#194 This AI Transformed Customer Service—Here's How Avoca Did It

We were able to reduce like staffing on nights and weekends.

The data shows that, you know, that lead has literally 4 times the amount of a chance to actually be converted.

If it's picked up in the—

It's picked up in under 10 seconds. Yeah.

I mean, you would, you would listen to these calls and you'd be like, I spent $100 on you to just totally fuck that up in 10 seconds. $100. Yeah. Just gone.

You don't have a program that can catch every single lead that's coming in. You better believe your competitors have that.

Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today on the show, I have Rafi from Avoca. Welcome to the show.

Appreciate it, John. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, this will be fun. We just— we're here. We're the day after our Breaking 5 workshop, and you guys did a presentation on AI in the call center. You want to talk a little bit about Avoca for folks that haven't heard of you guys yet?

Yeah, yeah, of course. So we are a voice AI platform for the trade specifically. So we work with home service businesses, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other trades generally. And one really cool thing about Avoca is we're here to not necessarily displace the human talent in the call center, but kind of aid to that.

Yeah, augment.

Augment, exactly. So we're able to really capture and convert every single lead that's coming in by having the ability to answer phones 24/7, answering on the first ring for after hours, weekends. We also have the ability to answer for overflow, whether it's on the second or third ring, 10, 20 seconds in. And yeah, it's one really cool piece of the journey is the growth of our team and the development of the product. It's such a fast-moving pace.

Oh yeah.

AI in the industry.

100%.

Yeah. And yeah, lucky to be on the team with Tyson and Porav, our 2 co-founders. So You know, I was the third employee at Avoca. We now have about almost 40 in office.

That's crazy. Well, and what's kind of wild, I texted Tyson about this the other day. I'm in this— I'm in like a bunch of peer groups. Big advocate of peer groups.

Yeah.

And so I'm in this one peer group and everyone in it is like smallest is 20 and the biggest is like 45, 46. Everyone I had, you know, I'm an advocate, like I'm a believer of Avoca. Yeah, it's been a really big win for us at Wilson and I had never really talked to this. I was new to the peer group and like we walked into this group and like everyone was already on it. So like, I, I think I feel like I can see the growth in industry of how many people are already on it. So I'm in 3 peer groups where every single person is already using it.

Wow.

And these are like $20 to $40 million businesses.

Yeah.

So like, you guys made a dent.

Appreciate that. And it's awesome to see because when I started, we really, we really had the early adopters, obviously housing companies.

Yeah, we're like over a year in.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

You're one of the OGs. Let's go. OGs. Let's go. I love it.

I love it. When I first started, we had, you know, less than 50 customers. It was a lot of those early adopters that thought AI was cool, wanted to kind of like delve into it. I would say, yeah, more of like the risk takers.

Yeah.

And now we've kind of, the phrase that we like to use here is crossing the chasm.

Yeah.

It's now not something that's just cool, but now that a lot of the early adopters have had a lot of success, it's kind of a necessity now in business.

Yeah.

Because if you don't have a program that can catch every single lead that's coming in, you better believe your competitors have that.

100%, you know, 100%.

That's now kind of like where we're—

it's the great equalizer. It's sort of like, hey, everyone— people started wearing like booties, like floor savers. Yeah, it's not— now you just have to wear— yeah. So it's sort of like it has become an equalizer.

It's the standard.

You just got to do it. Yeah.

If you don't do it, you're falling behind.

Yeah. You're just noncompetitive. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. And I think what, you know, what we've seen and what others have seen is there's now people implemented at very varying degrees, right?

Sure.

Like, you've got Josh at Rescue, like, running it full bore, um, whereas, like, we're still, like, overflow and weekends.

100%.

Um, but it's a labor-saving— like, for us, when we did it, it was we, we removed our old answering service, and that was a really big win, cost savings. And then even after that, we, uh, we were We were able to reduce like staffing on nights and weekends.

Yeah.

'Cause we have to run a 24/7 center because our old answering services were just so terrible.

Uh-huh.

So that ended up being a really big win for us.

Awesome. Yeah, I love to hear that. And yeah, one really cool piece too that I know you guys are experiencing here is that human-centric piece of it as well. So we're actually one of the only companies out there that has our own—

The human in the loop.

Yeah, human in the loop. So we have our own human call center.

Yeah.

They go through a very extensive interview process with us. You're not only representing, you know, our brand, They're directly on the front lines representing the brands that we're partnered with, like, like the Wilson companies. And so we make sure that they're enabled not only with, you know, those companies scripting, but also just generally with the ability to, you know, have that kind of warm transfer through our, through our model that we put them through, which is, which is huge. And I think that's, that's really making a huge difference because, you know, AI is amazing, but there's, there's certain applications where, you know, in a really tough kind of emergency setting, You need that human touch at the end of the day. And I think that's where our humans can come in and kind of, you know, provide that to customers that might be upset or, you know, just really showing heightened emotion.

Yeah. What do you think? Who out there has implemented AI the best in their call center? Like, how have they done it?

Yeah. Are you talking about like specific companies?

Yeah. Yeah. Because I think, you know, for people that haven't or are beginning to try to under— everyone, everyone's heard of AI, right?

Yeah.

And everyone at this point is like, Well, how do I use it? And the ways that we're thinking about it is like level 1, we made this up, so this is not official, but like level 1 is, hey, I use AI in my business. And that could be VoCA as like overflow or nights and weekends calling. It could be like ChatGPT writes my emails to my customers. Level 2 in our mind, which we're not there yet, and we've been using AI in every department for over a year now. Level 2 is like it is now displacing labor. So like we are using this as an efficiency, we are custom devving problems with it. And then number 3 is like that, that basically like we are custom designing solutions to our very hyper-specific problems. So those are our like how we think about AI implementation into Wilson. So for who do you think out there is a customer that of your guys that's really like just doing a great job? Yeah, it's one of those levels.

Yeah, great question. I think one customer that's doing a great job, and actually, actually on one of our other products, is AAA Solutions. And that's actually— they're, they're actually in, uh, in the Denver metro area.

Okay.

And they're doing a great job specifically on Coach because what Coach does and what— while our Responder product, that AI sales agent can answer all those calls, um, and, you know, give you guys the best opportunity to actually book those incoming calls that are coming in. The neat thing about Coach is that it's able to actually go in and, you know, provide feedback on every single call, even the calls from your human CSRs.

Yeah.

By really giving them data-driven insights on, you know, what's happening on the phone.

Yeah.

You know, where are CSRs like messing up the most? What are they doing? Where are they having the most success that way? You know, it's— I think that's really cool to really empower, really kind of empowering their team to understand like which CSRs are strongest in which category and which—

Yeah.

Kind of help on specific categories and kind of tailoring it to there. So yeah, I think that's, that's a company that's doing it really well specifically for coach. For responder, we actually just started with a company out in the Memphis area, Choates HVAC Plumbing Electric. And, you know, they've been using Avoca quite a bit to catch a ton of overflow during the day. Yeah, I think one thing that's made them very successful is the amount of kind of dedication and drive that they've put into the, into their, their process of actually developing Avoca and having it be in their business. This is not really a plug-and-play solution, John, where, you know, someone comes up to us, wants to use Avoca, 48 hours later it's implemented.

Yeah.

No, this is going to be very custom and unique to—

I think— I feel like it took us 90 days to learn, for it to learn.

For sure.

Is that still the case?

Yeah, I would say it's going to perform at a high level from the start, but obviously as it—

Because we're already—

Yeah, yeah, of course. And, you know, every, every month, every couple weeks, like, we're always making iterations to our products. So not only to our direct voice product, but also the ability to have, you know, a simple scheduler that can, you know, go on your website and, you know, a customer, you know, with ease can, can book from there. And it's all the little nuanced things that, you know, people don't realize where, you know, you can go in there and, you know, once you put your phone number in, our, you know, our AI is able to capture that and then even, you know, potentially go outbound to that customer as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you guys just dropped that. That was pretty interesting. I think, I think whatever, you know, I was at this conference and I've brought this story up a lot. It's just like really sticking with me. Yeah, I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago and one of the speakers brought up AI arbitrage. Yeah. As like an important part of their current investment thesis. So it was an acquisitions conference. So, hey, we're going to go buy these companies and we are going to like look at their overhead, their SG&A expense, and we're going to figure out how we can reduce it by a third by implementing some version of AI. And I know, so like what that does is it means it's, I just gained back a third of cash flow. So a huge win, you know, if I didn't like drill that down enough. And I was thinking about that a lot. You did this presentation at our workshop and one of the things that came up was, hey, there's this $100 million company and they've gone down to 9 CSRs as they've grown from, what was it, 50 to 100 or 70 to 100 or something like that?

Yeah, I think almost Doubling in size, basically.

Yeah. And they didn't have to add any headcount. And it was like, basically we could take off—

Actually reducing a little bit of headcount.

Yeah. Well, that's been ours too.

Yeah.

So obviously there's a lot to that. Some of it's Avoca, some of it's better practices. There's a lot to that. But we went from 18 to 10. We believe that 10 is kind of the number now. And despite however much more volume we can drive, Like, we think that it's now frictionless, which is crazy.

Yeah. And it's, it's cool too, because obviously, as you know, in kind of the CSR world, there can be quite a bit of turnover.

So being just people like I have friends that run $100 million companies and it's 70 CSRs.

Yeah. Like, it's a lot to manage.

That's a lot going on. Yeah, that's, that's crazy. At Wilson, we've saved a stupid amount of money by having AI help out with our call center. And the best tool out there that's making that happen is Avoca. So look, you've probably heard the buzz about AI CSRs. They seem to be everywhere, but not all AI CSRs are created equal. And Avoca seems to rise to the top every time. They answer every call on the first ring. They sound just like a real person and they don't take breaks. But here's what makes Avoca really interesting in the real world. If a caller's getting heated, like they're getting frustrated or annoyed, Avoca knows. It hears the tone, emotion, and hands the call to a real human so you can still save that call. And this has been huge for us here at Wilson. There's no more churn or people yelling representative into the phone. And the backend is tight. It directly integrates into ServiceTitan at the Gold tier level. That means it can handle reschedules, check tech arrival times, and look up customer info. It even helps with capacity planning. It's basically a CSR with perfect memory. On top of all that, it consistently makes our team better. We get post-call analytics, auto-tagging, and coaching tools so that no matter who's on shift, we deliver for our customers. If you're curious, go to avoca.ai. A-V-O-C-A dot A-I. Book a demo and tell them owned and operated sent you. And what was the company that was $100 million with like?

That's H.L. Bowman.

Yeah. Okay.

Out of actually they they do service Tyson's hometown, Yorkville.

Okay.

It's pretty cool.

All right.

It's it's close to home for him.

Yeah. Yeah. And how many branches?

They've got I believe like different like locations.

Yeah.

I think about ten.

That's a lot.

Yeah. In the Pennsylvania area.

And I know my friend Luke, he works— he's the GM for Deljo.

Yeah.

In Chicago. But he's a part— he's one of the Heartland companies. I know they just did one. It's going to be really interesting to watch how like PE handles something like this.

Totally.

Because the efficiency to be gained is like in the millions. It's not like— I think there's a— it's interesting because there's a use case. It's one of the few technologies That there's a use case where like, I'm a dude in a truck and I have 4,000 trucks and there's like a use case for both.

Yeah.

And everything and everything. It's a wild technology. I don't know how many— do you know how many trucks Heartland has?

Heartland total? I mean, they have so many brands. I don't— I can't tell you the amount of trucks they have in the thousands.

It's $100 million of EBITDA and that's about all I know. But like, you know, dropping AI into it probably added like 5 of EBITDA to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's kind of wild.

The goal is to fill the board. That's, that's the goal each day. Fill the board. Let's make sure that, you know, the leads that are coming in, you know, there's expensive dollars behind those leads, right? Leads can be $100, $200, even more. And so, you know, why, why drop leads when, when you can go ahead and book them?

Yeah.

And I think really what kind of we're empowering companies to do is really like reduce that blind spot. Right? Like there could be someone who is calling in and they're waiting on the line for, you know, 20, 30 seconds and just like that, they could abandon that call and call the next company and not only call the next company and get someone on the line, but then actually, you know, have a job performed in their home and then they, you know, become a member of that company's services.

Yeah.

And, you know, so that's really the revenue that can be lost. That's not actually, You know, even noticed for having a solution like Avoca.

Yeah. And I just don't think it's that much money. Like, I think, I think that's the reality too. It's just sort of like frictionless way to scale. And I think it's an easy way to introduce. And this is like, I'm not trying to fluff up Avoca here, but I feel like it is an easy way to introduce AI to the business. It's like, hey, this is something that has to happen. If someone calls at 9:00 PM, What does your team currently do? Your answering service probably is terrible.

Is it probably letting that call go or—

Yeah.

Taking too much time to answer?

Yeah. Or like paying someone like before, you know, before you guys were a cost savings to us originally, which was the attraction.

Yeah.

I'm sure it's a cost savings to a lot of people, but for us, we went from $8,000 a month to our answering service to— I honestly don't actually know what Avoca costs, but I remember what $8,000 a month was.

Yeah, definitely less than half of that.

Yeah, sure.

It's around like $3,500 or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That rings a bell. But yeah, it was such a cost savings. And like, I know for us, one of the big priorities we were aiming at, which has been a win, is how do we get to a 7-second pickup?

Yeah.

Like a one-ring pickup. And we've been able to drive that. 'Cause basically if my team doesn't pick it up in 7 seconds, which we do 90% of our calls, it is immediately picked up with AI. So that was like, that was a big win. I don't know why I got so passionate about that number. I know you have data to support it. Yeah, I would say— I got awkwardly passionate about it. Prior to seeing data.

I love it.

I think this is right.

Yeah, the 7 number does sound about right. I mean, we say under 10 seconds. I mean, the data shows that, you know, that lead has literally 4 times the amount of a chance to actually be converted.

If it's picked up in the—

It's picked up under 10 seconds. Yeah.

Yeah.

Within the first 10 seconds. Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. So this video, this is a part of, we're doing this series right now and it's how to grow your plumbing company, how to grow your HVAC company. And like, I'm passionate that it's really 3 things, right? You have the lead, You have the sale and you have fulfillment. And if somebody's been listening for a while, they've heard me like harp on that like a million fucking times. But like the lead is the first action. So, you know, we've talked digital marketing, we had the folks from Service Scalers on, we had James from ModernEyes on and just like talking about like, hey, how are we gonna handle the first portion? 'Cause we can't sell anything until we get the lead.

Yeah.

And we had the folks from Wanamaker on to talk about how traditional advertising like ties into all that and like is steroids for your, For your marketing, and now this is like that next step in the lead where like anything pre-appointment still lead. Like the way we're positioning AI and call center is you don't lose the lead. So what happens when you pay all that money for the $80, $100, $200 lead and no one's there to pick it up?

Yeah.

Or even worse, someone does pick it up and like the phone calls are so terrible.

Fumbles it on the phone.

Fumbles it. Yeah. Like are you? Yeah. What was your example yesterday? You guys available today? No. Dead silence.

Yeah. Do you want to call someone else?

Yeah. Yeah. We used to— I mean, everyone's got those horror stories. I remember, I remember, it's the worst ever when you listen to your own call centers. We're fortunate now. Our call center is amazing.

Yeah.

Like 5, 6 years ago, it was a crazy pain point. I mean, you would listen to these calls and you'd be like, I spent $100 on you to just totally fuck that up in 10 seconds. Like, that was $100 to lose that. That was $100 fucking dollars. Yeah, just gone. Uh, it's painful. So if someone's AI curious and they're thinking about, uh, call center, sounds like Evoke is a potential solution. Are you— what are other, like, applications that you guys have seen that's an interesting way to drive, uh, AI into Service business outside of call center?

Outside of call center.

Yeah.

I think for home service businesses, there's also— there can be a lot of, you know, a lot of people don't know what happens in the field as well, right? Like for like when technicians are actually out.

Oh, sure. Yeah.

So I don't know if you've heard of Rilla before. Yeah, they do. Yeah. Coaching for those infield technicians.

Yeah.

So we've seen that be, you know, a huge success and, and, you know, having technicians like having the ability to actually like coach them correctly.

Yeah.

And then also our friends at ProBook. I don't know if you've heard of them. George and his team. Yeah, they, they built a product. It's, you know, AI dispatching tool. Yeah. Which has been massive as well for just making sure that every single job gets assigned to the, you know, to the right tech. Yeah. Yeah. They're very— they're pretty deep in ServiceTitan. I think they have services that are specific on ServiceTitan. We've seen those applications be huge too.

Yeah.

That's kind of like being, you know, that kind of encapsulates, I'd say, like a Pretty large percentage of the sales process right there. So we've seen, yeah, we've seen a lot of success there specifically with, you know, a lot of companies that use Avoca, they partner with, with, you know, Rilla as well. So we've seen huge success there.

I have friends, we are not trying to do this, but we have friends that are trying to like figure out how to unpeople their entire administration team. I, my quick take, probably a bit early, but I think in the next year we could start to see it where they're like, hey, if I've got an AI call taker that can directly book and I've got a dispatch software that can manage the board, there's no need. What? Yeah. What do you need at that point? And the answer is, is, I mean, less. You definitely need less. Much less. Yeah.

I think the big thing there 'Cause what we recommend is, you know, making sure everything is fine-tuned, starting small, right? So starting with after—

Yeah, dip your toe.

Yeah, yeah, those more difficult situations. And once kind of companies feel very confident on it, then kind of, you know, scaling from there. And that's how the real growth starts, not just the cost savings.

Yeah, yeah. Man, this was fascinating. So this was a good dive and I loved your presentation yesterday. My big takeaways were like really like the $100 million company with 9 CSRs blew my freaking mind. And there was that, you know, again, I have friends in the $100 million range and like, it's like 50 to 60, sometimes 70 CSRs. Like, that's a, that's a wild game changer. That's millions of dollars.

Huge.

Back into the business. So just really huge win. Some other great vendors to think about how to introduce AI into the business. I feel like that was good. If you've got any other like quick hits on If like dropping AI into your call center, like what do you think would be the quick tip?

I think the quick tip for dropping AI in a call center, yeah, start slow. And then really, I think the biggest thing when kind of implementing a product like Avoca is really going in and diving in, understanding your true booking rate. I think that's where—

Oh yeah.

That's where a lot of the misconception is.

Yeah, that was a learning curve for us.

People think their booking rate is 85, 90%, but they're not factoring in those abandoned calls, those excuse calls, those suspenders.

Exactly. Totally.

Sometimes CSRs can make mistakes. You don't know if it's on purpose or on accident, but there are mistakes made. So a booker is there to really kind of shed light on that and then, you know, kind of help drive that booking rate up.

Yeah, no, that makes total sense. And that was a real learning curve for us. Like we call it raw book rate now.

Yeah.

And like our raw book rate I think is in the 30s, which like is actually—

That's good. Yeah, that's all calls.

Yeah, it doesn't sound good, but like, that's good. When we first started tracking it, it was like 27. But like 30s feels like pretty good. Like we're feeling good.

Love it.

Awesome. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on, Rafi. Thanks for having a lot of fun. If you want to learn more, it's— what's the website to check out Avoca?

Yeah, it's www.avoca.ai. Awesome.

And that's avocado without the do. Correct.

Avocado without the do.

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