How Three People Handle Calls for a 65-Person Team With AI Voice Agent | Podcast Ep. 88

One of the really cool things is when you go into your voice agent settings and you go to reporting, you can go in and see all of the calls that your voice agent has answered, and you can see lead booked, unbooked, and you can go in and listen to those or look at the transcript, and you can reclassify all of those calls.

Welcome to Mastering ServiceTitan. I'm your host, Josh Lew. This podcast is where you get expert advice from power users. And today I am joined by Liz Larsen. She is the office support staff at Arc Electric. And so we are talking about the AI voice agent, ServiceTitan's AI voice agent topic. I think everybody is so curious about one of our latest innovations here. And so Liz, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Josh.

Of course. I'm really excited to have you on. I think we connected at one of the webinars. I believe you put in the chat like, oh my gosh, I love the AI voice agent. And we were like, yeah, we need to to talk to you about your experience. Maybe before we dive in, could you share a little bit about you and a little bit about Arc Electric?

Yeah, I, uh, have worn many hats in my career. I've been in marketing and communications for the majority of the time, but I also did take a slight detour into the hair and beauty industry and am a licensed cosmetologist as well. Um, with my latest adventures in the last 10 years being in marketing really focusing on streamlining processes. And I guess I kind of nerd out on those things and how I can make not only my job easier, uh, open up some time for other projects, more fun things, kind of trying to find solutions and what I can do to make everyone's lift a little less and our days a little easier.

And then, uh, tell me a bit about Arc Electric. How many people do you have in the office? How many technicians? Is it residential, commercial?

Yeah, Arc Electric was founded March 8th, 2021 with, uh, one guy and 5 helpers. They were working out of a Suburban in a storage unit, and since then we have grown to 65 electricians ranging from you know, apprentices in school to master electricians. And we do anything from residential, multifamily, and commercial projects. Majority of our work, I would say, is done in the commercial multifamily space, but we have a really strong service team, um, in the residential, which is where ServiceTitan comes in for us.

Gotcha. And then is it correct you guys have 3 people in the office?

Yes, there's 3 of us office gals that work In the office, I like to say we're all working moms, so it works really well for us to kind of be able to tag each other in and out when things pop up with our kiddos. But we do everything from inspections to scheduling appointments to scheduling trainings. Like, we're doing an OSHA 10 training for all of our employees this week, working on some of that kind of stuff, kind of keeping things going, because I think we all know that sometimes guys in the field are just hyper-focused on what they need to do and sometimes they just need a little handholding to get some of the other stuff done. So really, like you said, support staff, how can we step in and help them and make everyone not more easy, but make everyone a little more comfortable with what they need to do and processes and things.

100%. And then did I get this right? You don't have additional CSRs and dispatchers, the 3 of you do all of that?

Yes, which is where voice agent became more of a necessity. And yeah, we just needed some extra assistance, and that's where this came in for us, and it couldn't have been better timing.

Yeah, I'm very excited to dive in, and I think people listening will be like, wow, 65 people in the field, 3 in the office, they do all answering all the phones, dispatching, like everything. So it's pretty—

it's interesting because we don't know any different, but when we talk to outside people, they're like, that's actually really crazy. And We're based in Des Moines, Iowa, so we have, you know, a large service area that we, that we work in, but we do commercial jobs all across the state and even some projects back in our owner's hometown. So we're really spanned across hundreds of miles. So we're taking calls from people all over the state. So yeah, it can be a lot at times, but it makes the day go fast. So that's good.

Wow. And so what was life like before, uh, ServiceTitan AI voice agents? Like, were you the one, uh, mostly handling the calls? Like, how did you set up the calls and like who was taking them? And sure, what was a typical day like?

We use a platform called Dialpad, and so all 3 of us in the office are logged into Dialpad, and I'm sort of the first to answer, and then if I'm not able, someone else tries to pick up. But if we weren't, we were using a different platform before, and it was a live person. That was kind of our life before. Did that answer your question, Josh? Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, so yeah, you have Dialpad, but previously you had a live agent helping to pick up some calls.

Yes.

And then, um, I imagine with 3 people trying to do everything, like, must have been pretty challenging. Can you share maybe a little bit about the challenges or what kind of pain points or challenges that you had that led you to reach out to get voice agents?

Sure. We're a little interesting in how we use the ServiceTitan platform. We have 4 technicians that we use in the platform to schedule our service appointments. Each technician does the same thing. They charge the same prices. So we don't have to worry necessarily about the different tiers or what things we can schedule with a certain person. And one of the big pain points for us outside of that was with our previous service was really making sure the messaging was consistent. Yes, there's 3 of us answering the phone on our end, but we're all really dialed in on what that script looks like, what questions we need to ask, and really feeling out how the customer is feeling about the issue. Is this an emergency? Are they really stressed? Are they frustrated? How can we make this situation easier for them? Sometimes it's really exciting and they're getting a new hot tub and they need something wired for that. It can also be a really stressful situation where they've had a house fire and they need, you know, electrical temporarily set up at the home, or they need an inspection. And so really making sure the messaging was consistent through all of those things was important to us, and that was hard to do. With a live agent, not because they can necessarily go rogue. I don't want to say that. We just had a lot less control over how our, our message was sent out to customers when they were calling in.

That makes sense. And it's something I hear a lot because oftentimes with live services, live agents, they're answering the phone for many different companies, I believe, right? And so I think that's sometimes actually a pretty common challenge depending of which live service you go with. Um, definitely maybe how much, how many different companies that, that representative has to represent.

Yeah, so yeah, some of the call recordings were kind of funny to listen to because they'd be like, uh, oh, Arc Electric, you know, like, and probably hopped off from somewhere else. And that service served us well for 5 years prior. It was just time for us to move on to something that suited us better. And we're very AI friendly around here, so it just seemed like a really good fit for us.

Cool. And then how did you first hear about the ServiceNow AI Voice Agent?

Gosh, I'm trying to think. I think we were talking with like our account rep and we'd been mulling around the idea of using Marketing Pro and how, you know, that could really assist us. And this just popped up and we had been approached by a different voice agent business and were really intrigued by the idea, but the investment didn't make sense for us. And when we learned that there's a platform available in a service that we already use and trust and like, it just seemed like a natural fit for us to transition into voice agent with ServiceTitan.

Got it. And then for your phone system, are you guys still on Dialpad?

We are.

Okay, cool. Because I know the voice agent works with any phone system. What was, what was it like setting that up?

I'm going to be very honest, it was so easy to find the call forwarding number. I struggled a little bit with finding where to plug that in, but luckily your team has been incredible and so responsive that I asked the simple question and they said, happy to pop in and do it for you. And it took 5 minutes and we were up and going and it was easy. So it was a stress on my part, but I should have known I could have just reached out to ask and it would've been much easier.

So yeah, we have a lot of— okay, that's great to hear. Cuz usually when, yeah, when people say that, they're like, honestly, they're usually gonna say like, oh, it was really difficult or whatever. And VoiceAgent, I think people are intimidated by, it's like a very, very new thing. Um, in a very innovative product.

And to be frank, I was very intimidated by it. Before I dove in. It was like kind of on my list and being pushed, you know, like, let's get into this, let's get into this. And it took me like 2 days to fully like wrap my head, like, okay, I'm gonna get into it and figure out, you know, there is a lot that goes into setting it up to make sure that it functions properly. That was more intimidating to me before I realized all of the support material and webinars and things like that that are out there. To really walk you through that process. If I didn't have, you know, the webinars and the PowerPoints and things like that to help with some of it, it might have seemed a little more intimidating. But once you kind of get into the groove of, okay, this is what I need to do, it really is very user-friendly to set up, in my opinion.

That's great to hear.

Yeah.

So when you first heard about it, what was it, what were the conversations like with the other office staff or with the owner, with the team? Were they all immediately on board or was there some back and forth about this topic?

No pushback at all. We had expressed frustration with our previous live agents, and when we brought this as a solution, it was like, heck yeah, let's get into it. We all know that the world is shifting to AI for so many things, and if we can be on the front end of that and get it implemented and tweak it to how it really can help us and be beneficial, I don't see why it would— why we wouldn't want to just jump in because we're going to be going there eventually anyways. So, right, there was no real pushback there other than when we launch this, we need to make sure that it works well and we don't have customer frustration. That was the biggest, you know, pain point for us was when this goes, we want to make sure that it's pretty seamless and we're not necessarily losing customers or leads because they don't want to interact with an agent, the voice agent.

Yeah, I see this concern a lot, and rightfully so. I mean, those leads are so expensive. You work so hard to earn that call, and then it's like, oh my gosh, we're going to hand this off to a robot, quote unquote, or like an agent or whatever.

We have Sam.

Sam, there you go.

Yeah.

So can you walk us through What was it like preparing to turn it on? And then what went into actually going live?

Working to turn it on, I took, I took my time on it. It took me several weeks to really work through adaptive capacity and what do we want Voice Agent to be able to book? What don't we want Voice Agent to be able to book? What questions do we need to put in, you know, to said spreadsheet that we know customers are going to ask and we need to have an answer for. So really taking time to hone in on what that looks like and our message through her, that took me several weeks to really work on. So the lift in the beginning is quite a bit and it takes time. And yes, you need to walk away from it once in a while because it can, it can be a lot, but Once you're ready to go live, smooth sailing, in my opinion. We also, we didn't really use like a test number. We didn't test it a lot. We just said, turn it on. I emailed Lindsay Gwertz. She's incredible. And I said, Lindsay, let's rock and roll. We're ready to go. So she had it up and going in a Zoom call. We were talking for like 15 minutes and it was ready to go, ready to roll.

Wow. Yeah, shout out to Lindsay.

Yeah, shout out to Lindsay for sure.

Yeah, Lindsay's amazing. Uh, her calendar is insane when I see it. She's just helping so many people with the voice agent and just so responsive.

And I've always asked, so sorry to bug you with this, Lindsay. She's like, Liz, stop apologizing. It's what I'm here for. This is why you can reach out, because I'm happy to help you with these things. She's just very nice and never makes you feel silly, if that makes sense.

Yeah, she's the best. So previously you didn't have Adaptive Capacity set up at all?

No, it is a prerequisite for the voice agent. So once I kind of wrapped my head around what that was, great, makes sense. And it's, it's easy. We previously, like I had mentioned, we use ServiceNow probably a little different than some companies. There's, I know there's some companies on this platform that are enormous and have hundreds of techs and are doing, you know, all different sorts of things. We really, you know, we can go in and schedule shifts and, and it's pretty easy on that end for us. Once you wrap your head around adaptive capacity, you're golden, I'll say.

Okay, cool. So would you say adaptive capacity was like the hardest part about the prerequisites or like preparing for voice agent?

I think for me, making sure that all the settings in the Adaptive Capacity were ready to go was the most stressful thing for me. But like I said, once you kind of figure out how it works and what's needed, it's pretty easy. But also making sure some of those settings are turned off, like voice agent cannot do these things. That's incredibly important because each of our appointments, someone might mean, 6 hours to install can lights at someone's house and replace a chandelier, or they might need 2 days to trench in service to a new garage. There's no way for us to differentiate when booking those install appointments versus estimate how much time they need because it's not a cut and dry situation. So with our voice agent, she's only allowed to book estimates right now. and each estimate is 2 hours, you know, 8 to 10, 10 to 12, 12 to 2, 2 to 4. And that's, to be truthful, where a lot of our phone calls come from is, I need to book an estimate, I need someone to come look at this. Because after that, once we've sold that estimate, they generally reach out to the technician and the technician can book it through the Service Titan app, right? So that's where a lot of that came in and just making sure she put it booked. Appointment, someone, or someone to think that when they're calling in, I need X, Y, and Z done. Okay, well, we can come tomorrow at 8 AM and making sure they know work is not going to be completed at that time and making sure that that's known to them was really important. So that's why she's only allowed right now to book those 2-hour estimates. And if they're looking for an install or whatever, she takes a message and we get an email saying, you know, this person called in, they wanted to speak to a real person, or they're wanting to book something, and we follow up when, you know, we're available. So that's how we set up, and might be a little different for others.

Yeah, this is great to hear. I love to hear these like nitty-gritty details about the setup. How did you do that? Was it— yeah, how did you set up what to say, what not to say, what— how did you like—

sure, so when you go into ServiceTitan and you go into the search function and you type in voice agent, right, you can go in and there's like 8 or 10 different categories that you can click into. And one of them, I can't remember, I think I just used an Excel sheet and I titled one, one column questions, one column answers, and I put in there You know, the question is, can you come install a light fixture tomorrow? Answer, no, but I'm happy to set up an estimate, right? So really some of those frequently asked questions with a solution that doesn't sound like a no necessarily, because you never want to really tell someone no. You want to provide a solution, right? So really working on the wording and how we want that to be portrayed. In that Excel document took some time, but once it's uploaded, she knows exactly, you know, how to reply to those, to those inquiries.

So amazing. And then how about, um, do you have to customize any kind of escalation path if like the customer is frustrated and they're like, oh, I actually just really want to talk to a human?

Like, from my understanding, you don't have to, but you can. So if you can put in trigger words, you know, you can put in other things for her to know, like, okay, I need to escalate this to a real human. Another interesting fact about how we use it is if they're calling during office hours and we don't answer, we're generally on the other line. Since there's only 3 of us, we're not going to escalate it back to the live agent that's on the other line. That's just going to create this evolving circle of frustration that we're trying to avoid. So we turned off that option. Well, we didn't actually turn that option on. We simply just said, I'm happy to have a live agent call you back. That's how we handle it. And we get that message and we call those people back. And it's just a simple, I'm so sorry you caught me when I was on the other line. I see that you talked with our voice agent. This is what you're experiencing. I'm happy to get something booked. So having a little bit of a recap from her and then, you know, a slight explanation because you don't really need one, but I still provide one just so they feel heard. That's how we choose to handle it because we don't have a lot of people to fall back on for a live agent. So that's how we choose to handle it with that setting anyway.

That's awesome to hear. Yeah, it seems like there's a lot of settings and customizations. And one thing about this podcast is I like to hear all the different ways people use some things because there's no like— every business is so unique, you know. And so it's not like there's a quote-unquote perfect way to use it.

Yeah.

So, but it's nice to hear your thought process and how you made it work for you.

And I think even in setting this up, I will learned things about ServiceTitan that helped on other things. Like, for example, this is kind of a tangent, the techs in the field would book an appointment, but it might need to be 6 hours, but they can only book it for 2 because that was our setting, right? I figured out when I was going through Adaptive Capacity and setting up all of these things, I can put in there different appointment link. So now techs can easily go in and say, oh, I need 4 hours, and it automatically books that 4 hours. So I think it In turn, while you're learning all this other stuff, you learn other things that are really going to help make things easier on the back end. So that was another fun thing for us because it was not a pain point we had. We knew that there was something we could do. We just hadn't put the effort or time in to figure it out because other things took precedence. But that's been a huge small thing, but a big thing for us too when setting this up was finding that.

So yeah, and adaptive capacity in and of itself is, is an amazing feature. And so yeah, that must have been a good feeling to find like these other small wins along the side and they all stack up. How's feedback been from the other office staff and the technicians? And yeah, what, what's the conversations like after you turn it on?

I don't know if the techs even really realize we're using it. That's not true. I shouldn't say that. They know we're using it because they love the recap that's in the appointment notes. When they see it. And it's not, you know, like a cool tag, like voice agent booked this. You can see it's, at least in our setting, the potential member and then voice agent. So they know the voice agent booked it, but they also know because of the great notes that they get for the appointment. So they've loved that so far. Our previous service, we would get an emailed recap of any phone call that they took. We can see, you know, this person called in for X, Y, and Z, and then we'd also get like a voice recording, right? We didn't necessarily listen to the voice recordings unless someone was really mad and we wanted to kind of dig into what that conversation was like. But we found that we, when we launched Voice Agent, we really missed those email recaps. Like we didn't have to go in and listen to anything. It was just right there. Like, phone number, name, this is the context of the situation. And sometimes when we're busy throughout the day, I don't even notice I've missed a call. And so having to go into a different tab in ServiceTitan and then go into calls and then, you know, over here, it wasn't, it's not hard, it's easy to do. It was just a new thing for us to kind of implement into our day. And maybe we're stuck in our old ways, but one thing that we really pushed for was We really want emails when we miss a call so that it pings in our mind like, oh yeah, we need to go back and return that phone call. And it wasn't an option in the very beginning. And so I think that that was maybe one of our biggest frustrations. And not that we couldn't get over it, because we could, but before I knew it, I think Shelby and Lindsay both were like in touch consistently saying, hey, we've put this out to the engineers and We're working on a solution for this. And it was not long after they're like, hey, this is ready to go. Go put in whatever email address you want it to go to and you'll start getting those recaps for like missed calls or a call that an agent takes. And it's amazing.

Wow. Okay. So this one, I guess, reputation of ServiceSight AI Voice Agent is they are adding new features to it and adjusting. So fast. I have not seen— I don't know if I've seen at ServiceSign them move this quickly on any product before.

Wild. And even, you know, even with the webinars I was at, you know, there were several people on there. They were like, I wish it did this, or, you know, in our instance, we wish it did this because it's what we're used to and it helps us, right? I mean, to take that feedback and make it a reality so quickly, to know you're heard, it just like makes you want to dive into it and use it even more because you can really make it what you want it and it only gets better.

So yeah, I love hearing stories like that. How about any early results? Like how is Sam doing at the company?

So we love Sam. We signed up with Voice Agent, we had a free month, right? So I told everyone, I said, I'm going to intentionally miss some phone calls because I want to see how I kind of want to stress this system and see where do I need to go back into my spreadsheet and ask questions and provide answers. Where do I need to change a setting for calling? Is, is 4 rings too much before it goes over to you? You know, all of these things. So I really said, I'm going to intentionally miss phone calls. You know, in this period. So I want to preface, some of these numbers are probably skewed because I intentionally did that. So I pulled numbers from February 1st to today, like right before I came to meet with you, as of 10 AM Central Time. Our booking rate is 20%. I know that sounds weird, but keep in mind we only let her book estimates. We have people calling in all the time to pay bills. We have people calling in all the time asking for their electrical provider, like a MidAmerican or an Alliant Energy. We have people all the time calling in to book their estimates for installs. So I know that 20% sounds really weird, but I would honestly, I would guess 20% of our phone calls are for estimates. So I feel like that's really consistent with how I answer the phones and how I'm booking appointments. So I don't want that number to sound like, oh, only 20%, but like, we're like, 20%, that's amazing. That's amazing. Because before, you know, they weren't necessarily booking anything. They were just kind of taking a message, right? And then you were calling back to book anyways. So we're extremely happy with that number. And I know when I can kind of hone in on some of those questions and answers, that number will only continue to go up. So that was 20% of 370 calls.

Wow.

Yeah.

Do you know what the percentage was in the period prior to VoiceAgent?

I, I don't. I should have pulled. I did not think to pull from previous provider. I'm so sorry, Josh. I know that the number of calls that are being answered with voice agent is consistent with what we were using prior. Do I think that we were getting 20% booked from that? Absolutely not. Definitely not.

Got it. Okay.

So yeah, I don't have that firm number, but I, I know for a fact we were not getting 20% from those phone calls.

It's good to hear too, because like I said, every business is so unique. You mentioned at the top of the episode that you do a lot of commercial work, so I'm sure there's all kinds of calls coming in that maybe aren't, like you said, they're not bookable basically, right?

And yeah, one of the really cool things is when you go in to your voice agent settings and you go to reporting, you can go in and see all of the calls that your voice agent has answered, and you can see lead, booked, unbooked, and you can go in and listen to those or look at the transcript, and you can reclassify all of those calls. You can associate a call with a job. We had someone call in that has an appointment scheduled for Monday, and they said, it's gonna rain on Monday. We don't want your technician out servicing our generator in the rain. Let's, you know, call me back and let's find a better time. That's not a lead, but that's also not a non-important phone call. And it isn't, it's not going to lead to a booking, right? It's just a reschedule. So being able to go in and reclassify that and associate it with a job, that also helps your numbers too, when you can go in and kind of make sense of some of those things. And I'm just really kind of come up from implementing and figuring all of it out that I'm going in and finally reclassifying some of those things. So that number will go up with that as well. But I can't stress enough how much, how happy I am with the platform being the person that's in it so much and working in the settings and how user-friendly it is compared to Foreigner. Wow.

Uh, 300-something calls to reclassify sounds like a lot of work.

Yeah, I'm definitely not reclassifying all of them. Yeah, you can see, you know, with the caller ID And sometimes we get, you know, oh, I thought I was calling a different electrical company. I'm not going to reclassify all of those calls. Absolutely not. But the ones that are associated with a client that's already in our system, I will reclassify and do that. So, right. That's one of those things to do when I have time.

Yeah. Yeah. When you have time. When, when, when, when, yeah. That's, that's the hard part.

When things slow down.

I was wondering if voice agent helps at all with reclassifying. Are there like notes that can make it easier?

You know, that's a great question. I don't know that answer, Josh. That's something I should reach out to the team and ask, is where— if I can add a different classification. Like, if someone, you know, uses these trigger words, can we automatically classify? That's a great point to make. I'm gonna write that in my notes right now and ask. Thanks for pointing that out.

Yeah, of course. Because no, I'm just wondering if, if they already have the transcripts and like all this automation, I wonder if something they can add on, or, or if it is already in there, is some way to make reporting or reclassification easier or automatic. That would be so cool. And it can— yeah, that would be, that would be amazing.

Amazing.

Any advice you have for people? There's a lot of people who are really interested in AI Voice Agent, um, and I think that they would love to hear, if you could start over maybe, any, any advice you would give people implementing or adopting something new like this?

Not putting like a hard deadline on yourself and really taking your time to understand what settings need to be in place in order to launch it. I don't think that I had fully wrapped my head around what all I needed to dive into to make this work. It's a lot less intimidating when you have extra materials to really review and videos to watch and things before you kind of dive into it. I tried to dive into it after listening to 5 Minutes saying, okay, you need to do adaptive capacity X, Y, and Z. Okay. I dive in and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is not what I was thinking. And of course, get in your own head and you're like, this is gonna be a nightmare. But if you can really sit and take in the material prior, I think to starting, that's really important. Jump on a webinar, listen to other people's experiences. Ask questions. The team is great about answering them. And then going in and really working on your settings and getting things set up. I think familiarizing yourself with what you need to do and how it works would certainly make setup a lot easier.

Such good advice. And then when in doubt, you can always reach out to Lindsay. I'm not going to put her— in our webinars, she's just like throws her email out there. I'm like, oh my gosh, you're going to get so many emails.

So many emails. I can't imagine.

Yeah, so I won't, I won't, I won't put her email out in the episode, but you can reach out to her somehow if you find a way or join a webinar and she'll probably put her email out there again. But yeah, but reach out to her.

Join the webinar, ask the question in real time and she'll answer it for you because she just like that brainy about it.

And we have a whole staff here at Serverstein to help out. So yeah, reach out to anybody here and we can always help. But yeah, Liz, thank you so much for coming on the show today and talking about your experience with Voice Agent. I know it's unique to you and for people listening, you know, may not use it exactly the same way depending on their business, but it's great to hear your thought process and how you made those decisions.

You bet.

Any last parting words or words of wisdom or encouragement for folks listening?

I think when you're ready to make the change, just dive in headfirst. I don't think that there's an easy way to take it slow when you're introducing a voice agent. I don't want to say like trial by fire, but when you do launch it, really embrace it and work hard to make it work for you quickly because it is such an asset for our team. It's like having a fourth person in the office for us. And if I didn't work rigorously and hard to get those questions and, or, or hiccups fixed in the very beginning, it wouldn't have been an easy transition. But now that we've really done the time in the beginning, it's been wonderful. So embrace it early, work on it really hard in the beginning, and then it's smooth sailing.

Beautiful. Thank you so much, Liz. And, uh, hope this was helpful for all you listening, and we'll catch you all on the next episode.