in things that are, that we know like work really well. And then yeah, it's, it's like a two week process. You get up and going, get your integrations, get your scheduling stuff, choose your voice and then it's off to the races. And there'll be some continuous improvements, but that's for kind of your small business. And Paul, you want to talk about what it's like as an enterprise?
- [48:45]
B
Yep, super briefly when we first started this process, it was very white glove and we took whatever idiosyncratic processes the brands had and we sort of automated in place. But we know enough now on how to maximize the benefit of this capability. So we come in with a point of view. We have a checklist of things that we need people to do. And once they've cleared that checklist, then it looks very similar to what Tyson described. Where you go from an initial meet and greet to you are testing this thing internally and then with customers in just a matter of weeks.
- [49:20]
A
Ongoing support, Right. Obviously, like ongoing. I don't know what the cadence of that looks like.
- [49:24]
B
This is a, this is a long term relationship. This is not a transaction.
- [49:29]
C
Yeah, exactly. And that's the way we approach it. It's like really we're, we're on this journey not just to provide you really one solution. It's like we're on this journey to be your AI partner and make the entire customer journey AI native for, for these, for these businesses that power America. And the last thing I'll say is with our agents, it's very much. A lot of people have this misconception that it's like setting up software. It's like, you know, you download this new program, it works. Not at all. I will actually venture to say that setting up and training these agents is a lot more akin to training a new CSR than it is learning a new piece of software. And what that means is like, just like a new csr, you have to listen to their calls, you have to provide coaching. The only thing is that it learns and gets better and you don't have to train it over and over again. And so, and you don't have to train like, you know, 100 people. You can just train this one agent.
- [50:28]
A
So you'll pay benefits for them.
- [50:31]
B
High potential. It's. Think of it as a high potential digital worker with a nearly unlimited ceiling that never forgets.
- [50:38]
A
Yeah. And never gets any days off or has benefits. Perfect. That's how it impacts the bottom line. That's perfect. I like that. Well, one, number one, appreciate you guys coming on here talking through all this with me. I have like three more questions I never got to, but we kind of run out of time. But number one, Tyson, thanks for the sponsorship, man. We really appreciate your sponsorship here on the, on the podcast and hopefully we can actually get you into Rhino X this next year, which is going to be a banger. I got the theme squared away, so we'll roll that out here in a few weeks.
- [51:04]
C
Excited? Yeah, we're gonna, we'll come back, come full force.
- [51:07]
A
And I always got to keep stepping it up a notch. And so I think I, I think I got it figured. Where.
- [51:12]
C
Where. Have you announced the location yet?
- [51:15]
A
It's. It's going to be here in Arizona. It's always out here in Arizona. That way we can. Most the time it's warm. There's only been one time when it was cold, and Chad still cries about it to this day, but most of the time it's at the end of February. It's warm. So. But hey, Tyson, well done. Well done, man. I'll build an incredible product. 900 contractors. That's fantastic. And, and honestly, like, this is, like, this is super cool. Like, it's, it's the end of the day. It makes these companies more efficient and it books more, which ultimately turns into. To more revenue and a. And a better return. Right. Like, so that's, that's the game, man. More efficient, better net profit. Like what more we want still booking clients, so I'll be curious to see what else you come up with. Dude. Smart guy. I can't. I can't. I'm sure you'll kind of. You're already thinking about things we haven't talked about yet. So.
- [52:01]
C
Yeah.
- [52:02]
A
Is there. What's the best way for anybody to listen to. To connect with you or to connect with the voca. AI? Um, once you're done listening to this.
- [52:09]
C
Yeah, I always just give my. My personal number. It's 717-318-0198. So you can feel free to reach out. Otherwise, the easiest and fastest way is probably to just go to our website, which is www.avocaavoca.AI and you can book a meeting with one of our lovely sales folks, folks.
- [52:34]
A
AI agents.
- [52:36]
C
Not yet. Not yet. They're. We. We value the personal touch quite a bit.
- [52:41]
A
I hope you got a filter process on that number you gave out and that wasn't your cell phone.
- [52:46]
C
Actually, it is, so. So, yeah. It's all good, though.
- [52:49]
A
Okay, listeners, let it rip. 2am, 1am, 2am, 3am Those are the best times. Go ahead and set scheduled text messages. Yeah. And tell them it's a gift from your boy Chris. You're welcome, Tyson. Hey, Paul, appreciate you joining us, man. Tyson, thanks for joining us. And listen, cool stuff, man. Hope our listeners take advantage of this stuff, too. I mean, you know, a lot of the bigger players using this stuff, you know, they've. They've pretty well thought through how well this does for their business. And I think these guys gave proof enough, you know, to. To get involved with us, so. And then if you have any more questions you'd answered, Dyson just gave you his phone number. Just text him and ask him. And then, yeah, I guess if you guys want us to make any connections with that are listeners to, you know, to Tyson or Paul any other way, like, just reach out to the to the Point team. We'll get you hooked up. So. So, guys, appreciate you so much. Congratulations on the cool business, Tyson, and to our listeners. You don't got to do everything, but you got to do something. No. Zero days welcome to to the Point Home Services, the podcast where real contractors share real strategies. We cut through the noise and get straight to the point with the contractors that are working in the field right now. If you run a home services business and want to lead, better grow faster and stay sharp, you're in the right place. Now, before we get started, I need you to do one thing. Only 30% of our listeners are following the show. So stop what you're doing, hit follow, and let's get to the point.