Why Every Service Business Needs AI Now!

Do you think that a service company could even survive in the future without this tool, could even be profitable and make it.

You can be a sizable company and maybe have two, three, four people behind the scenes that are. You're escalating things up to. AI is taking everything else. You know, I think that's kind of the near future, to be honest. You know, everything else that's. That's coming out, you know, obviously it's just going to be getting better. The integrations are going to continue to get better. The knowledge base behind it and how nimble it's becoming is pretty cool.

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

Welcome back to Service Titan Hacks Podcast. This is the show where we talk about the tools and ideas that help you win in the home service space. I'm your host, Bill Brown, and today we're talking about something that's really changing the game. The growing gap between shops that use AI and those that are still doing everything by hand. Our guest today is an expert in this stuff. Nate Keller is the chief Sales officer at Free to Grow, and they're a sponsor of our Facebook group. They use AI to help home service companies answer every call and book more jobs 24, 7. And they give the smaller guys the kind of tools that just weren't possible a few years ago and at a price they can afford. So today we're getting into the good, the bad, and the scary parts of using AI. Is this a tool that helps everyone, or will it crush companies that don't keep up? And what does it mean for your business? Nate, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Bill.

Awesome, man. So, first off, can you just tell us about Free to Grow and the main problem that you guys solve for contractors?

Absolutely. Yeah. So Free to Grow. We're coming up to our sixth year in business. My partner Charlie Felger and I started this. We're based in St. Louis, Missouri. We started this. He had a couple small contracting businesses that he was in the middle of selling. I was always in technology on the sales and operations side for large companies. Have worked at Oracle for a number of years and then kind of Made my way to smaller businesses, really like working with smaller businesses because you can see the impact very quickly when you're, when you're getting stuff done and. But I, I, you know, I come from a family of entrepreneurs. I had that edge show. It's like I, I kind of want to do something. And the timing was right that he and I just got together and we started free to grow. And essentially we were a white glove overflow or, or replacement call center with humans.

Right?

We, we had agents started off locally in St. Louis working with basically anybody home service related. So this was, you know, right around Covid all these home service businesses were booming because everybody was at home and they understood they needed to have stuff done and, and they were outside looking at their trees or their house or whatever and, and they started calling these guys and all, all these companies really took off. So our company really kind of did well in that time. So we got up to about 10 agents in the St. Louis area, started working outside of the St. Louis area because obviously we weren't tied to any sort of location and our folks wanted to go remote as we were looking for bigger office space. So we went remote. As we went remote, we also said, hey, this gives us a bigger pool when we do need to hire. Because there were a lot of folks out there that had this type of experience, wanted to be remote, wanted to work at home. And at the time we were also starting to get pretty heavy into the trades. So the plumbing, electrical and H vac world. And there were a lot of candidates out there from that agent side of things that had that type of experience from a CSR side of things. They knew the systems, they knew the service titans and the house call pros and everything else. And it was just a good fit on that side. Fast forward. As we grew, we got up to about 26 agents across the country. We were building out some AI tools. I don't want to say fairly early, kind of early on where our agents, as opposed to having to pull up an SOP or look up in a, you know, or look up in a sheet or something like that to figure out a service area or dispatch fee or something like that, they could just type it in, you know, they could type it into slack. It would draw from a knowledge base, it would give them the right answer and they would be able to kind of solve. Call resolution was trimming down quite a bit. So as we were building out those tools, the developer we were working with, I was asking about AI Voice. AI Voice at the time, this Is going back two and a half, three years ago now. Said it wasn't quite there yet. There's definitely some stuff out there from an answering perspective, but not really robust, but just said, hey, keep your eyes open. After about six months of looking, I actually came across an AI voice company based in San Francisco called Archer. It was developed by a guy named Jerry Yee. UPenn K moved out to San Francisco, started a business. Just a builder of technology, right? He is just, he's just an absolute wiz. But he was doing the marketing, the sales, everything else on his own. So I reached out to him direct. We had a couple of phone calls and we just said, hey, with what you do with your platform, you know, can we start looking at integrations and what that looks like and that sort of thing? And within about, you know, a month or two, we had, we had an agreement in place to essentially merge our two businesses. We have, we acquired his business. He's a partner of ours now. He's our cto. We were kind of going back and forth, is the AI going to be supplemental or is it going to be across the board or what have you? And this is getting to the where it helped our business and how we knew it was going to help others. Every summer, as a human based business, we would grow, we would take on more accounts. We have CSRs that even though they're at home in their pajamas working, they would have a hangout and they can't type, whatever, right? Any excuse under the sun we've heard and people don't show up and all of a sudden we're missing calls and we're not fulfilling what we said we were going to do and we would rightfully get fired. And we just said, you know what, let's put our chips on the table here, let's push them all in and just say, let's go all AI voice across the board at the time, big risk, right? Big, big risk. It was a fringe technology. But with the progressions that we were seeing with the AI between what Jerry was building out, the kind of what we're built on top of and what our team's been capable of, the integration side, we just said, you know what, this, this looks like it might be the future here from that third party call center side of things. So yeah, and from there we just said, you know, we're solving this problem for ourselves. We now have a new business model. We changed from a service business to a technology business in about 90 days. And we went AI voice across the board and really started going after that, that third party call center, you know, where someone calls in after hours or even overflow and they're on hold for, or whatever that might be saying, we can fix this problem, we can get to these customers fast.

That's awesome. I didn't know that you guys came from specifically the call center space and had a bunch of CSRs or agents at the call center and that. What I found when looking at AI companies is they usually have a very technical guy that knows how to interact with an AI, knows how to prompt it, program it really, really good. But what they're missing is that very specific domain knowledge of exactly how to test it and make sure that it meets the expectations of the end user, the customer. And with your guys, call center background, you know exactly what a good call looks like, you know what to say, how to answer questions. And so I'd imagine that with you and Jerry working together, you were able to have this feedback, feedback loop and say, no, let's change this, let's do that. And basically copy the best csr. And I've seen that in other companies.

In a lot of ways, that's exactly what it was. It's like we had, you know, I listened to tens of thousands, I can't even tell you how many live human calls, good, bad and otherwise.

Right.

And it's like, yeah, we know good ones and we can train off that model, right?

Yeah, for sure. And you know, when I first started messing with AI and chatgpt a couple of years ago, it was pretty expensive to, to use, especially in high volume. When did it get cheap enough that we could, that you could bring that technology to home service businesses, even ones that were a little on the smaller side at a reasonable price.

Yeah. So when we, when we first acquired Jerry's company called Archer, and that's the platform that we're built on. So our customers, they have access to this platform where they can see the dashboard and calls coming in, everything like that. As soon as we acquired it, the technology prices started dropping, I would say almost a year ago. We started really contemplating. We're like, okay, what do we, what do we do with our model here? Because, you know, we were, we started off with the old school pricing approach of an allocation of minutes and an overage and everything like that. And let's be honest, nobody likes to, even if they're busy, even if it means they're booking more calls and making money. Dealing with overages sucks. Right. It's just, it really does.

Remember when we had to do that. Are you old enough to remember when we had to do that with cell phones and you had to only do nights and weekends? God, that was such a pain. And then you got a surprise 500 bill, and they said, tough. Yeah, we hate minutes and overages and not to cut you off or whatever, but I know that, like, a lot of contractors don't even know how many minutes they use. That's just like, not. They can. They know how many jobs, but how does that translate to minutes?

They have no idea. Yeah, they have no idea.

Right.

And typically, you know, that model of the pricing on an allocation on a per minute side of it, it's. I don't want to say it's intentionally confusing, but it's. It can get confusing.

Right?

It's. You're like, okay, I paid for this at the beginning of the month, and now I'm paying for, you know, my next allocation. And then my overages are. And it's. A lot of them make their bills.

I think it's really easy to understand how AI can save money by answering the phone.

Right.

Because you're not going to use as much human labor, which is pricey. And so can you give me, like, a real story about how it helped a company make more money? Like, were there any types of jobs or types of calls that they were missing that AI now was able to handle those questions and start booking those jobs?

Yeah, a lot. So a lot of our customers, it's a competitive industry. Everybody knows that.

Right.

There's a new AI voice company that pops up and then goes away the next month.

Right.

It's, there's, there's a lot of them out there. But, you know, a lot of our, A lot of our business still comes from that traditional call center side where those companies are taking messages and passing them on, and hopefully someone's able to get back to them before they call someone else and get it booked or whatever that might be.

Right.

Our system is built out to take that call, qualify that call and book that call.

Right.

It's. It's that, that speed and saying, you know, hey, I'm, I'm Marissa. Some, some of our clients have digital assistant in there, some of them don't. I'm able to answer your questions or get you on the calendar within 90 seconds.

Right.

Knowing that they can, that something's going to come out of that call is productive.

Right.

That customer is going to feel like they're getting taken care of right now. You know, typically when someone calls a call center and, and it's Kind of, you know, it's becoming a lot better with AI, but some still understand that it is AI. But you know, when you call call centers, the same thing happens, right? You're calling after hours and those folks know that something's probably not going to happen with that call. A lot of times a message is getting taken and sent on.

Right.

We want to have our customers onboarded in a manner where we don't have to. We will send messages on for emergency cases, for billing questions, for stuff like that, anything that if someone wants to make a payment, you know, obviously no one wants to give their credit card to AI yet. But at the same time, if someone's calling for their ACs out and it's emergency call and they need to get on right now, hey, we're going to look to make sure there's a technician available. We're going to notify that technician, we're going to put them on the schedule.

That's awesome, man. That's something that just wasn't possible a few years ago. It's awesome. So let's say you get free to grow AI voice set up in your system and you know everything today when it comes to operating a business, we like to put it in a quantitative, you know, we like to measure it by numbers. Right. So what numbers should you be looking for on your CSR dashboard and Service Titan to know that it's actually working? What kind of changes should you expect as an operator?

Yeah, so in, in our dashboard? Well, one, it's going to show up in Service Titan, right. As, as an agent. So Frida girl is going to show up as an agent. You're going to be looking at how it's booking and compared to either your normal agents that are on during the day, it's going to be booking comparable to that. And then from an after hours perspective, we're shooting for that 75 to 85% range. That's where our customers are seeing success. 75 to 85%. You do that over a thousand calls in a month. That's a lot of calls. It's adding.

What do you usually see as far as the range of booking rates from humans?

So third party call centers, I think they, they typically claim to be in that 60% range, but when you really start digging into numbers, they're probably in 50 or less. It's not, it's not high.

Right.

There's a lot of kind of number fudging and you'd have to go through every single one of them on there.

So yeah, so that's a. That's a pretty big significant increase as far as booking those calls go, which we all know as operators, how expensive it is just to get that phone to ring. It's way more expensive than we'd like it to. You know, one of the big concerns with AI is really customer happiness. So you know your caller's happiness, and it's pretty easy to tell if the person on the phone is making a customer mad. That sentiment's pretty, pretty easy. So one of the big important parts of this is customer caller happiness. And it's really easy to tell if a person on the phone is making a customer mad. But how do you know if the AI is doing a good job or frustrating people?

Yeah. So our AI is looking at those calls and we are looking at sentiment in the background and that sort of thing. But the biggest thing we're looking at is completed calls.

Right.

All the way through that it was customer that was recognized, that it was booked or completed or answered or whatever that might be.

Right.

Completed just means that it was taken from start to finish. One of the things that we built out in there too is at any given point in time, we can live transfer calls over to a person. Person.

Right.

Especially in that overflow side of things or whatever that might be.

Right.

Because no matter what, if it's AI or if it's a third party call center, if it's recognized as a third party call center, a lot of times someone's going to say, can't you just transfer me over to a manager? You don't have any information. I need to talk to, I need to talk to someone that knows what they're talking about, whatever that might be.

Right.

So as soon as we build out trigger words in there, if that, if we're hearing these, hey, let's get them over to someone that can, that can, you know, handle this issue.

Sure, sure. That makes sense. So still having that human that can take over so you don't just leave a customer upset and they abandon the call and call someone else, you know?

Right.

So.

And we're transferring as the people that are within the organization.

Right.

We're sure. You know, I don't think there's anything worse than if you take a call and you're transferring that to another call center. It's, you know, you want to give that to someone that actually knows they can fix the issue of whatever it might be, that college calling.

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I talk to a lot of people online and I know a lot of owners want to implement AI, but they're really nervous about it.

Right.

And their fear is obviously the customer service in their organization going down from where it is.

Right.

And so besides the fear of, you know, having an AI sound like a robot, what other fears do you hear from these contractors?

We hear a lot of, hey, I have an older customer base. I don't know how they're going to like this. I can say with 100% certainty, older customers, a lot of times they don't know that it's AI. You know, you do have. Everybody's going to have a customer. No one has 100% happy customers.

Right.

You're going to have a customer that's upset. They're going to call in, whether it's AI or a CSR picking up, that's upset. You know, we do a lot of demo calls with prospects beforehand and I tell them, hey, when you call in, be pissed off.

Right?

Be upset.

Right.

Whatever that is. And, and see how the AI handles it. And it, a lot of times it's handling it better than a human would because it's not getting flustered. As you're responding back with, I understand your frustration, I understand it's, you know, it's hot out right now. Let's get you on the schedule so we can come out and get this taken care of. The emotion isn't there. You know, it is empathetic and that sort of thing, but it's not going to get flustered and get irritated back at that customer.

Right.

Which escalates it. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I called your demo number and the number was, you know, a recreated a real life situation and I tried to throw all kinds of curveballs at the AI. So I cut the AI off and I have a video of it that has a lot of views on YouTube because it was, it was really interesting. So I just said some wild things and asked for pricing and everything just to try to see if I could throw the AI off. This was a few months ago and I wasn't able to. So I mean, I really, I'm going to put a number in this description of this podcast so that other people who have fears and concerns about it can try it. Because that's really the best way to do it is, is to actually call it and try it and listen to what the, what the AI responds with. Right, yeah. So well.

And, and the AI that's built out for that number is a super simple demo.

Right.

When it comes to how we're building these out for our customers, you know, the scripting is one part, and the scripting is something that is obviously very important, but it's that knowledge base.

Right.

When you get into the knowledge base and you're. And you're starting to load it with pages and pages of documentation on a company or if this. Then, you know, if someone calls in and you don't have a soon enough time, book them for the time that you're quoting them and tell them someone's going to call them back if something else opens up. Right. Secure that, that, that appointment. You know, there's a lot of different things that can happen within that knowledge base that really kind of give the nimbleness and the personality of the AI.

Locked in so that the AI. Yeah, the AI is going to need to understand the specifics about that company that a CSR understands.

Right.

Like what are their hours and what is their service fee and things like that and their policies.

Yep.

And even one of the things I was talking to Ben about a while ago with Free to Grow was, man, I really wish that these AIs can go into service titan based upon who's calling and talk about job history and answer some questions from the job history. Because whenever I called, like I called, I remember calling Verizon and it was really annoying when I called them after we just had a conversation and they didn't know anything we previously talked about. So I'd have to start over. And I always liked, and I noticed years ago that these, these CSRs at these companies started to have history and they could see, oh, Mr. Brown, I saw you talk with, with Susan a few days ago and they could continue the conversation. And Ben told me that your AI does that. So you guys can go into ServiceTitan.

Yeah, we can look at job history. So if someone calls in, it's a callback, right?

Yeah.

You know, hey, you guys were just out here. Yep. Mr. Smith, I'm seeing that we were just out there. Is this having to do with, you know, the work that was just done? Yep. You were just out here and things aren't working. Okay, let's get you on the schedule and I'm going to escalate this up to make it a priority.

That's cool. And that probably was not super easy to program as somebody who dabbles into the back end of AI. Man, that must have taken a while. But you guys must have. That's where Jerry comes in, right?

Yeah.

It's always those.

Jerry and Jerry's team, they're great.

It's always those young guys. They are Killing it. When it comes to being able to program and speak with AI, it's. It's crazy how you look at these guys in the tech space and. And I read a lot of. A lot of news articles online, and they're always like kids that know this stuff. It's cr. It's wild, man. It's wild. So, you know, when it comes to setting this technology up in your business, a lot of contractors have a lot of different pieces of software that they set up. Service Titan, because a lot of the listeners in this podcast are going to be on. Service Titan is a mountain of work to set up to onboard, and you're never 100% ready when you onboard. And there's people that have been using Service Titan for years that haven't even been able to take advantage of the features in it that they're paying for.

Right.

And so as an operator, I always think, oh, man, all right, I'm gonna. I love the idea of the technology, but now it's gonna be weeks and weeks and weeks of onboarding, and it's gonna be up to me to do the onboarding really, really well and know the system really well to be able to get my return on investment and everything. So contractors are just really sour to that. So can you talk about your onboarding process and, you know, how is it easier than it normally would be with other software?

It is. We intentionally have worked really hard on onboarding.

Right.

We understand that getting this right, right out of the gate is extremely important. When we do that, we do tell customers, hey, for onboarding, we would like the attention of, you know, the folks that are going to own this within your organization.

Right.

Be it an A manager, whoever that might be, we actually assign them a customer success and an onboarding manager.

Right.

And they're with them throughout the lifetime of the contract. They have someone that's assigned to their account. That person is. Is there to help set everything up, help test, roll it over to the customer to have them test. We're looking at all the test calls, and then as things progress and they go live, we're looking at their calls that are coming in. Yeah, we're doing it with AI, but we're also doing it with humans, making sure that, hey, you know, what's your success rate? What is your booking rate, you know, completed calls, everything along those lines. Great little story about that. One of our customer success, you know, we have a great customer success team, but one of our customer success managers, Jess, is actually a former client of ours. So when we first Transitioned AI. She was our point of contact with, with a company that is still a client of ours. She left to. She was CSR manager role and she went on to another company that was more on the commercial side. I think she was there maybe a few months and she, she reached out to me and said, hey, I'm, you know, I made this move not thrilled with where I am. What are you guys doing? Do you guys have anything? I was like, you know what if we can find someone that has the experience that Jess has and bring them in and she understands the technology and she can get people up and running, but she also understands this role of the CSR and what needs to get done and how service tightening works and all that stuff. And I was like, I told Jerry, I told Charlie, I was like, we need to, we need to make a spot here. And we did. And she's been fantastic. But she's one member of a team, but she's great. I just love the story that we had a former point of contact with a client that wanted to come work for us for sure.

As an owner. Well, former owner sold my business a year ago. You know, you always want to save money, you always want to grow revenue and reduce expenses so you get to keep more money, right? So it's kind of easy for an owner to get buy in on AI, right? On utilizing something like AI voice and then also for GMs who are held to numbers and call center managers. But I feel like, and you would know this better, how do CSRS feel about bringing in AI? Do they feel threatened by it? Where they see these numbers in Service Titan that says this AI has 75% booking rate, I have 50. I'm going to get the ax to this technology, right? How do they, how do they feel about that?

You know what I a question I get a lot, as you can imagine, right? A question that I go through with, you know, people that were onboarding or that were about to, you know, sign up and they say, hey, my, I'm worried about how my folks are going to react to this and everything else. I feel like the good owners know who their A players are and they know where their A players are going to succeed, when the AI is going to be a success, right? They figure out how to let the AI have their humans, human better and do things that are more, more revenue generating, right? We have a, we have a client that's onboarding right now. And this was, this guy was great because you know, the enthusiasm that we get from our clients after the Fact is, always really high. He was very enthusiastic kind of coming into this, which I love. But he, he said he's like, I'm going to be able to have my folks, you know, during peak season take demand calls because he's going to set up the AI to where it's an emergency or where, where it's a replacement or whatever that is. You know, AI is going to book the maintenances, the simple fixes. Anything that comes through with these trigger words, we're going to send on someone that's going to be available and they're going to be able to book that job and do a really good job on it.

Right?

And that's just one way that it's getting set up. And he just, you know, from his side of it too, he's like, I then, you know, when it does come to peak season next year, I don't have to bring on more people, right? I don't have to worry about adding more people.

So yeah, there's an onboarding period when you add people that you're not going to get the number, the KPIs and production out of those people when they first start. And there's also the fantasy of getting someone who's plug and play, which, I mean, come on, how often do you see that, right? Those people are usually well taken care of at the job they're at now. So I definitely see that as part of scaling and I would, that would be my fear a little bit as an owner would be, worst case, are all my CSRs going to see some writing on the wall, get really negative and quit? And then what if the AI doesn't work the way I hoped it to? Now I don't have CSRs and I have this technology that, that isn't working. So I would think that that would be, you know, something that you guys as the tech company have to be able to approach with empathy and understanding, you know, because you're talking about people's jobs here.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's where I tell hey, this is an opportunity to kind of put your arms around your A players, right? And say, this is going to be a tool that's going to make your life easier. It's going to make your job probably a little less stressful, right? The calls that are coming in, you know that they're going to be the calls that truly need human attention and then everything else you can leave to the AI, right? But I also think the folks that are worried out there, and this is probably not the best thing to say but it's like the folks that are worried out there are probably the ones that are getting by.

Yeah. That are just filling a slot because the company is scaling and growing.

Right.

And from what I've seen as my company grew, the A players would rather have AI or an automation do the work of the D players. The D players really bother the A players, Right?

Absolutely.

And so a lot of the things that take away from the A players doing a great job is picking up the slack for the people that don't do well or just dealing with them on the emotional side.

Right.

So I, I could see that the A players would be like, oh, I like this. So now when we scale, I don't have to be the person that onboards all these people who might not even stay or do a good job so they can focus on getting better at their job.

Exactly.

You know, for somebody that just wants to dip their toe in the water with this technology, what would you say is the safest and easiest way to begin using it?

Yeah, most of our customers start off in that, you know, after hours overflow weekend capacity. And then they soon figure out, okay, I can start having this as frontline. They may have like an IVR in place right now. And IVR is really good for filtering out spam calls. But, you know, when you're in, you know, dial 9 to get to the right person and all this other stuff, you can lose people then too, because people are already frustrated. They're not calling you. Typically they're not calling for a good reason anyway. They're calling because there's a problem. AI can take that place of that IVR too, Right. Where it is filtering out that spam. It's taking all calls.

Right.

It's able to schedule the emergency calls, it's able to schedule the maintenances and everything else. They figure out that, okay, this can start taking over the IVR side of it. That happens. We do have customers that come out and they say, hey, I want to go full bore on this. And that's great. Get them up, we get them running. But a lot of it is, you know, they got to feel comfortable with it. They got to see, you know, the after hours call come in or, you know, eliminate their third party call center. That's not booking anything. That sucks. And someone's on, you know, on hold for three minutes and then waiting for another two minutes while someone's, you know, wiping the crusties out of their eyes and trying to figure out what they're.

I've had it happen, man.

What they're doing.

Yeah, it's death, you know, so let's do something really fun, especially in the tech field, which is speculate.

Yeah.

Right.

So five to ten years from now, which, I mean, could we imagine what was. What would happen today, five or 10 years in the past? Probably nothing like it.

Right.

But let's, let's have fun with this and maybe we'll come back to this podcast in 2030, 2035, and go, wow, we were right on point. Or we were way off.

Right.

So, man, do you think that a service company could even survive in the future without this tool, could even be profitable and make it?

No, I don't. I think, yeah, we pick up customers that are big. We pick up customers that are in that medium range and some that are smaller, too. But I think it's, you know, it is about speed to lead. It is about taking care of customers. The AIs. You know, the worst day that the AI is having is right now.

Right, right.

And it's only getting better. You know, I think the model is going to be, you know, people are going to be able to do a lot more with a lot less from the human capital side in regards to, you can have, you can be a sizable company and maybe have two, three, four people behind the scenes that are. You're escalating things up to. And AI is taking everything else. You know, I think that's kind of the near future, to be honest. And then everything else that's coming out, obviously it's just going to be getting better. The integrations are going to continue to get better. And just the knowledge base behind it and how nimble it's becoming is pretty cool.

Yeah, it is. I agree with you that if you don't implement AI and automation in your company, you're going to get beat down and lose the market and probably go out of business. And one of the things I was talking to, I was talking to somebody about it the other day was, let's say that you sell a heating and air conditioning system on average for, for $15,000.

Right.

And with that, your net profit of your company all the way when it flows down is 20%, which is that awesome goal that not a lot of companies achieve. Well, that build into that $15,000 are all of the expenses and inefficiencies that you have in your business. Right. They have to be included in there. The customer pays for everything. So if you were able to scale without having to hire people and use this technology, then essentially you could charge less and keep the same amount of money, which means your conversion rate would be higher.

Right.

So if you're. If you need to get $15,000 today out of a system and you're more expensive if you're right along with your competitor, the big competitors, and if you can drop that down to 14,000, you're going to convert, get more jobs and keep more money than your competitors. So I think it's not just will be a big deal where as companies that don't use this will find that they're not able to be competitive in pricing in the market as well. Yeah, you know, I agree. I don't think that, like right away everybody's going to be super excited to drop their pricing. But you look at it and you, for the most part, pricing does determine what your close rate is. And you know, if you can lower it a little bit, you'll get a little higher of a close rate for the most part. So I think that that'll be something that's coming up too. And you know, you got these big companies using it and the smaller companies today, especially with private equity, are wondering, how am I supposed to compete with these big guys? They have unlimited marketing budgets. They can pay everybody more money than I can pay them. And man, these big guys implementing AI, wow. As a small company, I would really want to get on board with that so that I could keep my costs down as much as I possibly could. You know what I mean?

Yep.

Yeah.

So five to 10 years, it's going to be. It's going to be wild, you know.

Yeah. Five to ten years is. It's almost unimaginable at this point. I hate to say it that way, but yeah, a lot of the things that we're seeing now with how, like just the reactions of the AI, what we've been able to do from that knowledge base side, you know, a lot of it is just, you know, we thought it, you know, we thought it'd be a year out and it was, you know, a few months and it's like it's just moving at warp speed here.

Yeah.

It's crazy. So for a while you did inbound voice only.

Right.

And then there's something that a lot of CSRs do, which is outbound, which, you know, an outbound is normally going to be calling and following up on unsold work. So, yeah, booking the maintenance calls for customers who have a maintenance plan. And really it's a monotonous job for csrs to do that.

Right.

It's just especially some of these companies that have thousands of them and everything. And have you guys been working on the AI Outbound version which is going to, you know, have these, these AI CSRs call and book these overwhelming quantity of calls for some companies?

Yeah, yeah, we have, we have AI Outbound officially being released the end of this month, the end of August. Our capability from doing AI Outbound has been there for a while. It is going to be, you know, it's starting off just for, just for service site and the integration that we have into service site, you know, we had thought about releasing it more towards the beginning of the year. I've said this to a lot of people. I had, I was very bullish on it to begin with and then got, you know, into springtime and you know, being in St. Louis, we had a lot of storms here and I've gotten a lot of AI roofing calls and that sort of thing. And Outbound is definitely a gray area too, right? Because you got to be, you got to be really zeroed in. It has to be your customer base. It has to be, you know, you can't just cold call people because it's, you know, you get into some very gray legal areas too. And that's not a list you want to be on from a spam calling side of things. But you know, limiting to current customers or we'll eventually do sales follow ups too and that sort of thing. But starting off with that maintenance member check in is.

Yes.

Going to be our first, our first one here at the end of the month.

So yeah, those calls are prepaid, so they're usually very easy to convert.

Right, Prepaid, easy to convert. And it's a, it's a very, the outbound can go a bunch of different ways, but it's a, you know, it's a pretty easy script. Hey, we haven't seen you in six months. You know, can we get you on the schedule for two weeks out from now?

Right, yeah. So that's still important technology because these are com. These are customers that you could lose.

Right.

And these are ones that you've had existing relationships with. So they're usually a little bit more patient. But man, you don't want to lose those customers. Those are, that's your, your future sales, your future lifeline, right?

Yep.

So still speculating on the future. What do you think the next big thing in AI to hit our industry will be within the next couple years? Even if it's outside the scope of something that you guys would do?

I think the next big thing is going to be outside the scope of what we're doing because I think there's a lot of stuff that one, we have roadmaps, you know, and kind of rounding out our services, you know, from the inbound side and from the outbound side. And then, you know, the texting, like, we have a lot of stuff that we're kind of putting together here to kind of round out our service offering so we can kind of be more of a complete solution on that side. I think, I think it is going to be outside of what we're doing. I'm just. I'll be honest, Bill, I don't know what it is. Yeah, it's. Yeah, it's. It's so tough to predict. Yeah. When you get that, that far out and then all of a sudden a company pops up and they've been developing something and it's ready to be released and it's here. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it.

What do you think, Bill?

Man, I think that with the tech that you guys have that we're getting to diminishing returns on the call center side.

Right.

I think that we're really starting to cover all of the key points that a CSR does. I think the next step goes more into the field and helps with the technicians be more successful and more comfortable doing their job on the customer communication side. So they have, you know, Ciro and Sales Pro, and then there's also companies like Rilla that are very popular, which are these virtual ride alongs. So it is, you know, it's AI and they're recording calls. I think that taking that a step further, that technicians will be recording, will be prepared from AI based upon the complete history of the customer to be able to continue the conversation when they knock on the door.

Right.

So they're going to get some sort of a pre call AI back and forth. So maybe they'll call in to their own company and talk with the chat bot and say, hey, you're going out to Mrs. Jones's house. She's been a customer for 12 years. This is who's been there before. This is the equipment we've installed. So no searching through Service Titan. It's going to be a call on the way to the customer's house. So they're going to prepare the technicians with some very specific questions for that customer. Make sure that there's questions and things they don't bring up.

Right.

And then they record the conversation that they have with the customer. The AI does it. Then based upon all that information, the specific technical inspection is customized to exactly what is relevant to that job. So right now we have like a maintenance inspection.

Right.

And there's 99 points you hit. Well, not everybody needs all those 99. Maybe this customer needs 45 of them. Well, the AI is going to customize the inspection. It might. The inspection with the technician to the AI also might be a voice conversation where you're just talking about what you're measuring, what you're seeing, and then you could tell. I thought about this a lot. Then we put all of that information together before it's time to make a presentation of solutions for our customer. And the AI looks at the price book and creates the solution options based upon all of the. All of these indicators. And even based upon that specific conversation that the tech just had with the customer, what was found on the technical inspection prepares the options. And for techs that are kind of nervous to talk to customers, especially new guys, you know, the AI can do the presentation and handle objections and close it. Here's the iPad.

Right.

And for the ones that are comfortable with doing a presentation, the AI will prepare them for it and help talk them through and everything like that. And I think one of the great things about something like that would be, as a technician, you would be really confident that the options that you're putting together for customers are very relevant. I mean, I think that a real fear for a technician is trying to sell something to a customer that they believe that they don't need. And I think that AI is going to help with that. So we close the deal at that point, and then the final piece of it is that there'll be a debriefing where the AI tells the technician how they did all the way through the thing, all the way through the process, and says, and that's kind of, from what I've seen what RILLA does. And it's kind of like a coach that said, hey, man, you did a great job talking about this. Your, you know, your tone and your cadence of the conversation was great. You felt confident, and that's why the customer bought. And then the last thing would be, the AI would analyze the whole thing and determine what future opportunities exist in that house. So let's say I had a humidifier as an option in my option sheet, and the customer was like, no, I had a humidifier before it leaked. Don't sell me on that.

Right.

Which is very obvious. Or sometimes it could be subtle. Well, the AI would go. Would list it and either. And put it into its memory. Or in service Titan, don't bring up A humidifier to this customer again. So with that, I think the next level of help is with the guys in the field, you know, So I don't know how far along that tech is as far as being ready, but that's just what I would wish that I had as a technician, that I had that level of help so that I just didn't go out there and get blasted by customers.

Right, right.

It's very disheartening as a technician to have a customer push you out of their home. It really sucks. It really hurts your. Your confidence. Right. So I think that'll be something we see in the future. And then after that, I really don't know, man. I really don't know what else. What else there is. I can't see past that.

Yeah, I. I think, I think that solution is. It's probably like 20 or 30% of the way there from what you just went through, right? Yeah, it's not quite there yet, but it's.

I. Yeah.

And you can add it in stages. Right. It doesn't have to be perfect. The first stage was the debriefing at the end that Rilla does, which I think is. That's very important to get that feedback, man. I mean, you have no idea when you're on a call if you did a good job or a bad job. Neither do CSRs. They don't really know. Especially if you do a high volume of calls, you can't say how your sentiment is, how happy was that customer? It's very difficult to do that. So for me, as a tech who wants to get better, that would be vital information. As a tech, today I'd be recording every one of my phone calls, so I could analyze that. Even if I did it myself, I'd want to know how I was doing from someone who was unbiased. And then also, you know, like everything, you'll have the text that'll think it's big brother and hate it.

Right.

But those usually aren't the real high level guys. Right?

Yeah.

So, yeah. That's awesome. It'll be fun to see how all this plays out, you know, it will be.

Yeah.

So, you know, thanks for breaking all this down for us. You know, it really shows the AI is not this fancy toy. It's really becoming a must have to keep up and win the market.

It is.

So if you want to know more about Free to Grow, where you can book a demo, I also have the phone number below where you can give this demo AI voice a call. And if you're not if you haven't already joined the Service Titan Hacks Facebook group, you can join 9,000 other contractors who are learning about this technology and sharing tips, tricks and hacks about Servicetitan. And we'll see you next time. And Nate, thanks for coming today, man.

No, thanks for having me. This was fun. Love it.

Awesome.

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