5 AI Initiatives for Home Service Businesses

So I was recently a guest on the Jobber podcast and we were talking about artificial intelligence and automation for local service businesses specifically. And so in this video I'm going to share with you some of the AI tools that we're seeing coming down the pipe. Also share with you things that you can implement in your business from an AI and automations perspective to help you grow your business. That's what we do on this channel when we post content. All right, so let's just get right into this. So everyone at this point should know about ChatGPT. Basically, ChatGPT is a language, you can ask it to do stuff and then you can get stuff out. So really high level when you think about your business, marketing, emails, communication of any extent, you can ask ChatGPT for like, hey, what should I be talking about this month in my marketing material? Or can you draft this email for me or this document? Those are really nice things. And there's a layer to that which is AI. But at this point everyone kind of knows that you can do that. So we're going to get a little bit deeper in this video. All right, so the first thing is on ChatGPT there's a plugin called AIPRM for ChatGPT. Basically people build these prompts and so you can see that the prompt topics are all different kinds. Let me make myself a little smaller here. Are all different kinds. So you can see like copywriting, marketing, SEO, software applications, operating systems. So the ones that we typically use on here is we'll use ones like keyword strategy to get some ideas outrank article. You can put another competitor URL in there and it's going to rank write a article that's better than this one. So we use a lot of these prompts and there are other prompts. If you just, you know, Google prompts for this or prompts for that, you can save these prompts and then reuse them. The reason that prompts are really beneficial is because people have built these out to do all of the right stuff. So you don't have to ask ChatGPT a million different things. It's going to build it exactly the way that this looks. So this works really good from an AI perspective. Let's go a little bit deeper of how you can use this from AI and automation perspective specifically in your business. So if you've ever used a tool called Zapier, Basically Zapier is an open API and they create connections between your CRM, whether it's like Service Titan, housecall Pro, jobber, Whatever, and then it connects it with whatever else you want it to do. So I'll give you an example of some of the things that OpenAI allows you to do. I'll read some of these and then I'll give you some off the cuff ones that we built for companies. So streamlining communication, when Gmail comes in, send it to OpenAI and then draft the response and put it in my drafts box so that I can just simply respond to that email if I think that it's good. So that's a way that you can automate some of the back and forth with customers if you have CSR problems or CSR issues. Another one that we've seen on here is for welcome content. But let me see. Yeah, another one that we see on here with communication is you can actually connect this with your Google Business Profile. So when a review comes in, you can send the review to ChatGPT, OpenAI and then you can have it craft a response and then post that response on your Google Business Profile. So it looks similar to this Google Business Profile OpenAI, Google Business Profile response. And so it goes in and comes back out. And that one's a good way, just like streamlines a process. This one you can connect it with some type of a Twilio, which is a text message. So you could say a text comes in, go to OpenAI, respond to the text and then send the text message back to that person. And so you can start to build some of these customer service responses in your business for content creation in general. You can, you know, if you use type form, you can take that information, put it through OpenAI and then put it into a Google sheet or again send it to your CRM or different things like that. You can create a blog post, have it automatically post on your WordPress website analyzing reviews. You can pull in a lot of your reviews. Like if you were to export your Google Business Profile, your Google Profile reviews into a spreadsheet, you could put in OpenAI and then have it go through them and audit them for like what are people typically saying? What are they not saying? Anyways, you get the gist. There's a million things that you can do on here. One of the things that is kind of the new AI type stuff, if you've heard a lot of these things is actually this company called Same Day. Basically what this is is the same day artificial intelligence. Same days artificial intelligence will respond to leads and book appointments just like your best salesperson. So if you go to this, I don't know if you can hear this, but you get the gist right here.

She said, there's a bunch of ants coming through our kitchen window. How soon can you guys come out? That's the worst.

So when there's a communication going on, basically instead of the calls getting routed over to Ruby Receptionist or something, it can go to an AI type of person. That is the best CSR that you've ever had because you're basically prompting it on what to say. And so this is a really cool tool. I think that this is coming out. There's going to be a ton more things like this. For example, there's another one called Air AI. And what Air AI is, is it allows you to do outbound calls. So a thou a hundred thousand sales and customer service reps at the top of a button so you can upload a list of customers and then you can have it do outbound calls and do your artificial intelligence sales calls to all those people. It's an amazing tool. We haven't tried it yet because it can come off a little spammy. But with customers that we have a bunch of client data for and we want to try to do outbound calls, this is a cool way. The one caveat to this is that if you, if you listen to that call, there's a little bit of a buffer in there where they have to listen and process and then respond. It doesn't sound as, it sounds natural, but it doesn't sound as natural as a real person conversation back and forth because there's still that layer of processing. But I really think by in 2024 or 2025 this will be pretty tight process that is a normal thing and you're not going to really know are you talking to a AI person or a real person. The other thing with Same Day that I like is that it will actually schedule the appointment inside of your CRM. So that's another layer to this which makes it for home services specifically is like it will go into your service site and it will go into your housecall Pro or jobber. I actually have a call with them. I'm not sure the exact CRMs that they work in, but they say that they work in a lot of Home Service CRMs and they'll actually schedule the appointments inside of your CRM all through their AI tool, which is really cool to me. So we got ChatGPT. Okay, perfect. And then the last one here, this is more of an automation side of things, which is a low hanging fruit for pretty much any business over here. You create Visibility, they come to your website and they turn into a lead here. And a lot of times what we found was happening was this. They would go to a lead and then the person would call the lead on Monday morning when they got in and it was a Saturday afternoon and they didn't answer and then they just like stuck it over to the side or they put it into an email folder and then no one ever followed up with it, or if they did, they just called it another time. Obviously we've talked about it before, you can send them text messages, you can do voicemail drops, you can leave them a voicemail, all that kind of stuff. But what we found was taking the lead and then adding them into some type of automation sequence or funnel. You can do this a million different ways. But basically what would happen is when you get a lead, let's say they don't answer, you could put them in an automation sequence that automatically follows up with them every day, three days, five days, seven days, for however long you want it to follow up with, to hopefully schedule an appointment. Now the other side of this, which a lot of people miss, is when you get that call that says, hey, how much does it cost? And they say, okay, I'm going to talk to my husband or wife and I'll get back to you then is a great opportunity because now you got the lead but you didn't convert it and now the ball's in their court. So what you could say is, hey, that sounds great. Let me send you over a more formal estimate and a little bit about our company. That way you can review it with them. Can I get your email real quick? That way you get their email, you send them that first thing that tells you a little bit more about the company. Maybe it is a more of a formalized estimate and then you can take their email and put them into a follow up sequence and then now you can follow up with them every couple days and you make it very natural, like, hey, this is Phil from your H Vac company. I know I sent you that email a couple days ago. Did you get a chance to take a look at it? Or I want to make sure that you got it, whatever that is. Another pro tip to this, you could also send the email and a text message. So you send the email and then you send a text message and say like, hey, this is Phil from H Vac, I just sent you a text, want to make sure that you got it perfect. Now you've kind of opened up that text communication side of things. So you can follow up on text, which gets a much better open rate, but you want it to feel very organic and natural, not like they're in some type of a nurture sequence, basically. And so from an automation perspective, that's some really cool stuff. If you don't know the prompts or what to say again, you can ask your AI tool how to what to say. A lot of these things can be automated using Zapier and the Same Day and Air AI. These are futuristic things that I think are going to be coming in the next six months to a year. If you need help with setting up a lot of this stuff, this is what we do as a company. As a marketing consulting company, we partner with companies, we help them increase their sales, keep their schedules full. A lot of this stuff, they have no idea what to do. So we connect all these marketing channels and automations to help them grow their business. I'll put a link down below. If not, I'm curious to get if you have any other AI or automation tools that you do, drop a comment below. Be sure to hit like and subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.