Should AI or a Human Answer Your HVAC Phones? (Jill's Office)

AI definitely has a great place, especially in home services and the trades. I mean, it can take so much off your plate and it can answer phones instantly. While the trends that we have seen currently are people just so grateful that they got a human and not AI. With a lot of companies adopting AI answering, I feel like it is creating a lot of that sameness among everybody, right? So how do you be unique and how do you create trust faster? Customers are not stupid. I think that people were really angry when they felt like they were dupe into thinking something was real when in reality it was AI. So we can't trick people. The best way to create trust is to, you know, to have a human just empathizing when you're in any type of situation and then going through and delivering your amazing service that you're promising them as well.

Welcome to the Home Service Hacks Podcast, the show for contractors who refuse to settle for average, hosted by Bill Brown, licensed HVAC 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 pricing, marketing, and management. If it's working in the field, you'll hear about it here. Let's get into it.

Hey everybody, thanks for joining me. I'm Bill with Service Titan Hacks, but you probably already knew that. And for a lot of contractors, especially HVAC contractors, the Phones are ringing off the hook right now. And when that happens, the instinct, I think, at least in the past, has been to hire someone, use an answering service, turn on AI, or bring in a trained live team. So a couple of those are relatively new to the market. Hiring somebody definitely is not. So we're going to go through those 4 options. I've got Jill, uh, I've got Jill's office Uh, on the line here, I've got Nicole. Thanks for joining me, Nicole.

Thanks for having me, Bill. I'm really excited for this show.

Yeah. Fantastic. So we're not going to do a sales presentation today. So we're just going to talk about what works, what doesn't, and what owners should do to make these options successful for them. A little bit first, before we get into the 4 different options about what Jill's office does, who's your best clients?

Yeah. I mean, I'd love to talk about that. I've been at Jill's for over 10 years now. I think I've got a pretty good idea of where our services fit best. And I mean, our ideal clients are, for one, in-home services, specifically in the trades, lots of plumbing, HVAC, and electrical clients. But they are definitely at a stage in their business where they've got some really good processes down, you know, they've figured a lot of stuff out, and now they're looking to take the next step. They tend to have a team already that is handling a lot, handling a lot of things in office. So We still have clients who are solopreneurs doing everything themselves, but we've seen the best fit is really for owners who have a team and they're looking for support for themselves as owners, but also for their team because their team is usually human and can't work 24/7, 365. And so, along with that though, they really have this great mindset of just being an owner and taking accountability of their business. understanding what it takes, um, what they need to do to, you know, get to those next levels.

Sure. I like what you said about taking accountability for the business. I think, you know, going through those different options that you have for who can answer your phones, the first one I think everyone does is they hire and train internally. And I've had many different CSRs through the years, and when I first Hired my first CSR. I wasn't a good trainer for CSR, so I hired this girl, I brought her on, and I said, just answer the phones. How hard could this be? Right? And I didn't train her or anything like that, and she didn't work out for me. I went, hmm, well, she wasn't a good candidate. Let's move on to the next one. And I didn't take accountability for what it is that I didn't do, which was provide her with the right amount of training and the right amount of, you know, processes. What's the formula for doing your job well? And I was able to do that for installers. I was able to do it for service techs because I knew those jobs, but not the CSR. And I think, and it was a big, it was a big mistake. It cost me, cost me a lot of money, a lot of headache, a lot of turnover. And when, after, after a couple of CSRs that I went through, I realized that and I said, well, this is on me to put together a process for them to be successful in their job. And the contractors I see that grow that you're talking about, they do take that accountability and they say, it's on me to improve my team, to give them the tools they need to, to do a great job. And so I like, I like what you said about that. So the, our first, our first option out of those 4 is to hire and train internally, right? And so you said a lot of your, your, uh, customers already have an internal team. About how many do they usually have when they, uh, come to you? How many CSRs?

It's hard to tell exactly how many CSRs they have, but they tend to tell us how, how many employees they have as a whole. And so we see somewhere between a team of like 6 to 12 is what they have reported. I don't really know exactly how many CSRs they have, but I do know that, well, talking with clients, it's like, you know, we like to talk about when you, you, when you sign up for a service, if you have a real person that you're talking to, you tend to talk more about your business and then sometimes spill a little bit about your struggles, even to us when they sign up at Jill's.

Mm-hmm.

And so, I mean, a common thing we hear is that they, struggle trying to find somebody to help with the tasks that admins would do in office.

Mm-hmm.

Because they're really good at their trade, you know, they understand their trade really well, but maybe they've never worked strictly in customer service or sales. And so coming up with a, a way, like a process to hire, to train and provide that support, I think kind of gets put on the back burner. And so at Jill's, I mean, we're doing customer service and we're booking jobs, and so we, we know how to train for that specifically, but we have had employees very frequently come to us cuz they've worked at other places where, um, they left because it lacked the training and the support. And people feel like they're just thrown out on jobs, like how you mentioned your first CSR, just being thrown out on the job. And from an owner's perspective, you feel like, well, I'm just putting all my trust in you, right?

Mm-hmm.

But from the employee's perspective, you know, they feel like they haven't been given the resources and they've been given unrealistic expectations. They're maybe afraid to ask some questions depending on their personality. Or they get angry and then they just kind of lash out at you. And now you think you have this employee that is just not a good fit. Um, but we're forgetting the human side of what, what people need when they come to us. And your employees, I mean, we're responsible for them and their livelihood, their health, their mental health at work, things like that. So, there's, there's a lot that goes on behind just like, okay, you have a good voice, put you on the phones. Like, they just wanna feel. supported, and they also want vision, which is a whole nother, like a whole nother webinar we could do about culture and vision, right? But, um, but yeah, we have some employee or some clients that have figured that out really well and they're just really great owners. Um, and then we have some that struggle and, and probably more that struggle than, than not when it comes to hiring CSRs.

Because they struggle, they come to you and go, and I've done this with a, with a lot. with almost every external vendor that I've had too. We talked about this the other day.

Yeah.

I'm struggling with this. I'm not really sure how to do it. And I just go, hey, Jill's office or answering service, a digital marketing agency, just do this for me. Take care of it for me. I don't want to know anything about it. I just want it to work. That's a lot to put on an external company. And then we also throw as owners, Throw our 2 cents in it and we say, I don't know how to do this, but I'm also going to tell you how to do it. I mean, I'm sure you guys have probably came across that too with some of these owners.

Yeah. A wide array of all of that. So, you know, just, I've, I've kind of dealt with it all. And I mean, it's been, it's been exciting to help clients through some of those hurdles and then some can't be helped, you know, because like we've talked about before, Um, the statistics on businesses that are successful and the ones that close down in certain amount of time, it's really high. Um, and that has a lot to do with a lot of different factors. But yeah, we've seen a lot of different, uh, like just ranges of how much a, an owner is willing to give away. And then we've had some on the extreme end of like, just take it all and do everything, but do it exactly how I want. Um, And you can't expect that from anyone outside of yourself. You know, even when you hire someone in office, you have to make sure that the expectations are real, aligned with the person that you hired, hiring the right fit for that position. Um, it's not possible to have a service like a, um, an answering service come in and function like your internal CSR. You know, those are two very different things. And so, Mm-hmm. there's a lot we can dive into there, but the just setting up the expectations and understanding You know, what you're, what you're looking for and what your, what your non-negotiables are of what you have to have versus what you'd like to have. Because as owners, you think about it and you start to feel any sort of relief that you start to feel as an owner, you kind of lean into that. And sometimes that can lead to, oh, just take more, just do more and do more. Uh, you know, and it kind of can spiral out of control at that point.

So yeah, that's like scope creep, right? We just keep dumping, dumping things on the, uh, External team. Yeah. Yeah. That, that makes sense really. You guys have a live answering team that answers calls and books jobs in ServiceTitan, right? Can you kind of tell me a little bit about that process of, of how you guys started up and onboard a little bit?

That's a great story because I've been here from the beginning. And so the funny part is when I found Jill's, I thought it was a comp— a A lady named Jill that was maybe an attorney, I don't know. And we were—I was going to help answer phones for her. And so I came in for the interview, and you know we were a tiny company with about six employees at the time. This was back in 2015 or 2016, and I—I was closing down another business that I completely failed at. And so I was feeling all of this, all of these emotions, and all this pain about.

This was your business, right? My first business.

And I, I didn't understand, for one, my numbers. I didn't understand how to hire and how to delegate anything. I did everything and I did it for 6 years. And so while I'm in the process of closing this business, I'm looking for a job that can give me back time with my kids, 'cause we had 2 little boys, and also pay off some of the debt I accumulated from this business. So I found Jill's, um, and I started part-time. After the interview and I understood what Jill's was, The thing that stuck in my head, all I heard was support for business owners and taking something off their plate. And it hit me so hard because of the point of where I was at in my life, closing down the business, that it just resonated so strongly that I was excited to just jump on board with the expectation that, look, I'm at this place where I can't commit full-time because I wanna take care of my kids now after being, you know, running a business for 6 years and not really being present. But I mean, my background is in business and also in human resources, and my degree is there too. And I am super passionate about sales. And so I knew that I would eventually move into a more full-time role that ended up being in sales, business development and stuff. And, but when I started, we were answering a lot of phones for local companies in home services. And we also were introduced to a lot of marketing agencies that we were helping calling leads for them. And, and we ended up, um, just naturally going in towards home services. And so as we kind of grew there, understanding what we could do for those clients, we were calling on leads, we were scheduling, and I mean, we would say yes to everything. And if you're a business owner, you know what it feels like to start up a small business and just Say yes to everything.

It's tempting, right? It's tempting to get—

It's so tempting. You just wanna say yes and get everything you can. But as we grew, we saw how it would prevent us from providing the best service that we could, trying to know and understand everything for everybody. And so we just kept growing and started to create, um, you know, guidelines of what we could do. And typically those guidelines are, are things where they're edge cases, right? Like, uh, one client says, you know, sometimes people call in about a job. I want you to do this every time. Well, that's really hard to do when 90% of your calls are about booking estimates.

Yeah.

The Jills are looking at your call instructions, trying to understand what they need to do to book, um, an actual lead for you, that they'll miss this little note about if it's a, if it's a someone looking for a job.

Right.

And so, just trying to figure out how to make those guidelines very clear so that we could handle the majority of your calls. And then, um, we started answering more for people in the trades and plumbing and HVAC, electrical. So, We started trying to better understand those industries and what those clients really needed as far as especially after-hour support and, you know, dispatching and things like that, which we had already been decided to be scheduling in Joburn and Housecall Pro were like what most of our clients were using. So we were in that very heavily. And so we started leaning into ServiceTitan and got into, uh, Got into it. Uh, with a consultant, started learning how to schedule in ServiceTitan. And just started really understanding that software, which I mean, I mean, all of the people in your group know that it's massive, right? It does so many things.

Sure. It's enterprise grade, right?

Yeah. And it's amazing. Um, so we just started learning how to schedule for our clients, how to just do things that they were asking us to do. And that's still an ongoing process to see what, what fits best for Jill's office and with, with our clients. But that has really led us to Just providing a better service for them. And that's where we are today.

Yeah, that's fantastic. So, I mean, scheduling and ServiceTitan is, you know, for this group is obviously important. You know, I had a, um, I had an answering service for years and I went from one answering service to another, not a lot. It was a live person, but it was a glorified voicemail. I wanted more from them than they can do. Or they could do. And what I really needed was somebody who could open up ServiceTitan, look at it, and, and schedule. And so I think that's really important, uh, or really sets you apart from a generic type of answering service. So in order to like get into someone's ServiceTitan, do you have any sort of special onboarding? Do you have any standardization or anything like that?

We do. I mean, we have a set of guidelines currently that we always have to review since it is our newest platform. I mean, we've been doing it for over a year, but it is newer than how long we've been scheduling in, like, say, Housecall Pro. But with that being said, the guidelines we've set are pretty much based off of the clients that we've had from ServiceTitan so far. As that grows, we just need to make sure that the guidelines are benefiting the majority of our clients and, like, eliminating as many errors as possible on our end of things. Because, because it's such a big system. There are so many nuances that, and very, people can just, you know, set it up however they want. And so, some of the ways that we have, um, set up onboarding is, first of all, going through the discovery phase of understanding what you, what you need done most. And during that time, we really are trying to set expectations and figure out what is your top priority, because it can get a little muddy when, like we said, when owners are talking about it and they're like, oh, you know what else would be awesome? If you could do this too. And so trying to just reel all of that into like, what is the thing you really need the most? And then they go through an onboarding call with Lincoln, our onboarding specialist, and he reviews everything with you on a call. And you, you jump on a video call just to review your ServiceTitan. But we also have a ServiceTitan consultant that we keep on. And she's amazing. Her name is Frankie and she is there in case Um, we need that connection between someone who is just really good in ServiceTitan. And she's the kind of person in between our client and then us to help make sure everything is set up correctly. Because she did mention that with the clients she's worked with, a lot of them, when I've asked her like, where, where did things kind of get messy in ServiceTitan? She said usually she's noticed it's from the setup. Maybe something wasn't turned on correctly or set up correctly from the beginning. Maybe not paying attention to it for so long.

Mm-hmm.

Kind of just got messy and you don't know where to where to go back and fix it, right? Sure. Yeah. So that's kind of our process right now and it's working really well because we do have a lot of, I mean, we're human, right? So we're hands-on, one-on-one with our clients, talking with them about everything.

Yeah, that's great. As far as like best practices go, like if you look at your, your customers who have the most success, um, their booking rates, What, what's in, what do you see in common between one contractor and another? What's, what's kind of stands out to you as, man, this is a, this is a good company. They're gonna, we're gonna book jobs for them. This is gonna be pretty smooth. What do you, what do you see on their end, them doing?

That's a great question. And it's not something specific inside of their CRMs. It is literally how they communicate, their mindset. And the clients that are the best fit for us, they're very understanding of us and our services. Um, we try to be very clear of who we are and what we do.

Mm-hmm.

But, uh, when we have a client who is, for one, gives us a little bit of flexibility in the beginning.

Mm-hmm.

Because I mean, if you think about having a, if you hire someone in-house, you know, you do have to go through a training period and you do need to constantly check in with them, do one-on-ones and all of this stuff. You don't do that at Jill's. We are training our staff to understand the industries for one, and then know the CRMs we schedule in. The call instructions that our clients fill out are built a very, they're formatted the same for every account so that our Jills don't have to rely on memorization, but they are trained in how to speak to people so they sound like a part of your company. The clients that understand that and are like, okay, Let's tweak things in your call instructions because when you listen to your calls, maybe you want them to be handled a little differently. People that are just understanding and willing to go back and forth because it's like, you know, you set up a big service, it's not just like drop it and then forget it. You want to make sure it's set up how you like it. And then from there, there's a lot less maintenance afterwards. But our clients are constantly working with account managers because they have like—

Mm-hmm.

Changes in their services, changes in their hours, like their holidays that they cover and who's on call. So it is a, if they're willing to constantly communicate back and forth, um, those are the best clients to work with because, I mean, you know, you're busy as an owner. I mean, we've got clients who just will never respond. They won't, they won't reply back when, when, you know, we're trying to figure out like, have you changed something? Because we have all the feedback from your callers Yeah. And people are saying, and we're very, we send messages to you constantly. Every time someone calls, you get an instant notification of what that call is about. If you were to ask our Jills, they will tell you which companies they know get the most angry callers.

Mm-hmm.

And that will never get a callback from the owner even though they're calling back. And, uh, so I mean, in those cases, I think some owners just really wanna relieve themselves of the phones. Um, but yeah, it's a really interesting landscape. of clients all over the place. Mm-hmm. Ones that communicate really well and are very interactive with us when, when they need to be. Obviously we don't wanna take up all their time, but those are the best to work with.

We talked yesterday or a couple days ago about booking rates and how booking rates across companies are not gonna be all the same because some of the customers that call companies that have a great brand, a great reputation, They're a little bit more prequalified and easier to book. And these companies that don't have a great reputation or it's really, really busy and they're kind of like the 3rd company that someone's called, those are going to be a lot harder for you guys to book because there isn't that trust built. Or—

Right.

We were also saying, talking about how you guys had spent a lot of time on the phone with upset existing customers and then not be able to get to new customers. So, tell me a little bit about, um, a little bit about how new customers are different between one company and another, you know, kind of going, going over, um, you know, you're listening to calls.

It does vary because like you said, if a, if a cus— if a, a company has a really great reputation, Obviously, those calls, there's already a level of trust built based off of your reviews and even just your website, what other people are saying about you on social media. And so people will call in and, you know, they're already pretty much sold because your marketing did its job, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so we are always trying to gather data on booking rates for the Jills, but it varies so widely. Calls are coming in from return customers just wanting to know like where their technician is. We get wives, family members, moms calling in 'cause client, some of our clients will forward their personal phones to us, which they're totally allowed to do if they want to. And then, so people will call in and they're just wanting to book an estimate, which is really easy for us to book, especially—

Sure.

If you have a human answering and you're the first company that answered, because we still frequently get customers who say, oh my gosh, you're the first person that answered. My contractor won't get back to me. Um, or you're a human, uh, things like that. And then we've got clients who, where we book actual jobs. And so we're able to give quotes on the phone and actually give pricing and then actually book jobs for them. And so that, uh, gathering that data, we're trying to figure out how to discern between all those different types of calls and booked estimates versus jobs.

Yeah.

And so those are, you know, there's a lot of things that come into play, uh, when it comes to like, what if, what does affect your booking rate, right?

So I agree. Do you, um, have some best practices you could share as far as giving pricing over the phone? That seems to be kind of a big deal in our industry not to give pricing over the phone.

Right.

I don't think on estimates customers or prospects typically expect, uh, pricing over the phone. We talked about this the other day, like same with like roofing contractors. They don't expect to, you know, you to give a price for a roof over the phone. But when it comes to HVAC and plumbing repairs, how do you guys handle those, those price questions and still get, get the, uh, get the call booked?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we typically get tons of questions about pricing, um, in those industries, like roofing for sure. People, I mean, they might have some questions like, I just, I know customers will call in and tell you that they know what the problem is. Because they went up there.

Oh, sure.

Or they flew their drone up there, right? So they'll say, I know what I need. I just, you know, I'm just missing some shingles. How much does it cost just to replace a few shingles? But I mean, our clients will actually tell us how to address those types of questions. And when we have a question that we don't have an answer to, we can send that directly to our client and they can give us the answer or how to address that, right? But we do get a lot of, questions about like service call fees, because we do have clients that charge those and some of them apply it towards the job or, and some don't. And so those are very specific things and our Jills are trained on how to make that very clear. Um, and then like for roofing, we don't, there usually isn't anything charged for those or booking estimates for those, a lot of free estimates. Um, in some of, some of the other industries, Mm-hmm. People will ask about, like, say garage doors, for instance, like how much does it cost to, like, for a new motor? And they'll just ask a lot of questions. I think our clients know in their specific industries and their area, because if you have a place in Florida versus somewhere up in Wisconsin, like, you know, different even environments and things like that, weather, you know what happens in those areas. And so if they know what the majority of people are calling in about and they have some kind of base pricing, Yeah. They will put that in their call instructions for us to relay. We also like to ask our clients, what is your minimum? If you have one and you want us to qualify people based off of your minimum, we can do that as well. We can at least, or we could at least let them know, because if someone's expecting a $200 job, but your minimum's like, you know, I don't know, $600 or whatever it is, we want to make sure that we're weeding those out if that's what you want. And some clients don't even want to talk to anybody that's expecting, you know, cheap pricing. And then some other clients are like, no, give me everyone that you get, say yes to everything and send it to me. So yeah, a lot of different, you know.

It kind of depends on the season, right? Like right now, if you say yes to everyone, then you're going to lose a lot of money and probably not be able to get to them, at least for HVAC companies that are in the north and maybe getting hit with some, uh, some good seasonal weather, right? So, right. Yeah.

There's also maintenance programs. Some of our clients, you know, they want us to talk about maintenance programs or want us to talk about the pricing for someone that's on a maintenance program versus someone who's not on a maintenance program.

Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. So you said that some of your clients use you guys as backup, overflow nights, weekends. What do you, how do you typically engage? Is it usually one of those things or? Um, or do sometimes you guys are the primary person that answers the phone and then their, their office or the owner is the backup? How's that, how's that usually work for you?

Yeah. You know, I talked to a guy who has a really big plumbing company and I asked him how he handles his after-hours calls and they rotate it throughout the office. And then anything after 10, he said, goes to him. And I just thought that was so much because he's so busy. Um, but when clients come to us, they are looking for, I don't think they always know what they're looking for. They're, they wanna talk to us to figure out what we can do, and then they start to fill in the blanks, right?

Yeah. What do you have? Not what—

Yeah. What can you do? Can you do everything? We're like, hold on, let's, let's roll it back a little. What are you doing right now? And what we see is people are looking for after-hour support initially. They're thinking, like we said, they have already people in office, maybe answering phones. And those people in office probably have all the answers to all the questions, you know, where we have FAQs, but little, you know, like odd questions we might not know the answers to. So, then initially they think, okay, after hours, weekends, holidays, or my office person is going on vacation for 2 weeks, or she's about to go on maternity. I don't know what to do. I need help with my phones. And so, they're, you know, so we're initially, I think a lot of times backup. But what happens is, I mean, you can forward your phones to Jill's at any time because we are also 365, we cover holidays.

Mm-hmm.

So if you wanna forward it all the time and have your office person or you as the owner answer first, it can go to you first and we can be your backup then, and then just pick up everything, you know, nights and weekends. And that has increased a lot in the past year especially, or maybe 2 years because people, you know, on your, Uh, Google Business Profile, if you wanna list yourself as 24/7, you need to have something to answer 24/7. That's kind of the initial, I think a lot of people are right now asking for after-hours support and then just using us for the whole thing.

Sure. Do you guys, uh, handle, do you guys do outbound as well or is it just inbound calls?

Yeah, we've always done outbound. Um, and that's always been a really interesting and fun feature, like We've, we've initially started out calling to do like satisfaction calls on clients after jobs to see how, how everything went, um, to ask for reviews. And, um, but now the bulk of what we do for outbound is, uh, following up on leads.

Oh yeah.

And so, I think a lot of our clients, you know, they do a lot of marketing and you do waste a lot of money on marketing when you don't answer your phones.

Mm-hmm.

And when you don't follow up, and the follow-up is probably one of the hardest things to do cuz you are already, you know, it's in the past, you're moving forward onto the new leads. But the follow-up, like you've maybe didn't call someone back or maybe you gave a quote and they didn't respond. And so we'll get clients who give us a whole list of, you know, open quotes that haven't been called back so that we can call 'em back and see if they wanna move forward and book 'em on the calendar. Um, and then we use, uh, Zapier for something we call Lead Zap. And so you can connect maybe like your Meta ads or your website forms, uh, in Zapier to Lead Zap, and it triggers an outbound call from our team. Okay. Uh, within minutes usually. And so that's kind of the fastest way, but outbound has been awesome for us. But I would say like 80% is, is inbound.

With the leads, we're, we're talking about, uh, as far as outbound goes, new, new prospects that come in. Like if, if, uh, Angie's List lead comes in, those are always ones that it seems like you have to follow up on a lot. And then also, after you've done the job for someone, unsold estimates, like calling and trying to, do you guys try to sell the estimate there or get another, um, get another job on the, on the books? How does that work as far as the unsold estimates go?

Yeah, if there's an estimate that's been given, we like to know what the estimate was and we are calling to see if they want to move forward to get booked. And say yes to that, that quote that they were given. Um, so it's usually like a, like all the customers you've given a quote to, maybe it was in person or over the phone, they just never responded. And so they're just kind of open sitting there and it kind of just builds up. And so when we tell clients we can call on all of those, they get excited because like, here's a whole list of people I've never called back, but I spent money to get that lead in the first place.

Yeah.

And so those work out really well actually. And it at least starts the conversation again. Um, but you want to move on them pretty fast, obviously, because they're, they're calling around looking, right, for, for service.

Do you guys go in directly to the ServiceTitan and kind of, can you pull that list? Right. You know how I'm, look at me. I'm already asking you to do stuff I'm not sure you can do. Right. But do you guys go into ServiceTitan and work that list? Look, I'm going to need that from you, Nicole, or I'm going to be a cranky Uh, owner like everyone else, right? So—

That's a really good question, and I don't 100% know the answer. I do believe for all of our clients, they are generating these lists for us and cleaning them to make sure it's not someone that they forgot to take out. Like, I do not want to work with Bill. Like, do not call him back. Take him off the list before you give it to us because there might be little things in there that you don't want us to call on. And so, um, that's my initial thought because that's how we do it for the other CRMs is Our clients will pull that list and make sure it's clean before they give it to us.

Are, are you guys, as far as your ServiceTitan, getting, kind of getting back to that or circling around to that, um, do you guys have any certifications for ServiceTitan or anything like that? I know you said you have a consultant you work with. What's your, how do you guys do all your ServiceTitan training?

So we have internal training. So we have one ServiceTitan trainer that, um, She makes sure that new hires, when we hire at Jills, they go through a lot of training. First, they go through customer service in the Jill system, and then they start taking calls for, uh, a large majority of our clients just want call answering, taking messages. So they learn that first, and then they start to get integrated into the different CRMs and specific training to those platforms. Our one trainer who, uh, keeps up with anything in ServiceTitan, she works with, she trains the Jills. But she also works with our script specialists to make sure that the guidelines are up to date or, you know, reviewing things. If we're making a lot of mistakes in this one area, maybe it's something the Jills can't do because the Jills, believe it or not, are always looking to please. They're trying to make callers happy. Like, they really want to have a good call and do things for the caller, and they want to make the client happy. If they make a ton of mistakes, it becomes a trend. It's because it's something that could be outside of—

Mm-hmm.

What Jills can do on a call. And so that's something the trainer and script specialists are always looking at. Um, and then we have, um, our consultant, so we can always go to her and ask like, hey, can you help us here and help us understand how this is set up? Could it be better? But then outside of that, we have our ServiceTitan certification. So we're a certified call center, which was a huge thing to do because I think it was—

Yeah.

I don't take calls. Okay. So I don't want anyone watching this to think Nicole's gonna answer my phones.

Me either.

I don't. So I don't schedule in ServiceTitan the way our Jills do, but I did help facilitate the certification training program and we were required to get, I think it was 60 or 70% of our, of our staff through that whole training program. And that was a beast because if you can imagine, all of those Jills are on calls through their whole shift. So being, having to pull them off to go through the training. Um, inside of ServiceTitan, it was a huge undertaking. Um, and so there's so much to learn in there too, like we talked about. So a lot of things that we don't even need on calls with the clients that we have. So retention is gonna be low if you're not gonna practice it every day.

Yeah.

And so from that certification program, we took the things our clients really needed the most, and that's what's in our internal training program that we pull the Jills through specifically and the things they will use every day on ServiceTitan calls.

Do you guys find that you end up, okay, like your Jills or someone from your office ends up kind of training your customer on how to use ServiceTitan? Like, yes, because, because your, your Jills, that's, it's, uh, probably spend more time in ServiceTitan than a lot of the customers do. So it ends up rather than them training you, it kind of goes the, the other way around, right?

Yeah, definitely. And I mean, we have some clients who are just really, have been using ServiceTitan for so long and maybe it's not even set up optimally, but that's how they do it. And they're very resistant to changing it, even if it's going to be better. They don't want to change anything. And that's where our consultant comes in because we keep her on and we actually provide a couple complimentary hours for them to work with her. And she just has such a great mind for like, let's, let's tweak this a little. This will help you. This is not set up right. You know, she knows that stuff really well. And so that's a good example of delegation. Instead of us making someone in our office become an expert and not have to, and they might not be in it every single day, they still have to do—

Yeah.

Jobber, Housecall Pro, you know, and so many other things. I'm like, let's just get one person who is just so good in just this one thing. And that's, that's helped us out a lot. And so. That's kind of where we go to if a client needs help with ServiceTitan, because they're like, what— they always want to know, what do your other clients do? They always ask that question. But there's so many answers to that because it could be, what do your clients do in ServiceTitan versus, well, what do your clients do on outbound calls? Like, how do you— what's their script? They always want to know.

Sure.

And there's a lot of things we won't share because of privacy, you know.

Right.

But we give general ideas of this is What we've seen most, uh, that's been very, uh, the best results, I guess, for like outbound calls. Someone will say, I want you to call a lead and call them 5 times in 1 day. That's not exactly the best way that our service works, but if you had someone in office that would do it, I mean, that might be better. Uh, we haven't seen good results when we've done that, because again, we've said yes to those years ago and done things like that.

Um, and Yeah.

So it's constant, just trying to figure out what works best for our clients. We want to help deliver results, uh, as well, but also set expectations. So there's a fine balance there.

Well, I'm going to put you on the spot a little bit, right? And I don't want you to get in trouble with any privacy things, but what are some best practices that you can share as far as some things that, that you and the Jills have learned over the years as far as Maybe just a snippet of an outbound script or that cadence of how many times do you call a lead back and how often before it converts, things like that. Do you have anything just right off the top of your head you can think of?

Yeah. Well, specifically with outbound calls, um, our clients who have had the best results have done 3 attempts and they haven't been necessarily one right after the other. Um, it has been a consistent, like, Check in one day, check in the next day. Um, that has worked the best for Jill's to help you with outbound because again, outside in your office it might be a little bit different, but for us, our clients are for the most part pretty active when they get leads, right? So if we make an outbound call and you say you want us to call 2 times in one day, our clients tend to jump in and start to do stuff at the same time. So we have been, we have had a lot of times where we've made multiple calls.

Mm-hmm.

And the owner is also making multiple calls and we're crossing over, you know, our clients are being billed for our time and the lack of communication there. So, um, so that's one of the things, but now that I mention it, um, being able to let go of the things that you ask us to do for you, just let those things go and let us do them.

Yeah.

Um, because when you hop back in, it has caused a little bit of like, I guess confusion with customers, your customers, and we don't wanna do that. We wanna, you know, just make it sound like we're a part of your company. Yeah. I can't think of any other ones off the top of my head.

Yeah, that's, it's a, it's a little tricky as far as outbound scripts go. Um, as far, and as far as that cadence goes, other than outbound calls, do you guys do anything else? Do you send text messages, direct to voicemails? Uh, what about web forms, things like that? Or, Is, uh, are there any other ways that you communicate with clients that you've found successful?

Yeah, I mean, we have live chat, so we do have a chat widget that you can use on your website and that will connect anyone chatting on your website to a live Jill. And so they can do the same thing on a call as they do on chat. Um, we do have texting, but you have to use, I mean, you can't forward your text messages to your Jill's Office account. So your Jill's Office account has a phone number that you can provide as a texting number. And that texting goes back and forth with Jill's. Uh, so that's kind of how, how that works. We do have, I mean, we use AI at Jill's office because we're not against AI, obviously, but we, we specialize in human answering, right?

Mm-hmm.

We wanna bring the human connection to the trades and to, you know, going into someone's home and after-hours emergencies, like building trust, um, between our clients and their customers is like our priority. Um, with that being said, a lot of our clients use AI cuz AI is fast and it can answer, and then we are there if they need to speak to a live person. And so we're actually working on that this year in programming, um, an AI option for our clients that want AI to answer first when there is higher call volume. Um, like if a Jill is not available, cuz there's only so many humans to go around. So, sure. Um, AI can answer and do some basic answering. Of questions and some really easy things. And if somebody just wants a human or is going through something, an emergency, it can then forward to a Jill. And so those are the different features. We have different plans as well because we realized that our clients that do after-hours emergencies needed some kind of assistance where it, when it came to dispatching, right? And so what we do have is like a dispatching assistance feature. We can schedule for your online tech Or your online, your on-call technician, and our automations will alert that technician multiple times. Like they have to respond to accept it in order to, for the automations to stop.

Yeah.

So the clients that we have created this for, they talked to us, they were worried that no one would answer or show up to these jobs. And so they really wanted all of these notifications and escalation to happen. Um, to ensure that somebody showed up for that emergency. And so that's what we have built out right now.

So some of your customers have a combination of AI voice, internal answering humans. Weird calling us humans. I think that that's something that's kind of new, right?

Been so much till this last year. Say it all the time.

Yeah, people, right? So you have an internal team, you have Jill's as an external live answering team. And AI answering inbound and sending outbound, man, that takes a lot of organization to make sure that paths don't cross and that the routing is all good for that, right? You do work with AI voice companies as far as that goes, or you do your own? How's that kind of work with, with that?

We have clients that use, um, AI, and I don't know what companies they use. I have noticed a lot of It's very easy to start a company and say that you have AI agents, right?

Mm-hmm.

So we have seen a lot of, um, people calling in wanting to know the difference between us and like their buddy's AI service that they started. And so, you know, we, we go over that a little bit, but AI definitely has a great place, especially in home services and the trades. I mean, it can take so much off your plate and it can answer phones instantly. You know, everybody names their AI agents and, I feel like, um, well, the trends that we have seen currently are people just so grateful that they got a human and not AI. The other side of that is sometimes people just assume it's AI.

Oh, really? You're getting the assumption that it's AI? That's interesting.

Yeah, and I've pulled recordings where callers, you know, our Jills answer and the caller just talks really fast over the AI monotone because there's no emotion. They don't care. They're just like, my name is Chris, call me back. Here's my number. And then the Jill has to say, hold on, hold on. I'm, I'm real. I'm a human. And the conversation after that is actually really amazing 'cause they, you know, they're surprised, they're excited.

Totally.

And that all trickles back to your company and your brand's reputation. It's just, how do you make people remember you, right?

Right.

The thing with the, I feel like with AI right now, I use AI every single day inside of the trades where, you know, if I was looking for a plumbing company or, you know, my AC went out, um, if I don't already have a guy, I'm searching for one, right? And the battle for, you know, in-home services is you're trying to stand out and be different. Like, we're all fighting to have a space. And with a lot of companies adopting AI answering, I feel like it is creating a lot of that sameness among everybody, right? So, how do you be unique?

Yeah.

And how do you create trust faster? Because client customers are not stupid. I think, Last year, I saw a lot of people really angry about AI. I still see that more, but it's obviously, it's going to become more accepted. But people were really angry when they felt like they were duped into thinking something was real when in reality it was AI. So, we can't trick people. People are smart. Customers have unlimited resources to find information about your company. And so, the best way to create trust is to, you know, Like to have a human just empathizing when you're in any type of situation and then going through and delivering your amazing service that you're promising them as well. Um, and then even after that, right, there's relationship after that. You want referrals, you want reviews, you know, things like that. So.

Yeah, it seems like you want a balance of all of these different tools. There's just so many different ways to communicate and get leads and call leads back. It's wild. What happened to, When you started a business back in the day and it was simple, all you had to do is answer the phone and maybe answer an email here and there.

Like, I know, as we're talking about it, I'm thinking like, why would anybody want to own a business? It's so much work.

Well, they need help from, from some Jills, right? They do. So not everyone, I'm sure not everyone in your company's name is Jill, but that is, that is—

We don't even have a single Jill. No Jill. I mean, in the time I've been at Jill's, No, no, the, when, when Jill's was created, they were looking for a name that was very, a name that was very, uh, common and like, I don't know, felt very receptionist type names. And so you'll notice like other, other call answering services, some of them are names. And so it's always been Jill's, but it's a great conversation starter. Uh, when I go to shows, people always come up and the, one of the first questions is like, who's Jill?

Mm-hmm.

And so I just say, we're all Jill. 'Cause it's creepy. And that's my answer.

Yeah, that's— yeah, everyone's Jill. No Jill's and everyone's Jill. So if somebody wanted to learn more about your services or had any specific questions, what would be the best way to get ahold of you?

jillsoffice.com. It's great because you can see some videos about how we answer calls for some other clients, some actual recordings and demo calls. Um, there is a button there to book a discovery call, which I highly recommend because like I said, our sales team, my sales team is really trying to understand where you're at in business, where any gaps are and where we could fill those gaps for you and try to help you get to whatever the next level is that you're trying to get to and just kind of break through some of those barriers. So the discovery call is very helpful in just understanding where you're at, but also what Jill's can, can do. So setting expectations and seeing if we're a good fit.

Yeah, that's great. That's really helpful. So, I mean, it's not always going to be a good fit or might not be a good fit right now, especially making a transition right in the middle of the summer, but it'll at least give a contractor a roadmap of what they can do and what they can start thinking about. That's nice.

Yeah. And I mean, to give a reality check on like how the process is, Obviously, anything new you're starting up in business, especially in your busy season, is hard. It's hard even to answer your phone when you're in busy season. Just looking at a phone ringing, your brain is like, oh my gosh, I have a million things, I don't have time for this, right? And so we do try to make that process smooth and as fast as possible because a lot of our clients are in some kind of— usually in some kind of, um, situation where they need help fast. And then we have some really proactive ones that are like, in 3 months I'm gonna need you, right? Um, but it's sign up and you fill out your call instructions. And this is where clients can drag their feet. They have to fill out their instruct— what they want us to do on their calls. Um, but we're really good at staying on top of it, and we usually have a turnaround time of like 48 hours, and you can start forwarding your calls. Perfect. Yep. So if somebody's—

if you're getting crushed right now, you can have Jill's in 48 hours. Okay.

And if you want it, don't make us do everything because there's no way for you to put it all in, in everything in 48 hours. But I mean, we can, we can help so much in such a short amount of time.

So perfect. What I'm going to do is I'll send out a link to your website and where you can book that call. I'll send it in the replay email for everybody. If you guys have any questions or comments that you want to send over later, you can respond to the email and I'll be happy to answer that for you, or shoot it over to Nicole or one of her Jills to take care of it. But it was great. Thanks for joining me today and enjoy the busy season. Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Nicole.

Thanks for listening to the Home Service Hacks 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 at ServiceTitan Hacks or visit our website at servicetitanhacks.com. We'll see you next time.