The Missed Call Crisis Destroying HVAC Contractor Profits

Hey, what's up everybody? This is Bill, your Service Titan Hacker. It's Tuesday at 2 o'clock Eastern. Thanks for joining me and Brittany and Quinn on this fireside chat. So we're going to talk about something today that is obviously goes on in every HVAC business this time of year, and that's the phones ringing off the hook. You know, lots of missed calls. Your CSR team getting overwhelmed, upset, maybe quitting, customers expecting immediate responses. You have leads coming from everywhere, and office teams are kind of, you know, can get really burned out, especially the contrast between the shoulder season and jumping on the fast-moving train that is the summer. So I think you guys have heard the word AI a million times. And, um, we're going to talk about it again today. It's one of the biggest topics in the industry, probably in any industry, and I think a lot of contractors are still trying to find out what's real, what's hype, um, and how it actually will fit inside your business. So we're not going to do any software demos today or anything. I'm gonna have a conversation with Brittany about her experience at Action Furnace up in Canada. Action Furnace is an HVAC company that's been around since the '70s, and they have 230 technicians now.

230 employees.

Yeah, yeah, 230 employees. Okay. And so Brittany's been there for a good amount of time working everywhere in the, in the business. And, uh, also have Quinn here with Revvin who has been helping, uh, Brittany's company out. So I'd like to thank you guys for joining me on the call today.

Of course. Thanks for having us.

Fantastic. So I'm going to start with you, Brittany. Can you tell me a little bit about Action Furnace and your role there?

Yeah. So like you mentioned, Action Furnace was started in 1975. It had one duct truck, one salesperson. Those were our owners today. So really just two guys building a business from the ground up. Action Furnace is Alberta's largest residential HVAC company. So we span across 3 markets. We're $50 million a year, $50 million a year in revenue. We have 35,000 memberships and like you mentioned, 230 employees. So I started at Action Furnace in 2010, so 15 years ago. And yeah, worn really every hat in the HVAC business you can wear. I started as a sales and install coordinator. I was the office manager. I was the director of field operations for service and maintenance, and now I am the director of office operations. So throughout my entire career at Action Furnace, I have always managed the call center as well as all the lead inbound opportunities.

I see. You've probably seen a lot of growth in 15 years and a lot of changes. Yeah, as far as how people reach out to your company, all the different lead channels that have came up over the last 15 years. I mean, gosh, there's an infinite amount. Was it like if you guys do Angie's or when it was HomeAdvisor, maybe it was even ServiceMagic back then. I don't know. But it's wild keeping up with all those changes. It's got to be kind of overwhelming for you and the team.

Yeah.

So what kind of operational challenges did you experience before implementing some AI solutions in the company?

Yeah, so I think the thing is, back in the day, HVAC world was sort of phone calls, and that was just the game. But I think the way that customers are contacting a service business today, it's changing. We kind of say here, it's not just a call center anymore, it's a contact center. So customers are expecting instant responses. Our CSRs are busy on the phones. We had major delays responding to all of our other lead opportunities. And, you know, we were spending all of this money generating all of this business and then just sort of letting it leak out the bottom.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sure that most companies experience that, um, even still today, even, uh, applying new solutions, you know. Um, what lead channels would you say are the toughest ones to keep up on?

The toughest ones to keep up on. I mean, most companies I think are good on the phones. You run your business around regular business hours on the phones, so you're good there, but you don't realize all of the other things are falling through. So I would say, you know, web form submissions, chat, if you have a SchedulePro or a scheduler on your schedule, on your website, all of those, if you're not responding to those automatically, you're probably losing out on that business. And so that's sort of the problem that we had was instant responses and letting those jobs go to our competitors.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I've, I remember like testing out a HomeAdvisor ad, like filling it out and, you know, sorry other contractors, I'm sure you lost $25 me doing it, but I was wondering who would call back and how fast they would call back. And this was pre-AI auto response and everything. And I I had one out of the five call back right away, and the other ones, nobody ever called, never called back at all. And I was like, wow, they're just burning money doing that. But it's, uh, you know, you get a little notification on your phone or, uh, on the app, or maybe just an email, and trying to manage all that is just, it's just a mess, right? Is there any channels that you feel like you've really made some some big traction on since you've started to do these speed to lead type of initiatives?

Honestly, all of our channels have improved. We have everything flowing right through Revvin now. So there's just one platform. So just automatic responses. We have the AI SMS turned on and it's responding to all of those. And even just our missed phone calls as well during the day with our AI voice, we're just answering those phone calls that we never would have before and getting revenue off of those jobs.

Yeah, and Brittany, on that note, I know there's an exciting change recently. We're able to move your Google Keyword office hours, so now 24/7. So now you're really able to incentivize folks to reach out anytime, 24/7, 365. And so a lot more inbound is coming from that as well.

Yeah, exactly.

That's, that's awesome. So you can see it all in one place and see that the activity of, um, the AI reaching out and fielding these calls and questions. Do you, do you find that, uh, your customers respond better to text with the AI, to text back and forth, or voice, or you haven't really noticed a difference yet?

Haven't really noticed a difference. Um, I think both are equally as good.

Okay, so how many, how many CSRs, uh, do you guys have in the, in in your, uh, on staff?

We have 12.

Okay, so that's a good amount. Um, do they, do they work remotely or are they all in, in the office?

They're mostly all in the office now. Um, some— we used to be all remote, but we kind of moved everybody back to the office now.

Okay. And then how did they, how do they feel when you told them we're gonna do this? I mean, you know how it is, it's like we're bringing in a robot to do a piece of your job. Was there any pushback from that?

On that?

Well, we started using AI, I think, about 2 years ago with our chat. So we rolled it out really slowly. We made sure that our CSRs didn't think that AI was going to essentially replace them. It was really just a tool to help them do their jobs better. So we thought about how we were going to roll it out. We rolled it out slowly. And then I think now they just see that it's a tool and a benefit to help them do their jobs better. So Yeah, there's really been no issues with our staff and AI.

That's good. So I mean, you think it must— it's probably a cultural thing that if you have happy people, they're not going to be as worried about AI coming in and taking their jobs. But if you have a bad culture, then it could be worse. I mean, Quinn, if you've— not to skip over you, Brittany, but you guys obviously have a good culture. When you're talking to these companies, what do you see when there's pushback on AI? Is it usually because it's just kind of like not a great place to work?

Yeah, there's a couple of things to keep in mind here. First off, everyone, I'm Quinn from Revan. I'm the CEO here, and thanks to Bill for having us. We're big fans of this community and really excited to be here. Thanks for letting us share our story and share Brittany's story at Action. And so in terms of the teams that we work with, it really does come down to that culture, but also the narrative when you're bringing in a new solution, right? If you just on day one, just out of nowhere, tell your entire team, hey, here's this new software that we're now using, get used to it. Folks are usually gonna be a little jarred and a little scared. But if you put the team in through the process as you're just even vetting that software, get them comfortable, set up some coaching and training sessions, the team really quickly starts to see, wow, this is an accelerant to my job. I can now do more every single day. Everything from your inbound call center team to your inside sales team, you're now able to close more estimates. And so it's really, it's give your team superpowers if you narrate it properly. And I'm happy to like dig more into some of the ways to do that later on in the session. But then the last piece here is just the systems and processes you have in place. And Bill, you and I have talked about this, but the teams that already have a good foundation a good call center, good leadership, and a good process, good scripting, those are the ones that get the most out of AI. Because at the end of the day, these agents are employees. And if you have a bad culture, a bad system, if you bring on a new employee, regardless if it's automated or a live human, they're probably not gonna perform very well because there's no foundation there. And so, and I'm happy to dig more into that as well, but that's a really important piece for teams to think through.

Yeah, you can't automate a bad process. It just speeds up bad outputs over and over, right? So like, exactly, Brittany, you were telling me that you guys have a really in-depth CSR training program so everybody knows what it is they have to do. Um, why— when did you guys start doing that, like really bumping that up?

Um, we've had it for quite a while. We actually just shortened it. Um, but yeah, we've been really investing in our people for a really long time. Couple years, I would say we've been really focused on our call center because we know that that's the number one place that your leads are coming from. And if you're not solid on your call center or responding to your leads, then that's just lost revenue.

I feel like the call center has always got the short end of the stick on, uh, in, in home service companies, right? Like, you have to have, uh You have to have technicians. They're difficult to find. They have to be good communicators in the residential space. They have to be, so they have to be good at sales, they have to be good at their technical skills. We put a lot of time and money into training them. And then the same thing with salespeople, the same thing with installers, just on the HVAC side. And then with the call center, man, I did this myself. So I'm not sure if everyone else has had this problem, but, you bring in a CSR who's answered phones somewhere else and you go, well, how hard could it be to answer phones? Just, just answer it, right? You just, when it rings, you pick it up and whatever. And it's not that easy. It's a, it's, there's definitely a skill to it. So, uh, I made it pretty difficult to be successful in that department in my company. So I don't know if any of the other listeners have experienced that before, but That's what happened, happened with me. So do you, do you see that in other companies as well? Quinn, I know Brittany, you've got yours, but do you see that where the call center is not, you know, cared for as much as the other departments?

I mean, I think there's definitely occasionally somewhat of a stigma around the call center. I think for many reasons there's just high attrition, right? It's a tough job. CSRs have a very tough job, and I think occasionally they might not get the same level of attention and maybe respect as the technician staff does. And I think because there's that air of, okay, well, my team's going to be in and out pretty quickly, there's not as much of this focus on training. And that's why I think that Brittany and the action team just do such a fantastic job here. Brittany, I think it's a 6-week-long program, which is like amazing in terms of the, the amount of care. And again, if you meet the rest of the team, Ryan and the other leadership, I mean, just the level of empathy and focus and just, they have a very, very amazing ownership team at Action. And so I think an interesting insight that we found over the last year of Revn, especially in the HVAC, plumbing, electrical side, is the teams that produce the best and get the most out of automation and get the most out of tools like Revn are the ones where you go and talk to their call center, you walk through the room, you start meeting folks that have been there for 5 years, 6 years, 10 years, team members who've been there from the very beginning of the business started. And there's a very different nuance when you meet teams who are struggling a little bit more and you meet their call center, everyone's brand new in the last 6 months. And so my de facto advice here is, yeah, focusing on that retention of your human staff. Well, and it's somewhat ironic, actually help you get more out of AI tools over the next couple of years as you partner with companies like Revan.

Yeah, that makes sense. You know, we were, yeah, we were talking about that on the prep call, that a good team, AI will be more successful with a good team and well-trained, well-trained team. So, um, so what do you see, Quinn, that, uh, contractors are struggling with the most operationally right now? What do you see?

I mean, especially as we're going into summer season, it's just prep and getting ready for another extremely competitive season, um, as the inbound volume and the phones really start ringing. And Brittany and I were talking about this right before this call. I mean, the average— let's say the average ticket price for most folks on this call is $4,000 per job. That means every single time your phone rings, that's $4,000. That's waiting to get picked up. And I think operationally, the number one question teams are asking is, okay, where do we focus? Are we going on a big hiring sprint right now to beef up our call center? But now you have this thrash. Okay, we're gonna bring on all these employees, we're gonna train them, but then are we gonna have to let them go once our volume decreases coming out of the summer into shoulder season? And that's tough, right? Even just for culture and morale. And so it's really that question of, okay, how do we match that demand without that thrash internally? And of course, that's where tools like Revn, this is why we built companies This is why we built our product, was to give operators and contractors and teams the ability to grow revenue and scale their business without having to have that thrash. And so operationally, it's definitely the hiring piece, getting ready for summer season, figuring out what their stack is. And we can talk more about this, but I think a lot of folks right now have a bit of paralysis. There's a lot of AI tools in the market, not even just in the call center space, but dispatching to accounting to you name it. And so I think a lot of folks are just scratching their heads going, who do we trust? What is the AI horse we want to back? And there's just a lot of noise. And I know that that can be a little daunting.

I mean, there's also a lot of overpromising and underdelivering, right? And that, I mean, I think that comes from the top. I mean, look at the companies who create the LLMs, right? I mean, weren't we all supposed to be out of a job by now, right? Wasn't there supposed to be AGI by now? So who knows?

We're a little ways away from AGI coming in and fixing your HVAC unit, hopefully.

But yeah, oh yeah, that would be one of the last things, right? One of the last things. So, um, you know, going back to the speed to lead, uh, what kind of, kind of metrics have you seen? Do you get any like baseline metrics of how long it takes for a contractor to respond to specific lead channels, and then what kind of, uh, increase they see when they turn on your AI? As far as how fat— how much faster they reach the customer and, you know, how many more jobs they book, right? I, you know, going back, I remember maybe something in the low 20% range as far as jobs that I booked with, um, with HomeAdvisor. I mean, it varied over the year and by job type, but I don't think we ever got it above like the low 20% range. Yeah. And we didn't respond instantly. So what kind of metrics do you have with that? You see anything, anything, uh, out there?

Yeah, so the sweet spot for, uh, the sweet spot for inbound lead aggregators right now, it's around 45 to 55%. Like, that is the sweet spot. That's when you know, okay, we have the right systems in place. These leads aren't going to some scary inbox that we hope our team is checking on a daily basis. We know we're responding right away. And so, yeah, if you're seeing your, your booking rate around 45 to 55%, like, you're in a good spot. Um, I think the really important thing here is this mindset shift of speed to lead to what we like to call speed the truck on site. We're in such a competitive market here that you're seeing folks that are booking multiple appointments and they're just saying whoever is showing up first wins. Oh, I hate it. And so, and so that's just, you have to be ready to move quickly. And so that's not just that first time, right? You you see a lot of teams that will go and say, hey, we have a great response rate, but that response rate doesn't mean anything if it's not that full throughput of actually understanding the job types, booking appropriately, assigning the right technician, dispatching, giving the customer the appropriate estimates in terms of time of arrival, decreasing the amount of nuisance calls that are coming in of customers calling and saying, hey, where's my technician? And so that whole flow is— there's just so many critical pieces that you need to have perfect to hit those booking rates that you want. And so yeah, the speed, the truck on site is so critical. And in terms of products like Revit, I mean, the beauty of using a tool like ours is your response rates are immediate, right? You're responding essentially within a couple milliseconds of that lead coming in. And that's where you're really seeing that big bump. And so traditionally we're seeing customers get around a 20% bump in their booking rates. Once they move on to Revvin, just because of the speed, the accuracy, the quality of the agents, and a lot of this last mile delivery that we do, which I'm happy to talk more about in terms of how we pair each customer with an AI agent versus expecting them to do everything themselves. And so that's where a lot of the overpromising happens in the space that we really try to avoid.

So to make sure that the onboarding between you and the contractor is on point so everything can be customized correctly. Right.

Exactly.

That makes sense. Where do you see contractors having the biggest wins as far as what they're implementing AI in first? Is it the SMS? Is it the voice? Is it overflow? What do you see with that?

Yeah, the best places to start from our recommendation is inbound speed to lead on your lead aggregators, overflow on voice, and then giving that after-hours coverage as well, right? Especially the after-hours piece. I mean, It's just, there's just money's being left on the table if you're not picking up the phone. And I think especially in the demand service, folks aren't going to be waiting around for you to answer their voicemail. They are going to go to a competitor down the street. And so the after-hours and overflow is huge. The speed to lead is huge. But then the real exciting areas in my perspective are helping the inside sales team going after unsold estimates. This is where we see teams like millions and millions and millions of dollars left on the table. And then also your memberships. I mean, look at Action. You have amazing membership program, 35,000+ members. That's a lot of work for your call center team to be reaching out on every single owed service. And so being able to fully put that on autopilot and have an AI tool reach out to those customers, schedule those customers, answer questions, and even start to upsell membership programs during your scheduling flow, It's pretty exciting to optimize that recurring revenue part of your business.

Yeah. Brittany, how did you guys schedule 35,000? That's crazy. That's just so many. How did you do it, uh, pre-AI? That many phone calls, emails, texts?

Yeah, I hate to say it, but, you know, Google Spreadsheets, VLOOKUPs.

Oh my gosh.

You know, manual text messages through platform. Yeah, all manual work. And yeah, keeping track of 35,000 memberships is a lot of work and not wanting to reach out multiple times to the same customers. And we try to visit a house only once a year, but we've got all these different memberships per locations. So of course we want to only reach out to our air conditioning customers during the AC season. So trying to manage all of those different memberships within certain months was a lot of work. But now, yeah, we've automated everything through Revvin. We're doing our SMS, so it reads off of our recurring service event date. So we'll message them when it's necessary. And then even we're working on, and then with that, we send out, we have a Schedule Pro, our scheduler. So we have a scheduler built for those members. So we texting with Revvin and then we send out our scheduler and our members are booking in themselves now.

Oh, that's great. Yeah, so it's completely hands-off. It's just automated. And, and I think a lot of, a lot of customers prefer that. I mean, at least that's how I would like to schedule. Yeah, because I just don't answer the phone.

I just don't.

I'll look and I'll be like, um, I don't know what they want. Nope, decline. But if I get a text, okay, yeah, I can go through and do that. I don't know, maybe it's, maybe it's the, uh, millennial in me that that wants to work that way.

We've found a huge increase in the number of bookings because right before we had that, we were calling all of these customers and nobody would answer. And when our maintenance department was slow, we needed these customers to answer and we were just calling them over and over again. And that's with our CSRs who were trying to do that between responding to all of our inbound leads from our website while answering phone calls. And that just wasn't realistic to be able to do that anymore.

Yeah, so that's probably the way that you start with all of them is to send out those texts and, and that booking link. And then I'm sure some people will call in and things like that.

Yeah, some people, yeah, some people do.

And yeah, but man, that's— how long have you guys been doing that with Revvin as far as that process goes?

About a year or so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you've got some, got a lot of booked appointments under your belt there.

Yeah, yeah. And the really interesting thing, Bill, that we've seen is And this has really all happened over the last 12 to 18 months is this big change of, I mean, before the vast majority of inbound and outbound communication with customers was all over the phone, as Brittany was saying.

Yeah.

And we're seeing this really interesting shift now of customers demanding the ability to speak with businesses in the way that they want to communicate. And so that means whether it's SMS, email, or voice, or a subset of all three. And so we're seeing this really interesting change of before voice may have been 80 to 90% of all your communication with your customers. Now it's starting to almost be a 50/50 split between SMS and voice. And so having that AI voice tool and the AI SMS tool is really, really important. And I think Brittany, this might be a good call out as well. I know before Revn, you had 3 different tools that you were using. To support SMS, your inbound on your website, and your voice. And I think this is another operational issue that I see, Bill, with folks just having this hodgepodge of tools that they're running their businesses on. Yeah, really difficult when you're thinking through how do we have that unified— I think a lot of operators today are thinking about this, an elegant customer experience where, yeah, who somebody is, it can be personalized. And every time they come back, we're not saying, hey, what's your name, what's your address? We know, hey Bill, great to see you again. Yeah, it's really hard to do that if you have 3, 4, 5 different tools. And so having one that you can centralize everything in is just so critical.

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, definitely when I think when everybody— when companies first moved to ServiceTitan, that was the goal, is to have all of those tools kind of in one, in one place, bring all those leads in one place, bring all the phone calls, everything into one place. But it never quite 100% worked out that way. But the AI companies such as yourself are starting to really make it a lot easier to do business. And I think that, I mean, that's a very recent thing just in the last few years, right? Yeah. One of the things that you mentioned is lead follow-up. Can you kind of tell me a little bit about how that works? That was something that we struggled with a lot, especially with service technicians, because service tech technicians did a lot higher volume of calls than sales did. And getting service technicians to follow up, I just, I mean, that, that was very difficult to do. Getting salespeople to follow up, not as difficult to do. So how do you guys, how do you guys do that?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the, the best example I like to use is everyone listening, and Brittany and Bill, think about how many text messages, phone calls, and emails that you haven't responded to today alone. Right? This is a lot. People get distracted. Your customers are getting distracted. And so staying top of mind is so critical, and it usually takes 5 times more touch points than you might think it does to stay top of mind, regardless of what type of product you're actually trying to sell. And so having that ability to give your team superpowers and just more leverage to follow up in a personalized way is really the, the the best way to actually move these opportunities through your funnel, close invoices, or even, even for those basic leads that are coming in from your aggregators. I mean, you're spending money on them. Let's say it's $35 to $50 on average. Well, you should be running some form of a win-back process on those opportunities that you didn't convert. And yes, if somebody had a serious HVAC or plumbing issue, yeah, there's a chance that within 2 weeks they most likely went with a competitor if they didn't go with you. But there's still some interesting opportunities for a replacement or an upsell to a membership if you can really get them interested and excited. And so yeah, that's the follow-up piece. I can't recommend it enough. Of course I'm biased in terms of how we do it, but yeah, the follow-up on both those inbound leads on your unsold estimates, following up with your members, following up on customers who showed interest in being upsold into a membership program. All of those are just ways to increase your revenue. On an annual basis. So yeah, I can't speak highly enough in terms of the lifts that we see with customers who just, yeah, follow up 5, 6, 7 times with customers because you're just staying top of mind.

On the unsold estimate side, can you give me like an example of what that would look like? So let's say, you know, technician goes out, something simple, they replace a capacitor on a, on an air conditioner, but there's another quote given that the customer decides not to do right now. They don't say no, they said we'll think about it, you know, you'll get that. And the technician just goes on his way. What happens with that unsold estimate from there? What, what do you guys do with that?

Yeah, so we read that directly from ServiceTitan through our partnership integration, and then we're following up with that customer. So it's fully personalized, we're putting their name in that message, whether it's over the phone or over SMS or email. And we're explaining what that job was. We're explaining what this invoice is about and then asking if they have any questions. And this is where we, this is where really Rev shines a little bit. And I don't want to get too salesy, but what's special about us is we have our AI engineering team who will work hand in hand with each customer. And so the question that we always ask is, hey, what does your team currently do today? What's working? Do you find success? Exactly. What do you find success when you're offering a discount in that first follow-up? Or do you want to hold back and just say, hey, do you have any questions? I know this is a big decision. This might be a— yeah, it depends on the job. Might be a $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $10,000 opportunity for the business. So hey, any questions? Would a discount be interesting for you? Are you looking at competitive offers? If so, what are you optimizing for? And so just asking those questions, I mean, it's just—

it's very—

be very human, right? You just ask these questions for homeowners who are thinking through this decision. And then when a customer does respond or a certain point of the conversation hits, then you pull in your inside sales rep. And so the analogy I like to use for any football fans here, it's instead of your team members, especially your inside sales team, having to run the ball all the way down the field of texting customers and trying to get them on the phone and trying to get them to respond, you're instead teeing them up and they're on the 1-yard line just scoring touchdowns every day because now they have these customers who are like, yes, I would like to move forward. Thank you for following. But that's usually the response we get. Thank you for following.

Right.

Yeah, I forgot about this, or I think the— I think I— it went to my spam inbox, my email. Could you send the— could you send the estimate again?

Yeah.

And then you can jump on those opportunities and close them. But if you're not following up, you never know.

So Brittany, your team's kind of waiting for that, those responses from the customers for those unsold estimates, and then kind of take it from there? Or does the AI handle the whole thing? To me, that seems like it could get pretty complicated and very specific at that point, but at least reaching out with some level of customization. How's that, how's that work, uh, once the customer's interested?

Once the customer is interested, yeah. So like Quinn had said, um, I say there's an unsold estimate and then they automatically follow up, automated through their SMS, and then the AI can actually just take it over and book the system, book the job right in there for you as well.

Man, that's awesome.

Yeah, and we're doing that for not just our unsold estimates, but even just like our schedule on our website, any abandoned or dropped off. Yeah, there is that, you know, put their information in, then they decide not to book. We're also using that as well. So automatically they'll get an SMS text saying, you know, we noticed that you were looking to book X job, you fell off on our schedule, are you interested in it? And then say they don't respond, we message back again and Yeah, like Quinn said, it takes a couple times for a customer to even get back to you, but most of the time—

yeah, so depends on how urgent it is, you know. And some of the— I bet those, those unsold estimates are not— are usually not super urgent, or they would have sold them while they were there. But, um, and I couldn't imagine how difficult it would have been or would be in your company to follow up with all of those, because each membership visit generates a couple of unsold estimates, right? So geez, that would be— that'd be wild. I mean, my small company was hard to keep up with that, but, um, that's got to be— what kind of, what kind of, uh, close rate do you see on those now? Do you guys have those metrics?

Um, not those specifically yet. Um, that's something kind of newer that we just started doing. Yeah, but like Quinn had said, we see the metrics on just all of our other lead inbound opportunities, which weren't metrics we were able to even track for. Yeah, so we're starting to track that.

Yeah, and Bill, I'm happy to answer that. So right now for unsold estimates, we're seeing teams convert anywhere from 10% to upwards of 25% of those estimates that were just sitting idle. And so, I mean, every, every day we're taking customers live who, depending on the size of the business, have anywhere from $1 million to $10, $20, $30 million for some of the larger businesses that we work with of unsold estimates that are just sitting there. And yeah, we're seeing customers convert 10% plus pretty much right away. And some of the biggest success stories are, yeah, in the 25% plus category. And so, I mean, that's a game changer for certain businesses.

I mean, that's big time anyway. You wouldn't have got those— sorry to cut you off, but you wouldn't have got those in the first place. I can't tell you, gosh, it's a very small amount of customers who would actually call back um, after you just sent them an estimate and left with no follow-up, just an email auto-sent from ServiceTitan, nothing customized, just here's your estimate. Very, very low amount of people who would reach back out if you didn't, if you weren't proactive. So that 10 to 25%, that's, that's, those are leads you've already paid for. And man, the labor you've already put into it, I mean, those are the That sounds like some, some really low-hanging fruit there to grab that money.

Yeah, we had a customer last week who asked us to turn off the unsold estimate workflow because their schedule had now been too booked out. Um, and the inside sales team was like, we need, we need to, we need to pause just to catch up on the amount of business that we've now, now drummed up through Revvin. And so, yeah, I mean, for anyone listening, again, of course, take a look at Revvin, but there's other tools out there as well. Again, I want to be as unbiased as I can be here. But just following up on those unsold estimates is one of the most surefire ways you can increase revenue this month and this quarter.

Maybe you just put a filter on which follow-ups go out based upon who, what jobs you can do at that time or which ones you would want to do. The most profitable ones, right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, you can determine and you can set the, like, which specific estimates you want to go out. And if there's multiple estimates on a certain account or on a specific location or phone number, Yeah, you're able to then prioritize, or if you want to mention 2 or 3, you can do that as well. So there's a lot of flexibility in terms of how you reach out. But my general advice is just reach out. Like, don't overthink. Yeah, reach out to those, those opportunities, because if you're not, your customer might— your, your competitor might be, and they're gonna win. So if you're not, somebody else is.

Yep, for sure, 100%. So are there any things that Revvin offers Brittany and her company hasn't turned on yet? Any new features or some things maybe in beta? What's coming down the pipe, man? You're the AI nerd. We got to know this kind of stuff.

Yeah. So a big thing that we're thinking through right now is how do we make our agents even more human? And as you think about what a human rep can do, a human rep is able to simultaneously be on the phone with a customer, send an email, send a text message. And right now, a lot of the tools in the space are very one-dimensional. It's, hey, we pick up the phone. We send a text message, we send an email, and context isn't carried between those three sources. And that's a big issue. And for us, it's improving our product and our agents to be able to, yeah, carry out context across those three different planes of communication and offer that true unified customer experience. Where today, I mean, we are able to, and we have an amazing agent across SMS, email, and voice. And so it's just improving the ability for our agents, just like a human, to remember past conversations, be able to personalize conversations when that customer comes back and remember small things of, hey, if a customer was somewhat interested in a membership program 2 months ago, well, next touchpoint we have them, let's bring that back up and let's try to upsell them again. And so there's just all these opportunities of revenue throughout that customer experience where if you don't have that unified product, if you don't have that unified experience, you're just missing those opportunities and those data points. So that's a huge piece for us. Um, and then, I mean, this— these are little small things, but things that I'm really excited about is one, expanding our agents in the finance department. I know, Brittany, we're spending more time with you and your team on accounts receivable, reaching out to customers to actually pull in that revenue that you are owed. That's another huge, huge critical thing for teams today. And then on earlier in the stack around lead aggregators, this is just generally a piece of advice that I want to give everyone on the call and something we've been thinking about a lot more. So right now, again, speed to lead, you talk to a lot of other AI companies, speed to lead is, oh, lead aggregator sends you an opportunity. Let's say it's from Angie's List. Okay, well, we're going to text them and maybe your call center is going to call them as well. Well, for us, like, we want to hit them with that automated phone call immediately at that point, having this multi-pronged approach versus just sending them a bunch of text messages. And we've seen, we're seeing a lot of success for customers to, yeah, call that customer right away. And if anything, even if they don't respond, at least they're looking at their phone and then they have a text message from you. Okay, okay, I'm going to respond to this. And so really optimizing that speed to truck on-site workflow is a big focus of ours. And improving our membership product, which is just one of the biggest opportunity areas for HVAC, plumbing, electrical businesses today. And then some other fun stuff that I'll share on the next webinar, Bill, but I'll pause there for now.

For the, for the memberships, or is it, um, is it outbound? When you say memberships, are we talking about the scheduling of the actual appointments? Are we talking about the selling of the memberships?

It can be both. Okay, it can be both. So a big opportunity for teams is, let's say you have an inbound opportunity from a lead aggregator, you book that appointment. Well, there's a really great opportunity and touchpoint if you've built that trust to say, hey, by the way, we do have this membership program. And here are some of the benefits. Or if you're sending an ETA text message because the technician is now going to that specific job site, you can then also send the text message saying, hey, by the way, we notice you're not a member. Here are some of the benefits. And either you're getting a discount from that service or hey, if there is anything that might be a larger job from this on-site, you're now going to be able to take advantage of our membership program. And so just putting in those little touchpoints is really, really important. And then yes, the big piece that we're talking about with Brittany is the actual scheduling aspect, right? When you have 35,000 members, all of which let's say have 2 to 4 ODE recurring services, that's a lot of touchpoints. That's a lot of scheduling and rescheduling and cancellations. And so being able to put all of that on autopilot just gives Brittany and the 12 CSRs that they have more breathing room on a day-to-day basis.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's got to be big time for you, Brittany. Yeah, big time for those memberships. With your process for CSR, did you guys— you guys would bring up the membership when the customer first contacted the business, and then the technicians would bring up the membership, and then you'd follow up on the membership. So the customer heard it many times, like pretty much every communication. right? I mean, that's probably how you got to $35,000.

Yeah, we had our CSRs always mentioning on the phone, so planting the seed. We also give our CSRs the same spiff as our technicians in the home selling it. So if they sell it over the phone, they're offered— able to offer like a few discounts, maybe a waived diagnostic fee. But again, like you said, the CSR would mention it, then the technician would mention it.

So, and then now you have the AI mentioning it. So very consistent among all the communication. So you're really giving it the, the best chance to close that membership, right? Then get it to $40,000, right? But now you can handle $40,000, booking $40,000 appointments.

Yeah, that's wild.

So, um, so you were— Quinn, you were talking about accounting, so having an automation for, uh, for reaching out for just, uh, accounts receivable for unpaid invoices. Sending them a link that says, could you please pay us?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just, there's, there's— I think for any— all the businesses we talk to, there's so much low-hanging fruit that operators and contractors and teams aren't going after. And it's to no fault of their own. It's just not easy to run these businesses, and you're already so busy. And because of that, you just have a lot of leakage throughout your— whether it's your lead funnel or your, your, your revenue model of whether it's— yeah, you're not closing enough unsold or unsold estimates, you're not closing enough of actual revenue that is now owed. And so yeah, just all we care about at Revvin— I mean, we, we literally call ourselves Revvin because it's the closest we could get to calling ourselves revenue to— while actually getting a domain and an email address.

Revenue.com, it was, it was too expensive.

Um, no, it was owned by somebody else. I did try though.

Yeah.

And so all we care about is helping teams close more revenue. Um, and the biggest part of that is just following up and just communicating with your customers and getting in front of them. Because if you're not doing it, I promise you your competitors are. And so that's how teams are going to win over the next year.

You know, going back to the lead aggregators, I think we all know about Angie's and Thumbtack What, what other, uh, lead aggregators out there that you guys work with that, that you, um, that your AI can work with?

Yeah, we're seeing folks— I mean, outside of those, you're definitely seeing folks that see pretty decent success with Yelp. But the other bigger ones right now are definitely Facebook and Google LSA. Those, those two, I would say generally— and Brittany, let me, let me know how you think about this— but we're definitely seeing most teams really push hard into those two channels, seeing a lot of really great success, um, especially if you're able to leverage keywords properly on the Google LSA side. But yeah, Brittany, curious if there's any, uh, any top secret new aggregators.

I mean, just speaking on the Google LSA, we've had ours turned off for a long time because we had to have a CSR or somebody on our office staff log in manually to the browser and respond to those manually. So that was a lot of work. We also had it going to our email inquiries inbox, and we found an issue with customers responding and us not actually getting the responses. So we turned that off for a long time. We recently turned it on again, and the number of messages that we are getting, like, it was a lot of missed revenue. And that's all automated now. It actually will Revan will go into our LSA, it'll read the message, and it'll respond to those customers right away.

That's perfect. Yeah, so, so LSA handling that, yeah, that's important. No, no new aggregators out there that are the magic bullet for getting all infinite leads at a low cost, right? Ah, that would be nice. So Brittany, what do you see next, um, with, with, uh, with Action? You guys gonna hire like a business automation specialist, or what, what, like, what, what do you guys have next coming on the horizon?

It's funny that you say that because we actually just hired our business automation specialist and they started, uh, last Monday.

Yeah, yeah, that's gonna be an interesting opportunity for them. So they just, uh, what department are they starting in? Like, all of them?

Yeah, all of them. Action is extremely excited for this person to start because we just see the benefit of automating every department in the business. So they're sort of sitting with the call center. I think, you know, we've kind of nailed a lot of our processes in the automation. There's still a few that are— that can probably be done, but it's just all of the departments in the entire business. Like, even we've discussed moving on to the AR, um, and just collecting— you know, for us it's $10 million a year in recurring revenue, and That's a lot of times we need to reach out to a customer. So being able to automate some things like that, and I think this person will, will work heavily with Revan to be able to implement all the automations across all the business.

So, and we're really excited.

Yeah, you guys will work with that person a lot, right?

Yeah, yeah, we're really excited about that because again, at the end of the day, we find that our best customers are the ones that hold us accountable. And I think as teams, and we're definitely seeing this this, this role starting to be a, a new addition to most teams that we work with. The teams are hiring for it, thinking about hiring, or have somebody who started in the last— it's like very new, in the last really 60 days. And we're really excited about it because it means that there's an amazing internal thought partner that we can work with, we can get direct immediate feedback on, we can spend time with and go, hey, okay, we have these 10 core workflows we're working on right now that are contributing millions and millions of dollars to your business, what's next? What's the 11th? What's the 12th workflow going to be? And it also just holds us accountable, which means that we're now going to be building better products. We're going to be getting direct feedback. And so it's another thing that teams can start thinking through is, yeah, who is our AI partner internally and externally to get most out of these tools? So I think it's so smart that the Action Team has done this.

Yeah, we have all the ideas. We can come up with all the ideas and know how we want to automate these workflows, but to get it from an idea to actually working isn't really our strong suit.

So, right, yeah, that, that'll be great to see how, how that, um, how that plays out for you guys. I'm sure it'll, I'm sure it'll, uh, it's just a matter about, or matter of prioritizing which thing gets automated first. There's probably so many, you know. I had, uh, gosh, I remember I saw this email or this memory come up in Facebook the other day I had 130 automations, 130 Zaps that automated 15,000 tasks per week back in my business. And wow, it was, it was great. They were helpful. Of course, when they broke, uh, that was not so fun. I was the IT guy for the company. But those kind of automations were, were great to have, but they didn't have any intelligence to them, right? They were just if this, then that kind of thing. So, um, what you can add with, with Revvin and with that, that person on staff would be pretty incredible. So I'm interested to see how that plays out. I'll reach out to you and see what kind of awesome things you guys are doing. So, um, we're, uh, coming up on time here. Do we have any questions for Brittany or Quinn here? Any questions for those that are on the chat today, or on the call today. You guys might have answered all of the questions, all the questions, right? So cool. I don't see anything. Um, is there anything else that you want to go over, Quinn? Anything else?

You know, my end, I'm always happy to talk with teams in terms of how to get the most out of these tools today, irregardless if you're using Revit or not. I mean, Bill is awesome and we're happy to support the community however we can. And so feel free to reach out to me anytime. It's just Quinn, my first name, at Revan.ai. I'm happy to send out my email also over email to the ecosystem and we can put in the Facebook group, Bill. But yeah, my last kind of parting words is just like, start now because everyone else is, but take it slow and get to know your— look at— you want to look at the AI tools you use as a partner, not as a vendor. You want to choose a team and a tool that you're ready to use for the next 10 years, not for the next 6 months. And so yeah, take your time to vet and find the right partners that are going to be here for the long term, care a lot about the space, and are really going to roll up their sleeves and go deep into how your business is actually using these tools.

Is that the best way to reach out to Revvin is to shoot you an email or should they go on your website? I'll drop a link in the replay and in the email that I send out here. Is that the best way to get a hold of you guys?

Yeah, feel free to shoot me an email, or we can also send out the, our website. And yeah, there's a booking link on there as well. But if anyone has questions directly for me, I'm happy to, to chat. So, uh, yeah, feel free to shoot me an email anytime.

Perfect.

Awesome. Well, thanks for the conversation today. Thanks, Brittany. Thanks, Quinn. I will shoot out a replay once this is done uploading and I do a little bit of editing to it. And, uh, hey, have a great rest of the week.

Thank you, you too.

Thanks everyone, bye.