AI Voice in Action with Ben Brimacombe from Free-2-Grow

Welcome to the Home Service Hacks podcast, the show for contractors who refuse to settle for average. Hosted by Bill Brown, licensed H VAC contractor, AI and automation expert and founder of service titan hacks community, each episode features real conversations with contractors, tech founders and innovators who are reshaping the trades from AI and automation to. To pricing, marketing, and management. If it's working in the field, you'll hear about it here. Let's get into it.

Today's episode is all about AI voice. Not the hype, but the real stuff that's actually working in the field. I sat down with Ben from Free to Grow, and we talked about how contractors are using their AI to book jobs, never miss a call, and honestly rethink the rule of CSRs altogether. So let's jump right in. So what made Free to Grow decide to do home services when there are so many other industries?

Yeah.

What made you guys decide to do that?

Yeah, I think home services is one of the kind of just clearest, most important use cases of the technology, just because the number of calls that happen and then kind of the repetitiousness of those calls across the entire industry. And it's also. It's a really good market. It's, you know, very kind of closely knit and easy to meet. People kind of move. Move across it. I think more generally, everybody on the company just has like a certain passion for. For home services. So the. The kind of story of the company is Nathan and Charlie, they're our kind of original founders. They were running a call center for home services and like a traditional call center. I think they had 10 CSRs or so. And Jerry, who's. He was 22 at the time, really, really smart guy, he had dropped out of college and he was working in. In New York on AI voice and was saying, oh, man, like, this is gonna really change the game in home services. He grew up in Queens, and his. His family is kind of in the real estate game. So they do a lot of home renovation, plumbing, you know, electrical type stuff. So I think he really had his kind of finger on the pulse of how big this industry is and how crucial it is. And so Nathan and Charlie tried Jerry's technology. I think this is maybe March 2024. And they're just totally blown away. They're thinking, wow, you know, this is really going to change the game. And they were very smart to. To see that and think, you know, I don't. We don't know if human CSRs are really going to be a thing in five years. So they merge. And at the time I'm traveling to San Francisco, I was living in. Living in New York, and I knew Jerry from New York, and I. I'm crashing on Jerry's floor in San Francisco, and he.

Because that's the only way people can afford to live in San Francisco. Regardless. You guys are taking tech geeks. It saved you a good amount. What did he charge you? 5,000amonth just to sleep on the floor there?

Yeah, just a kidney and, yeah, a hundred hours of work a week. But no, he was, yeah, very, very generous to me. And he was telling me, yeah, I'm going through this merger. We really need some help. And he was just telling me about the. The kind of space. And I have a great appreciation for the trades because my dad ran a campground when I was growing up. So he's like a plumber, electrician, kind of wears all the hats. So I'd, as a kid, be in, like, the kind of pool room helping him with the. The piping or like, the chemistry. I sort of knew how. How deep and kind of technical this stuff can be. And so I. I call into AI's voice number, and it's incredible. I was expecting traditional kind of phone tree or something. And it's. This was before OpenAI came out with their advanced voice. So it was kind of like cutting edge. He really was ahead of the curve on this. And, yeah, it was answering my questions. It sort of matched me in terms of its tone and empathy. And he said, yeah, we really need somebody else to join as we. As we merge. So that's the origin story.

That's really cool. So everybody seems to have a connection to the home service industry, and that's great. So Jerry. Is Jerry still on with your company?

Is he the.

Is he the super, super tech nerd behind it at. At 22 years old?

He's almost 24 now.

There you go.

He is. He's our chief technology officer, but he wears many hats. He's, you know, leading some of our enterprise sales calls, and he's working a lot on business development. He's just one of those kind of, he might say Gen Z verbiage. He's a giga crusher. He's just. He's really good at everything.

So how. How old are you, Ben?

I'm only 27, so I'm kind of 27. I'm talking about Jerry like he's a kid is maybe not that straightforward, but. Yeah, I think back, kind of going back to what you said at the beginning of our conversation. There are These moments in history when everything just changes all at once kind of in this massive discontinuity. And the insiders in the industry, they usually see it coming kind of from a ways away, and then all of a sudden, it goes viral. There's this famous quote. I think it's Richard Dawkins. The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

Hmm.

So I think maybe the Internet is a good example of this, where it just kind of slowly grew. Maybe, you know, some. Some R factor just got exponentially bigger and bigger and bigger, and all of a sudden, Facebook happens, and it's like, oh, my God. But I think AI was really singular and really different in that I think even the AI researchers were very surprised.

So, you know, for the people that aren't familiar, what exactly does Free to Grow do? And what specific number one problem are you solving for contractors?

Y. Yeah, we make sure that contractors never miss a phone call again and provide great customer service to callers 100% of the time. And we do that with very customized and powerful AI voice CSRs that are designed just for home service businesses. And you were mentioning earlier in the call, AI, you know, sort of, it's really good at some things, but some things, it's kind of just missing something. And that's really where Free to Grow comes in. It's. It's easy to spin together an AI voice system today. You know, there's hundreds of companies doing it, but to really succeed with callers in production in the wild, and book, you know, hundreds of jobs into CRMs a day really takes a lot of work. And every day, we're. We're finding things. You know, we've been at it. Jerry's been at this for over two years. I've been at it here for over a year, and we're still making improvements and getting booking rates better.

Yeah, Yeah, I agree. It's so important to get this right, because the value of a call could be $25,000. Yeah, right. It really could be just to get rid of all your CSRs and say, all right, any AI can do this. No, no, no. So we've seen it where. I've had it where a CSR has had to. We've been so small, they've gone to the restroom because people have to do that. We miss the call, it gets picked up by the answering service. We don't end up getting a chance to call that customer back quick enough. They use our competition. I know our competition. We talk about it later, and it comes up that. That that customer spent $20,000 with the competition, $3,000. That's real. That, that has happened before.

Yeah.

So just answering all of your calls and is, is necessary and vital. But then how many times have my CSRs like blown the call when a customer's asked about pricing and they just start making stuff up?

Right.

And so what a contractor's doing, when they say, okay, free to grow, you guys handle this, they're putting $20,000 calls into your hands. That's what they're doing. It's a very big, big problem to get right, if that makes sense. And, and I think that one of the things that I noticed when I was deciding who to partner with when it comes to this technology, because there's so many companies I saw that nexstar had trusted you guys to be the official partner of nexstar. And nexstar is the most elite coaching organization out there. All of the guys who are big are in nexstar and usually they were, they were decent size before they got there. They weren't, you know, we weren't starting with guys that had 20 grand in the bank. These guys were multimillion dollar businesses and Nexstar helped them grow to what are the 20, $400 million businesses today? And what those companies are putting in the hands of free to grow to do is to handle tens of millions of dollars worth of calls on a annual basis. So that is, that's a huge like social proof, right, that that your guys technology has to be somewhere above the other guys because that company doesn't just pick anybody to be a partner or you would see every single one of your competitors on there. So I think that that's, that's really impressive of what you guys have been able to do in such a short time to be able to have those guys on board with you.

It's an honor to work with nexstar and all the businesses that, the incredible businesses they have. And yeah, we're very grateful in and in general to work with home services. As we were saying, you know, these calls are mission critical. A call that comes in at 11pm on a Saturday night could be worth $25,000. Could be crucial to the business's bottom line.

You know, I talk to a lot of contractors and the ones who haven't adopted AI technologies and the older contractors, like, you know, the guys that are in their 50s and 60s, they kind of see AI as like a glorified IVR system. Right. And everybody hates IVR with a passion. It wasn't a good a good technology bridge. We hate it. In fact, it still exists today in a lot of organizations.

And I talk to it all the time. It's doctor's appointments and things. It's.

It's terrible. It's so bad. And so how is this better for the contractors that are thinking, oh, this is just an automated bot. How is this better than one of those IVR systems?

Yeah, it's one of those things where, you know, we could talk about it all day, but you just gotta try it. And anybody listening who hasn't ever tried AI voice, the latest technology, just give, give it a call. We have a demo number on our website, if you check it out, free-number2-crow.com and you can find some other numbers across the web. Just give it a call and try to break it. Try to ask complicated questions. And it's, it's just incredible. It's kind of intelligence. I think that's, that's really where it shines right now is just how smart and dynamic they are. And it's, it's very similar to a human. At this point, when we're onboarding customers and we're kind of setting their expectations on how we're going to scope the system, exactly the kinds of calls we want it to focus on. When it needs to live transfer, we often explain, you know, this is like a human, and we'll train it kind of like a human. So we give it call scripts. And that, that call script is not, you know, kind of the entire thing. It's able to very meticulously navigate off of it and back onto it, kind of answer general questions. Maybe there's some really particular point it's supposed to make. If the caller mentions, you know, propane, then the AI has to say, you know, well, we charge $59 dispatch fee, something like that. And then actually I get right back on the call script. So it's just, it's shockingly smart, is what I would.

That's awesome. Let's try it. Yeah, right now.

Awesome.

Let's try it. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to call Free to Grow's AI voice line. I'm going to really put this thing through the ringer and see how good it is. I'm going to really mess with it, right? Pretty much how a CSR has to deal with it. See what we got.

Thank you for calling Free to Grow Services. My name is Anna. How can I make this easy for you today?

Yeah, I got up and my air conditioner's not blowing cold air.

You've called the right place. We have expert technicians ready to help and in many cases, we can complete repairs the same day. Let's get you taken care of. Could you tell me a bit more about the issue you're experiencing with your air conditioner?

Yeah, I set my thermostat for 72 degrees, and right now it's 79 degrees. And I went over to the. The indoor fan part and it's just humming. I think I just need somebody to come check it out.

Thank you for sharing those details. It definitely sounds like something we can help with. Let's get you on the schedule so we can have a technician take a look. May I have your name? And could you please spell out your last name for me?

Yeah, my name is William Brown. My last name, B, R, O, W, N. For you.

On students, availability is today, Wednesday, May 21, from 12pm to 5pm does that work for you or would you prefer a different time?

No, I'm not going to be home today. What else you got?

No problem at all. How about tomorrow? Thursday, May 22, we have availability from 8am to 12pm or from 12pm to 5pm would either of those work for you?

Yeah, the first appointment tomorrow would be good.

Great. I've got you scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, May 22, from 8am to 12pm While we don't offer exact arrival times, we'll give you a courtesy call 30 to 45 minutes before we arrive. Most repairs are completed the same day, so you won't have to schedule another visit. Does that sound good?

Yeah. How much does it cost for you guys to come out?

Great question. For H VAC services on weekdays, the service fee is $114 for non members. And if you are a member, it's $104 with a 20% discount on repairs. There's also a $5 fuel surcharge included in the service fee. Your technician will provide an upfront estimate for any repairs before moving forward. Does that work for you?

Yeah. What kind of different payment methods do you guys offer?

We offer several convenient payment options. You can pay using a credit card, cash or check. Payment is due at the time of service. If you're having a new H Vac unit installed, we also offer financing options which the technician or comfort advisor can discuss with you during the appointment. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. Are your technicians certified? I'm going to break. I'm going to find out. You're not going to know the answer to one of these. Come on now. No, keep going. Sorry, I was talking to someone else.

Yes, our technicians are certified and highly trained to handle a wide range of H VAC issues. They'll ensure everything is done professionally and to the highest standards. You're all set for your appointment tomorrow? Thursday, May 22, from 2am well, one other thing.

Are your. Are your technicians afraid of dogs? Because I have two dogs, but one of them's a goldendoodle, so he's kind of nice.

Oh, that's a great question. Our technicians are generally comfortable around pets, but it's always helpful to let them know in advance. If you can keep your dogs in a separate area during the visit, it'll make things easier for everyone. Your Goldendoodle sounds adorable, though. Anything else I can assist you with?

Wow. No, this was actually just a test. I was just testing to see how smart you were as an AI voice. So I don't want you to actually create a. A job. So just cancel the call and I'll talk to you later.

Thank you for letting me know.

Right.

Well, there you go. Man, that says a lot right there. I told her about my golden doodle, and she loved it.

I love that. That was. I was surprised there. That script you were just talking to is one of our most, most successful ones. That one can a lot of different paths, and it has about an 80% viable booking rate with some of our biggest customers.

So. Well, I obviously know based upon that how it works. That's pretty cool. So obviously you guys have done some training for the AI with that. Is there any human oversight? What happens if it. If a customer actually breaks the AI and the AI doesn't know the answer to a question, what happens then?

Yeah, so sometimes it will live transfer, and it can also offer a callback. And all of this is just totally programmable. The other thing is that once. If that happens once, usually we'll detect it. We have an AI system in the back end that is watching every single call and looking for missing knowledge. So if we detect missing knowledge, we'll contact our customer, our partner, and request that information, or we'll find it on the. And it never forgets. So it just gets better and better.

Usually an AI checking in AI. There you go.

Yep. We've got lots of different AI systems in the background that look at everything, monitor it, classify it, and the call is like. It's kind of a conversion funnel. There's the introduction, then there's the information gathering stage, then pricing, scheduling, if there's a live transfer. And so we have some systems that track every single call. As sort of a call conversion funnel and try to get them all into the complete bucket. So some of our systems are over 90% fully converting.

Do you have, like, metrics or reports or dashboards? You can show customers where they can see the results, results of what's happened and where. Where these calls are in the pipeline or where they fell off, things like that?

We do, yeah. We have a platform, we call it Archer, and it has a dashboard of all your calls, a graph over time, and how many of them booked into your CRM and times of day calls came in, which can be very interesting if you're using a system for overflow or after hours. And then we have like, sort of other data on, you know, the kind of call conversion funnel, how many are complete transfer. You can dig into every single call, look at the transcripts, listen to the audio, see if it booked. Yes, we do have.

That's awesome, man. So, you know, one of the things that a CSR can do that an IVR cannot do, or from what I've seen, I've never seen AI voice that's able to do this. A CSR can go into servicetitan while they're talking to a customer and look up their history. And sometimes if your technician doesn't take good notes, the history is very difficult. That's a whole nother subject. But at least, you know, this is an existing customer. This is the last time we've been to their house, is the estimates they have notes, previous calls, stuff like that. Does your AI have the ability to actually go into service titan and look at this information and. And. And kind of keep going, continue the conversation from there?

Yeah, absolutely. So if you called that number again in. In production, that's not. That one's not totally hooked up, but it would. It would answer by saying, hi, William, or, hi, is this William? And so we. We pull all of that information kind of at the very beginning of the call or live during the call as we pull, you know, do you have any upcoming appointments? When are they. Do you have any, you know, what equipment? We pull all the equipment they have on file. So if they ask, what's the warranty date on this? The app will just know immediately in a. In a second. You know, with a human csr, they'd have to go look it up, figure out what it is if you're a membership customer. And then if you are a membership customer, we can warm up the script a lot. So it will say, you know, thank you so much for being a membership customer. We. We greatly Value your service. We're offering a new discount for you and so on.

And, and so, you know, I see a lot of things on the Internet back and forth about, you know, with this new technology, there's a lot of fear with it.

Yeah.

So when a caller recognizes that this is a bot and they get upset by it and they ask to talk to a human, what happens then?

If they.

If they want to, like, can they shut the bot off and talk to a human?

Yeah. So they can ask to transfer to a human. And the AI will. Typically, we can program what we want it to do in this scenario, but typically it will first just offer value to that caller. It will say, I understand you want to talk to a human, but you might end up going to voicemail. If you like, I could book you on schedule in 60 seconds.

And that's.

So people will say, okay, you know, gosh, I don't really want to talk to this thing, but if it can deliver value for me so quickly, that's great.

That's. So we talked about inbound calls, right?

Yeah.

And I see inbound and outbound as being two very different things, even though it's usually the same person that does it. But outbound is typically going to be an existing customer, and it's a relationship that you already have that you can lose, that you can mess up if you do wrong. And a lot of companies, especially nextar companies, have done and are huge proponents of doing outbound calling, but they haven't been. I think that they're becoming less and less effective at it because it's a grind. You will make a hundred calls, and now they have those robo dialer things. You can use that. That are easier for a human to operate. But I remember when we were doing outbound a couple of years ago, and my demographic is a little bit younger than the rest of the countries. Like, my target customer was about 45 years old, so we could not get homeowners to answer the phones. And it made my outbound department like they hated it because they're like, great, now I have to do this job that I'm just going to call and leave voicemails over and over again. So right now I know that for Free to Grow, does inbound. Have there been any thoughts or any plans on the roadmap to do outbound calls? What do you guys think of that?

Yeah, we do have outbound calling in beta. That's something we're actually working on actively. And about six months ago, we. We were. We developed a lot of this about six months ago and we did some tests and we, we kind of felt like, ah, do people really want to get a call? You know, you're drinking your coffee in the morning, get a call and it's an AI But I think that you know, versus inbound, where you have, it's very high intent. It's like, I need X right now, please.

You're at the bottom of the funnel.

Right, right Outbound. It like, you know, to. You really want to call from an AI But I think there are some use cases where actually it makes a lot of sense like maintenance membership, you know, where it's just, it's kind of this nice courtesy thing and the, the person who receives the call, they're, they're already a member to the company. So you know, oftentimes so they feel like, okay, you know, there's some trust pre established. So yeah, I think that's, that's what we're doing with Outbound. So I would say to anybody listening, if you're in, if you're on service titan especially and you're looking to do outbound, we'd, we'd love to partner with you to build what you want.

That's great. I've heard some things, some chatter about setup time, about how long it takes to set this up and get it going. If I were to call you guys and say, yeah, let's get going, what's that process look like? From the time that I agree to do it to the time that we can turn this on and this thing can start booking appointments, what's that going to look like?

Yeah, typically for our customers it takes one to two weeks just because there's kind of a feedback process and an iteration process. But really, I mean, we can do it. If Bill, if you wanted, you know, an AI for you to book into, if you had a service site and you wanted to book into and you had a complex workflow and all these things, I could probably get that set up for you in two hours, something like that. But it just. Then we would have to take some test calls, you know, live test. It's kind of like training a new employee for your business. So.

Okay, that makes sense.

Their first month, they might make a couple mistakes here and there. Hey, you know, you said this, this way. We don't really say it. You know, you said manager instead of customer service representative and so on.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

So I mean, when they adopt free to grow and they start using it, how do the other CSRs at the company feel about it? Have you guys got feedback from that? How do they feel about working alongside a robot? Right.

Yeah, good question. I think typically it's a pretty positive experience, actually. I think there's this conception right now in the world. You were saying earlier in our conversation, there's a lot of fear around AI. I think in reality AI is just kind of like your co pilot buddy. It's not really this Terminator that comes in and completely takes your job. So, you know, I think on the margin maybe, you know, a call center might reduce its headcount a couple percent. You know, as they take more AI calls, maybe it drops a bit, but everybody else, it's a little bit more flexible. They want to go to the bathroom, they want to get water, the AI is going to take it. I think that, yeah, maybe another thing to add there is the best CSR in the world. Let's say they're a 10 out of 10 CSR. They're going to have a bad day and on that bad day they might only be, you know, a six or something. I say the AI, it's getting better every day and it's, you know, if we're being really honest, maybe it's a 7.5 or something. Like it's a, it's a good CSR. It's not the best, you know, kind of closer in the world, but it's good. Every minute of every day it's going to be a 7.5 and it can take a thousand calls simultaneously and in every single one of them It'll be the 7.5 good. And then we.

That makes sense.

We ship a little software upgrade and all of a sudden it's 7, 8 out of 10, Paul. And so this just kind of keeps going, I think, you know, unfortunately, at some point when it's a 10 out of 10 good, 100% of the time, I don't know what happens to the people who.

To the 10 out of 10 CSR, that top one, I'll tell you what, that 10 out of 10 CSR, though, I've had a couple of those over the years and I've had some, had some one out of 10 because I did not know what I was doing when it comes to hiring. I've had some six that I've held on to. So if you're six out of ten CSR right now, this thing is going to fire you. That's the reality. It will, because you're not as good as it even close. Right. And I'm sorry, but that's what's going to happen. If you're an 8, you'll probably be good. If you're an 8 on your way to becoming a 9 or 10, then a business owner. Because as a business owner, I would say now I'm starting to think about what other jobs this person could do within my company.

Yeah, right.

That's what I'm thinking about. I never think like, ooh, how can I get rid of people? I only think, how can I get rid of shitty people? Not people that care. So the people that care and put in effort and really want to do a good job, there is always room for that person in a company. No matter how much AI is there, the people that care will have a job. AI is going to make it so the people that care don't have to do the terrible stuff that they hate doing that still needs to be done. Because what I found is the people that are really good, if you ask them to do monotonous, boring stuff, they don't give 10 out of 10 towards the boring stuff. And guess what? Neither do you as an owner. So we find a AI as something that can say, these are a bunch of things that we need to do because they make the business move, they keep turning the gears. I don't want to put a 10 out of 10 employee on that stuff. Right. I would rather take that 10 out of 10 employee and brainstorm with them things that we can do to improve customer service in the future and have them maybe even work on new projects, higher value things. So to be, to be straight up, if I'm talking to all the employees in the future that are nervous about AI, if you don't care and you're not really good at your job and you're kind of skating by, this is a wake up call. You will lose your job to this technology. I don't care if they use free to grow, if they use anybody, you're done. It's, that's it. Right. It's eventually going to come for you. If you're somebody who cares and you want to do a good job, you like working with people and you're always willing to learn. Owners will figure out a way to keep you in the company. Yeah, they will do it. So I, that's, that's kind of my feeling on it as an owner. I'd love to talk to the guys who have 50 and $100 million businesses, the big behemoths that have call centers with 30 people in it. They're not going to just wipe out all 30 of those there's five people in that, in there that they go, I wish I could, you know, pause their daily busyness to increase what it is they do.

Yeah.

Now what, what, what happens to the other 25 people? I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, you know, whether or not you're one of those five or you're one of those 25, you know that. And it really comes down to effort at the end of the day, in my opinion.

I completely agree. I think if you're a really good communicator and you're good with people and you're empathetic, I think there will always be opportunity for you in human society at large. But I also think AI is just going to create so many more jobs than it will take actually at free to grow. One of our customer success team members, she's fantastic. She used to be a CSR in and now she's training AI and helping other homes.

The perfect person to train AI is a 10 out of 10 CSR, right?

Yeah.

Right. That's awesome.

And then we need, we need to watch all these calls. You know, the human element doesn't really ever go away. And I think it's a pointed to us, we just live in this bizarre kind of utopian world that we none of nobody can even envision right now.

Don't we want that though? Don't we want a world where we're not doing monotonous shit? Yeah, we do want that. Right. You know, so the future of like, like I remember you know them, you'll see especially in politics where they're like these manufacturing jobs left and bring back these jobs. None of us want those jobs, man. We don't want to do those jobs. We don't want to work in factories. We don't want to manually enter data. We don't want to robotically outbound customers and ask them to schedule appointments. We don't even like when they answer and we're interrupting them from whatever it is they're doing, right. So the AI is going to do all of the crappy stuff that we're, that we're doing right now. It really is going to create a bigger purpose for all of us. Now some people are going to be unemployable by this. Like they just, they were barely employable as it is, right. You could barely get them to come to work. When they came to work, they were, they were not good for culture. They were just, you know, kind of cancerous. They were right on the edge. AI will push those people Aside and maybe some universal basic income will take care of those people. I don't know. That's a whole nother story. But I really. There's a lot of people, if you go into a company today that are just like going through the motions.

Right.

And maybe 90% of the job that they have is monotonous and everything and 10% they get excited about, but that 10% is not enough for them to be excited when they get out of bed and they drive into work.

Yeah.

Right. Now imagine you being able to have 30, 40, 50% of your job that you're excited about. That's what I'm talking about. Then it doesn't really become a job, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so hard to say where all this is going to go. I think, I think we like, we like to think, oh well, we have science fiction so we know what's going to happen. And yeah, like history. I know history. And so things will kind of be similar. But I think it's really hard to, to realize that we're really on the, we're in the future and we're on this crazy cutting edge, we're at the.

Yeah.

You know, boundary of something and nobody knows what's going to happen.

We have no idea what's going to happen. No idea, man. And if we knew what was going to happen based upon history, wouldn't all of us be very, very rich in the stock market? Wouldn't AI and just general math be able to know that to be able to recognize patterns and make predictions? We are, we're always in uncharted territory.

Yes.

But where we're at today is like, I remember like I was talking to my kids and everything and I talked to other adults about this who have kids my, my age and I'm like, I don't even know what to tell my kids of what careers they should go into.

Yeah.

I don't know what careers are going to exist 10 years from now for my 12 year olds, what's going to exist. I have an idea of some careers that are not going to exist that are going to go away.

Yeah.

But as far as like what jobs they'll be able to do, I don't know. So this one's interesting and I'd like to get your take on it. Even as a, the guy that offers AI voice. Let's say a contractor with a 10 person shop. Very common sized contractor. 10, 10 people all in. A few techs, a couple of people in the office part of your business.

Would you automate first inbound calls. Well, actually I take a step back. I'd say first make sure you have a good CRM set up. Now you're really tracking your leads, tracking your booking and your scheduling. We work with some customers who, you know, they, they have kind of internal processes. Maybe they've been doing this since 1980 and they haven't quite modernized or I would say if you're on like an, a really old kind of fringe CRM and it's just, you know, you, you've stuck with them because you have a relationship, I might say, you know, maybe move to one of the big players. They're just so sophisticated now. I think once you kind of.

Do you guys work with anybody besides Service Titan? So if I were at housecall Pro or Service Mate Jobber, do you guys work with those companies too?

We, yeah, we have a lot of different CRM integrations. So we have ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, FieldPulse, and those three are kind of our flagship. We're formal partners with Service Titan and FieldPulse and not yet Haskell Pro. Maybe we could pull it off someday.

Would you say that, that that fieldpulse kind of fills that gap? Like if you're starting out today one man band and you couldn't afford Service Titan because Service Titan doesn't what. I know a lot about it. They don't want the one man band yet. That's just not for you. This is enterprise grade. Is it Field Pulse that you would, that you would start out with or would it be housecall Pro in your opinion from working with them?

It's hard for me to say without running, you know, my own trades business.

Okay.

Just because we work with customers that use each one, they all seem to like it somewhat. I will say fieldpulse is great and they have a really good API that we've been able to.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, it's like, I think better than Service Titan's API.

I mean, Service Titans is also pretty darn good.

I feel like I've seen better, but it took me a while to understand it.

It's not. It's. The organization has room for improvement.

I like that you're an official partner. The organization has. It looks like it was patched together as they were building the software. Right. It wasn't. Didn't begin with the end in mind, but I've used other APIs. That one call gets you so much information in Service Titan. It's like I really got to do this just to get to the customer's phone number.

Yeah, I will say. Anyway, the housecall Pro API is one of my favorites. It's just.

Oh, really?

There's like one query and you get a ton of stuff. Service site is also great. When you query capacity planning, you get a ton of information.

That's good because you guys need to look at capacity planning to be able to offer appointments.

Right, Right. Yeah. And it has to be really fast. It needs to be very low latency because we typically pull all this information at the very start of the call so that when the call starts, no matter what the caller says, bam, it's ready to go. We have the train, the zip. Yeah.

Because it's not going to tolerate lag. Well, let me. Let me look up. Actually, you could fake it by saying, let me check something in your system, because that's what a real CSR does today. Right?

Yeah. That's kind of the magic of the AI is it never does that. So it's just Right.

Right.

Yeah. It's like, I'd like to reschedule my appointment. Yes, sure. I see it's tomorrow, you know.

Yeah.

That's awesome. Give me. Give me two minutes. Well, I'll put you on hold.

So you heard it from Ben. You want to start with a good CRM first, because answering the phone and booking into something that isn't clean and doesn't have isn't set up right isn't going to help you as much. So get the CRM first and then get this AI voice so that you can answer these calls correctly and book these appointments. Right. And then after that, we got a lot of. There's a lot of other stuff to do after that.

There's a lot. Yeah. I guess you could just keep. Keep automating until you need.

I had 130 zaps in my company that were working that automated thousands and thousands of tasks. But this was pre AI, so you had to create a zap and an automation for things that your AI can do. Can cover 25 of those right now. Right. So it just started to consolidate all these things. Things. Right. So, yeah, so we tried. We tried free to grow with the phone number. And I tried to break it. I didn't break it. I. I'd love to try again. So here's what I'd like the listeners to do. Nathan has created a phone number for service titan hacks specifically where they can call in and try it. And I think that that's the best step. The best first step is for somebody to go in Call this AI and see how it actually responds. That's your perfect demo to start. Would you agree?

Yeah, 100%. It's. Yeah. We could talk about how it works and how the 80% book viable booking rate all day, but you just gotta. You just gotta talk to it.

That's awesome. So are there any. So I know you were talking about Outbound. Are there any other upcoming releases or features that you're really excited about? Anything else in the pipeline?

Yeah, I don't know. We've got a couple things, but I don't know if I want to say any right now just to get anybody's hopes up. One thing we've been working on a lot is just deepening our integrations, especially with Service Club Pro fieldpulse. And we also have integrations with Service Minder Service Fusion. We have some Jobber in beta. We have Salesforce. Yeah, we have a lot of them, but really those big three. I mentioned adding return customer functionality, doing some really smart stuff around. The caller has a new location. It's an existing caller, but the location has changed. Intelligent, making that new location job types. So, yeah, we're really focused on perfecting this inbound work workflow and just making this thing a booking machine. You set it, get it live, and it's just printing jobs.

It's gonna go super deep. Before you go wide and try to be the next service titan, a little bit of everything for everybody, right?

Exactly.

So I like it. I like it. That's our plan.

Yeah. Our competition, some of the big names your listeners may have heard of, they're definitely trying to do 10 things, and we've actually taken a lot of their business. On the inbound side, a lot of people say this is just. It performs better. The onboarding experience was cleaner.

You can always make onboarding better. You can always enhance the AI and the integrations. You can always get better at it. Because I'm sure that. I agree that the integration's probably better with one CRM versus another. And yeah, thanks for listening to the.

Home Service Hacks podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform so you never miss a future episode. For more information or to connect with Bill, you can check us out on Facebook @ServiceTitanHacks or visit our website at ServiceTitanHacks.com we'll see you next time.

Sam.