How AI and Automated Scheduling Will Change Service Businesses

What's up, guys? Christian here from Copilot sales consulting and also tech support. We're here with Mike Andes. He's been out for about 30 days or so running on his adventures with business operating from Copilot. And essentially today I have a few questions that I've written down. I am going to use this. I'm going to look at this so I can revert back to it. Don't miss anything, but a few key points that I want to talk about in terms of copilot. And the first one is our budgeted hours. So on our scheduling section on our new KPI cockpit that's coming soon, when you create a new visit, you're seeing budgeted hours everywhere. I just want you to kind of run us through what you're thinking and what the actual big picture to that is.

Yeah. So really, budget hours is important because really, as service business owners and as service businesses, we sell labor. That's really what we are selling to our customers. That's our product, is the hours that we are selling from our employees. Or if you're out in the field working yourself your own time. And so keeping track of budget hours is extremely important. Are you ahead of budget hours and beating budgeted time, or are you behind and you're running behind? Maybe you're inefficient or you're just ineffectively estimating these jobs. So that's why it's how it's always been used. Budget hours have always been used as a way to say, okay, I think it's going to take six. And then based upon my budget hours, am I ahead or behind schedule? And we've started to do that. The reason, though, budget hours are starting to become prevalent throughout the software is. And we will continue to just ramp up how. How frequently you're seeing it is because it's going to lead us into what we call automated scheduling, which is going to come in next year. And that's where we can use the budget hours and how far you're booked out to know exactly when to put jobs in the schedule. So you won't even need to, you know, say, okay, Mr. Jones, you're going to be on next Thursday. When they accept the estimate based upon certain coordinate points, we can already know what day they can be put on the schedule, whether it be a recurring job or based upon budget hours. When you're next available, you might be four or five weeks booked out. And the system will be to know, okay, your next available time is five weeks from now on this day. And Then just go ahead and process that email to the customer, notifying them and then putting them on the schedule. So it's kind of just the first building block and we've already added it on the calendar function, the dispatch board, as well as having a chart for every single week the next four weeks to know are you already booked out? Is the schedule already filled for the next upcoming month?

Yeah. And we're planning on also putting that budgeted hours, I call it the budgeted hour capacity chart. You guys maybe hear me say that in my videos or support chat. We're also adding it on the wait list too as well and kind of take me through that where that update hasn't came yet, but what is that going to look like in terms of budget hours as well?

Yeah, in July the waitlist is coming out and we're really trying to make it where wait list is really, really functional. And that is when an estimate is accepted before automated scheduling has fully taken root, that it goes to the wait list. So a job is accepted, an estimate is accepted, it needs to go on the schedule. Where does it go? It sits in the wait list. And so then down the road, as we then build out automated scheduling, it'll take these jobs from the wait list and then configure them in the most effic efficient manner on the schedule. And so the wait list is getting completely redesigned in July and just trying to make it more functional. We've always had wait list, but I don't like certain elements that I've seen other serums used in terms of waitlist because it's sometimes hard to remember that those even exist. And so we're just trying to integrate it better into the workflow. And that is when an estimate is accepted, if the job has not been scheduled, it goes to the wait list.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that kind of goes into my next question. You talked about automatic scheduling. You're talking about auto doing this, saving time for the business owner in specific. And my next question is we just added with our recent email builder that we just updated AI capabilities, you know, to be able to promote really good articulation and professional emails to be able to send out to people and stuff like that. We're also adding AI to make, you know, data driven decisions in the future to our KPI cockpit. Kind of take me into what you're also thinking about in terms of are we going to continue to innovate with AI? What does that look like? And, and are you just planning on staying ahead of the game as AI becomes a big talking point in the world.

Yeah, like we were the first service based CRM to do integration. OpenAI to where now you click a button, it can write an email from you for you. So it's basically really saving the fact that you don't have to go chatgpt or pay $20 a month for that. It's all integrated now into the email builder. We also went ahead and upgraded the email builder to include things like embeddable videos, HTML and a whole bunch of other really cool stuff. GIFs, stickers, all inside the email now embeddable. And so the AI portion is really what we'll be focusing on after 2023. We'll be working on the cockpit. We've obviously done the email stuff in terms of being able to write emails, but AI in 2024 is like using automated scheduling. It'll need AI, it'll need to be able to know, okay, what, what services can I assign to certain employees? Because not everyone can install certain things, not everyone can be on certain types of services. And so it's going to need that AI component. And so in the next six months, like in the rest of 2023, we're really focusing on what you call data driven decisions or 3D notifications. And that's gonna be to the employee as well as to the owner of what they should be doing in their business, when they should hire, which services they should raise prices on, which services are the most profitable. These are the type of things that we wanna give the information to the owner, but more importantly make them decision making processes. So for example, your close ratio has decreased by 15%. Here's why. And we can sell. Well, you haven't been following up your email follow up has been off. You haven't been doing phone calls. These are the type of things that we can use AI to actually tell the owner exactly what to do in their business.

Yeah, and I've heard you say in the past, you know, this will take the emotions out of your business decisions. Kind of take me into kind of what that means too as well. I know that, you know, controlling emotions and being able to make sound decisions based off of data sounds good, it feels good, but it's easier said than done most times. So is this a way for you to kind of ensure that for all of the people that have been following, you know, Mike Andes or kind of take me into that a little bit.

Yeah, like there's always going to need to be a human component or you know, someone with some emotion on the deal because especially it comes to hiring and firing. And yes, you know, we are going to tell you what are, who are your least performing and highest performing employees and which ones you might want to cut after a certain amount of time. But ultimately there still needs to be a human involvement because, you know, we don't know if maybe this person is going through a divorce or going through some problems, their family, and you're going to work with them. And ultimately that's why you'll still need a manager, you'll still need an owner, you'll still need someone making the calls and the judgments. But to have data to say, instead of saying, oh, I don't think they're working hard, I'm going to fire them. It's like, well, based upon the math, they're 30% less efficient. And I'm going to give them a performance improvement plan that says if they're not at this number of budget hours by this date, I'm going to let them go. And so that removes the emotion and then just makes it like I'm making good business decisions. I'm not making this based upon whether I'm having a good day, a bad day, whether I'm having something happening good outside of work or bad outside of work. It's just simply based upon the numbers.

Yeah. And I think that's brilliant just based off of the different gentlemen and people, business owners that I've ran into in terms of my phone calls. They're needing this, they're wanting this. So I think the AI is exciting everybody and it's being used in a practical application too, within the innovation of the software. So it's very exciting. My last question is you. You have been on this 30 day adventure to essentially build a location from the ground up in 30 days while using our new software. My question is what are the key things, aspects that you took from using the mobile version in specific and kind of how you want to take that into the innovation going forward?

For Copilot, Yeah, it's good for me to see like the smaller scale because obviously with Augusta, we deal with it with a very, very large office and a lot of moving parts and a lot of users and big locations. And so it's definitely been, our focus has been like feature set and design from a desktop point of view, but when you're a solo operator or you're just getting started, the majority of your day is actually spent on the mobile device. And so we already started doing a lot of implementation of better design functionality on the mobile app as well as Coming up here pretty soon is just look at the mobile app and be like, okay, can I do estimates from here? And when we're doing job costing and price matrices, for example, in July, it's not just good enough to have a great desktop version. I need that to be able to power the mobile version. So someone from their mobile device, their phone as small as a screen, can use that functionality to create an estimate from their mobile device. And it's well formatted and looks nice. Not just using the backend technology of job costing and price matrices, but also sending it in a really well designed format. And so for me it was eye opening just to see how much I use a mobile app compared to if I was a larger company. I'm more in the office all day long. I'm seeing my dispatch board, I have my map, I have multiple screens, they're all large. Boiling that down to the mobile device, there's a balance of speed and functionality, but then also making sure that the feature set is powerful enough. I can change my automation, I can send my invoices, I can make a payment and not be limited to, you know, just starting and stopping jobs.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think we're very excited about the increase in terms of the innovation and the speed of the mobile version. I know a lot of, you know, business owners are using their truck as their office for, you know, for the time being. And a majority of our users right now are just starting up businesses. They want to float and ride Copilot as Copilot essentially scales their business scales as well. So I think all of our users are very excited about the direction of Copilot and I appreciate you answering these questions for us today.

Awesome. And if anyone has any specific questions about like the use cases of Copilot in your business specifically, you can book a call with Christian and he'll actually go through the software on a zoom call with you, go through what you're currently using if potentially you have certain questions about certain workflows or features and when those might be on our roadmap, we have a pretty clear roadmap for the rest of 2023 to what I consider to play catch up with a lot of other CRMs. And then as we head into 2020 24, really start to innovate with things like automated scheduling, a whole host of other things that we're working on for next year. So appreciate all of your time. Book a call with Christian and we'll see you there.