🚀 Ready to grow your home service business with AI and marketing that actually works? Book a free strategy call → https://www.contractormarketingpros.net/calendar

Your Booking Rate Isn't 85%. It's 60%. | Katya Hill, Lace

Ask a home service owner what their booking rate is and most will tell you mid to high 80s. When Lace runs the actual analysis on their call history, the real number lands around 60%. That gap is not a lead problem. It's a 40% leak between the phone ringing and the job getting completed, and you're paying for it with marketing dollars you already spent.

Katya Hill is Head of Marketing and Partnerships at Lace, an AI platform that analyzes 100% of inbound and outbound calls in a home service call center and shows owners exactly why qualified calls didn't book. Before she joined the company she called Lace customers herself to verify the results. One reported half a million dollars saved in a year. Another recovered forty thousand in a single month. A call center manager told her she had been spending 40 hours a week listening back to calls, and got that time back to actually coach her team.

In this episode you'll learn:

• Why manual disposition destroys your data, and how a CSR with the next call ringing quietly turns a qualified lead into a "not qualified" entry

• The two leaks Katya finds in almost every business she analyzes, and which one costs more

• Why the campaign that brought you three leads might be outperforming the campaign that brought you forty

• How to track past the booked job to the completed job, since cancellations create a second drop off nobody watches

• The dispatch fee objection gets more pushback than anything else, and Katya explains what the CSRs who overcome it are actually saying

• Whether you should publish pricing on your website, and the ballpark approach Katya has seen convert best

• Same day availability moves conversion more than almost any other lever, and there are ways to work around a full schedule without saying "Friday, take it or leave it"

• What a property management client said when he called an owner on a weekend to congratulate him on the great new woman he'd hired at the front desk

• Why one company that fired its entire CSR team for AI agents watched its Google reviews drop to one star inside a month

• Start with after hours if you're nervous about AI on your phones, because those calls are already going to voicemail and dying

• What actually makes a good CSR script, and why the fastest booking is often the worst booking

• The exercise Katya says to run this week, in a quiet room, before you take a single software demo

This one is for the home service owner who keeps hearing "we need more leads" from the team, and suspects the truth is that the leads they already paid for are getting away.

Mentioned in this episode:

Mauricio's Calendar

it’s somewhere around 60%.

and the show for contractors who want to grow without wasting time or

money. If you’re in roofing, Hvac, plumbing, or any home service

business, we break down how AI and modern marketing can help you book

more jobs and close more leads, and build a business that runs without

babysitting. Every task.

pros.

the host of the of the I am marketing show. I’m here with Katja Hill.

Welcome to the show.

conversation last time we spoke, about AI and technology in the trade,

so I’m excited to get into it.

that, you know, there’s a lot of talk and hype with AI. What made you,

want to work with lace in terms of not being. Yeah, this is just the

sake of being IB AI. What? What made you think that this is actually

going to be useful? For, for for businesses.

right now. And I feel like we all kind of went through this experience

of, like, I just exploded and everything was I and everybody added I to

their title and everybody added AI to the product, even if it was there,

you know, months and years before. But what I was really looking for is

impact,

exciting as AI is. If there’s no impact directly, they you can see then

then it’s useless. Right? So what I was looking for is not just, hey,

this saves time or it’s more efficient or productivity. Can we, can I

see people whose lives were, you know, changed or their businesses were

changed with the introduction of AI?

One of the first things I did when I was, thinking about joining was go

through the testimonials, and I actually reached out to a couple

customers and they had hard numbers. So they were very willing to share

and not just, oh, hey, we, you know, it’s 10% more efficient.

this past year. Hey, we actually recovered 40 K this past month. From,

from by using lace. And so seeing the impact that was so clear, and even

when it came to something as more, you know, generic as like time

saving, they had hard numbers that they were able to speak to.

mentioned that she was spending about 40 hours a week. So I had, like,

her entire that chunk of her time was spent just on listening to

previous calls and reviewing them and would lace she, she she she didn’t

have to do that so she could actually spend instead of saying later and

later and later to actually work with her team, she could just take that

time and actually coach them and know what the patterns were and where

the issues were.

money on marketing but the sales aren’t showing up. Where do you often

most find the link.

built in assumption, right? That like, well, you spend the money on

market and then you just sort of hope for the best. You hope those leads

convert, you hope those leads come in. And it was sort of assumed for a

while before I that that that was okay. And what we’re able to do now is

because we’re able to see, okay, just because you’re spending money on

marketing doesn’t mean, doesn’t mean necessarily that every single one

of those campaigns isn’t is converting.

the job that is actually converting. And then, you know, that person is

showing up. They didn’t cancel. They didn’t decide last minute to go

with somebody else, that that lead actually comes through. And all the

way through. So, well, we realized, you know, with the analysis is so

much of it is objections, right?

good is that lead of how good a CSR is that converting that lead? Some

of the biggest issues that we’ve seen is pricing objections. How do you

talk about price? How do you talk about the dispatch fee? Right. That

people don’t want to pay. How do you talk about.

unit, right. And the person on the other end feels like, oh man, this is

so much more money. Nobody’s call in an Hvac or any home services

business because they’re excited, right? They’re calling likely because

something is wrong and something is broken and they already know this is

going to be a lot of money.

And the better you can prepare your team to handle that and how to turn

that around, the more successful you can be as a business. But looking

at that leak early on of the lead comes in, are your agents able to

convert it? That’s the biggest drop off.

trade where they examined, I think over 100,000, businesses. And one of

the, the big thing, the big conclusion was actually I because I just

read it a few weeks ago, and it really coincides with everything that

I’ve been talking about, you know, last few years about, you know, for

the trades for, for home service businesses, demand is not a problem,

right?

demand. There’s actual, people looking for your services everywhere,

right? For, you know, typically it can be Google. You know, Facebook,

whatever it is. But there’s a lot of demand for your services. The

problem is what happens after the demand. And the big conclusion from

server side, it was and it’s something that they’re saying themselves

which, you know, you I know you’re very familiar with server side and is

that the the issue is, is is actual the operations is actual operations.

operationally, that’s what’s going to separate the companies that are

just spending a ton of money on marketing, that that is a big

differentiator. And I know laci’s that one of the big is a factor. And

then helping turn that lead into a sale, because that’s really what what

it turns out to.

light bulb for me was you think that, hey, the lead comes in people

answer how hard is it to schedule right. All you’re doing somebody needs

a new, you know, air conditioning. All you do is scheduling. But you

need to make sure that person that doesn’t call somebody else and get a

different quote and potentially that money baby sooner or cheaper or

whatnot.

we’re going to take care of you, you’re in good hands. We’re going to

solve it. We’re going to make sure it’s going to work and to make sure

you have a good experience. How do you create that environment? Because

again, if you don’t pick up or your CSR doesn’t, doesn’t convert that

right.

There’s no shortage of service businesses. So how do you make sure to

create that experience where you can actually not just book the job and

that’s it and hope for the best that they don’t cancel or or whatnot.

But you have to provide experience that makes people feel like, okay,

I’m good.

about today. Sounds like your business, I want to tell you about

something for a limited time. I’m opening up my calendar for free home

service marketing diagnostic calls. This is me on the call. That’s

somebody on my team. We look at four things were you with are right now

what your marketing is actually doing versus what you think it’s doing,

what your leads are coming from.

the one that nobody checks whether you show up when somebody asks you,

Betty or Google’s AI or another AI search for a contractor in your area,

because that’s where a lot of your customers are searching right now.

And most home service companies are invisible there. Then I tell you

what’s broken and what to do about it.

plan whether or not you ever work with us. Clients. I paid over $10,000

for this kind of assessment. Right now it’s free. It’s on my calendar,

so slots are limited. Click the link in the show notes or go to

Contractor Marketing Posenet slash Mauricio dash calendar. All right,

back to it.

business that are already doing several millions a year. What is moving

the booking rate from below average to strong actually look like in

dollars?

the businesses that we first started talking to or during the prospect

stage, they have a feeling that the booking rate is much higher than it

actually is. They all think it’s somewhere near the 80s, you know, maybe

mid to high 80s. And then when we do, if we do not have working with

them as part of kind of the the going through it process,

calls and turns out it’s somewhere around 60%.

crazy. I didn’t expect that. That’s not the number that I thought that

we had. And part of it comes down to not having the data and not and

relying on manual disposition. Right. If you’re relying on us an on CSRs

to put down the score was qualified or not, I mean, how likely is that

to be correct every single time across your entire CSR or an especially

when it’s a busy season, they have the next call ringing.

that’s more important than just doing the disposition in the moment. So

a lot of that data gets lost, especially the bigger the org. The more of

an issue this is. And this is something that gets overlooked really

quickly because you think, hey, where the revenue’s coming in, right.

We’re still booking the jobs.

is doing well, so it’s easy to say I don’t think that’s the problem. We

need more leads to grow. But if you pause it for a second and actually

do that analysis and realize, are we actually maximizing the leads that

we have, you will usually uncover a couple of places where they leak.

are we actually what are we actually capturing. And then looking at why.

Right. Like realizing those patterns. Is it availability. Is it the

dispatch fee. Is it the cost. How do we build kind of the playbook that

really speaks to our customers. And then it speed to lead? Yes. This is

something that I feel like some businesses have been really reluctant,

about, you know, with AI in general, I’m like, oh, we don’t really need

I will call them back.

months, especially with more and more businesses using AI, they’ve seen.

Okay. But the same with call these businesses back. They’ve moved on.

Right? I mean, they these folks back, they’ve moved on and because they

call the next the next company on the list that they had and those

people were available or I was available and and they balked and they

moved on.

business, a lot of business, and a lot of money that gets left on the

table. And that initial kind of like, are we actually booking? What are

the reasons we’re not booking? And a lot of it is just has to do with

just coaching up your team and then making sure that you have a safety

net of outbound campaigns.

seconds, not 20, 30 minutes, an hour. If you call back somebody who has

a burst pipe in an hour, I mean, they need a solution right now. It’s

not, you know, in an hour.

that’s doing 60%, they, they, they’re just tracking manually and they

think it’s 60% just guessing. They’re not really.

way through. You can be doing a lot of manual disposition still even

even if you’re doing, you know, 4 or 5, $6 million in revenue a year,

majority of those businesses are still doing manual disposition, and

there’s still a CSR manager that goes through and checks things and

looks for patterns.

they’re not really looking at.

That’s when you actually see the actual numbers.

see the patterns of why the ones that didn’t get booked, what happened

there. And they can be resistance there sometimes do. Right. Like nobody

wants to feel like they didn’t do a good job. But it’s more about hey,

now we know. And now your CSR manager or your own or your operational

manager can actually look at the issues and figure out a way to fix

them, whether it’s in the script or whether it’s in the coaching or

whether it’s in the promotions.

within them what they weren’t qualified. Those people called, but, you

know, they were looking for something we don’t provide where that’s not

necessarily true.

your cost by position tracking your numbers. You know, at the end of the

day, I mean, because you were in marketing before, before you you do you

make any decisions, you have to kind of understand what the numbers say.

In marketing. Right? I think the way, the way I look at it and the way I

try to talk to clients and people that we work with, is that marketing

is just a math problem.

it’s really not a gut feeling like, gut, you know, I’m selling gut or

anything like that. I just it’s a numbers game and understanding what

the numbers say. And most people have no idea. And that’s really what

reality like. That’s that’s what most small businesses, in the trade

didn’t really in any, any, any vertical.

ones that figure it out, you know, doing over 10 million, 20 million,

they have all have holes, but they kind of figured out, how it works a

little bit better. And that’s really the gap that I’m trying to bridge

with in this podcast, really, the whole kind of the theme that I’ve been

talking about for a long time is understanding and using technology.

using technology to kind of solve that gap.

Right. Like I think majority of the businesses that we have these talk

to, they’re trying to track like you know, marketing budgets spend on

this campaign. And how many leads they got that bar they have down. But

it’s then how the how a lot of the leads that converted how do they

actually relate to the campaigns that you had.

campaigns that bring a ton of leads, but none of them convert. And then

you have technically campaigns that you would otherwise pause because,

hey, it’s only about three four leads, but those are actually all three

of them converted. So if you’re not, go a step further and not just

saying, oh, I know where we get our leads from, then, you know, you need

to seek out of the full funnel.

that last time is that when you’re examining leads, some of the leads

are going to be high volume, but they don’t convert as well. So you’re

think you’re getting a lot of leads, but you’re not actually seeing if

they’re converting or not. Yeah. Yeah that’s that’s a big part. So how

should a contractor judge their, their campaigns?

dollars spent on campaign to actually book jobs and then to the jobs

that actually completed. Right. Because you then have another drop off

of a book job cancellations. Right. People that for whatever reason,

decided to to fall off after that part. So I would also look at that

rate. Is there is there a pattern there per campaign, per channel that

might not be, but check in.

completed? Is a is a really good one because what you want to make sure

is that that funnel doesn’t just exist top down. Right. But then you

have those happy customers and you have your maintenance campaigns to

them that you that you can do right to kind of, hey, this might need a

tune up or, hey, we’re doing this.

activity to do your maintenance campaigns. You’re happy, calls all of

that to kind of bring people back and and make sure they consistently

have your name in their mind for when something happens is key. And that

doesn’t end just when the job is completed.

stuck. Managers are stuck with, doing manual disposition. What what what

is leads actually do what how do they solve that problem?

outbound calls that I handled in the call center. And then we show you

specifically how many of those calls were qualified. So when we’re

onboarding a company we go through how do they think about qualified

calls. What makes it a qualified. And it’s a pretty standard process,

right? With like, hey, it needs to be in this area that we serve.

services that we provide. These are the promotions that we run. And

that’s how you qualify the, the calls. So then that number of qualified

calls usually ends up being higher than what they’re expecting, because

sometimes it’s just a CSR not being able to convert them or not having a

script that works or, you know, whatever other problems that might be

going on there.

call what happened. And then we’ll show you specifically, here’s the top

five reasons your qualified calls that should have converted didn’t. So

as a manager, when you come in and it’s busy and especially if it’s a

busy season, your phones are, you know, going off nonstop, you know,

specifically where you need to focus.

our calls didn’t convert last week or yesterday or a month ago or, you

know, in the past month is, let’s say, price objection or availability.

We had customers who, they look at least every day. That’s part of their

daily stand up for the team. They look at what happened yesterday.

patterns that I’ve seen across yesterday and across the past week, and

then they make decisions. And so one of the things that they saw happen

was, availability. They didn’t have enough availability. So they quickly

readjusted some technicians and were able to pull to to, you know, kind

of reformat the timelines and were able to get a lot more jobs the next

week.

reevaluating your data once a quarter, you can’t make that decision that

quickly, right? You’re going to by the time you make it okay. But now

it’s this low season. It’s irrelevant. You can now just prep for the

next one. So if you’re able to look at that data and see the pattern of

why things are not converting on a daily, weekly basis, you can make

decisions much faster and realign much faster and get a lot more revenue

out of the money already spent.

to spend more money, right? We don’t need to spend money on marketing.

You’re already likely spending a good amount. Now let’s maximize the

amount that you’re spending.

availability and then pricing objections. Those are the most common

ones. Talk to me. Walk me through pricing objections. So you see that

there almost that a lot of CSR, managers in CSR as they see that

actually kind of drops it off. What what have you seen like in the

software that really helps them overcome that?

So as you can imagine, the pricing conversation is always stuff, right?

Because the person on the other side wants to know how much this is

going to cost. But until the technician is truly there, they can’t

diagnose it. I mean, sometimes they can guess what it might be, but they

don’t actually know the true price.

customer feel like you’re not they’re not going to get scammed. They’re

not going to end up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills. How

do you reassure them that you know your business is going to give them a

fair quote? And a lot of that sometimes is the dispatch fee question.

what is this going to cost me? And that comes down to a couple of things

that you can do. One, you can see the calls that where this was an

objection, but then it got resolved. So how did the CSR CSR handle that.

And we actually show you, hey, here’s the pricing objection.

And here’s the people on your team that have handled it and booked the

call. So you can listen back. And in those, you know, 30s when they’re

talking about it. How did that what did they say, what was the language

that they used and what specifically worked and why it worked.

script or, or however you want to do it. You can kind of coach on those.

So you see a real examples of, hey, I didn’t know how to talk about it,

but Mark did. Let’s listen to his example. Oh, okay. Now I have an idea

of how to talk about it, and we make that data available and that

information available to the CSRs so they don’t have to wait for the

manager to say, hey, it seems like you’re having a you’re having trouble

with talking about pricing.

can see themselves, and they can kind of preemptively figure that out

before anybody needs to even talk to them and solve it for themselves.

So because they also don’t they’re working so hard, they don’t want to

feel like, you know, they’re not doing a good job or somebody is telling

them they’re not doing a good job.

to that information and, and what to say and how they could try to say

it, it will help and they will be able to do it. Also.

favoring companies that are transparent in terms of pricing, because

that’s what actually one of the most common, searches that people are

searching for. If you’re looking for a new water heater, you know,

replacement, they want to know the price, right?

things. And, you know, depending on the contractor, a lot of people push

back on that. But, you know, Google is actually favoring companies that

provide online estimates. You see a lot in the roofing industry is also

coming in a lot in the Hvac industry. What’s your opinion on on having

pricing, being more transparent with pricing on, on on the marketing

clutter on websites.

think about that?

seen it actually both ways. We have some customers who have big

customers who have multiple and multiple offices, and they don’t tell

you pricing anywhere. Not on Google, not on their website, not even over

the phone. And their whole idea is, hey, we. But they’re so dialed in on

making sure that the customer feels taken care of, that it becomes

almost a second, a second secondary problem, the that there is a value,

obviously, especially if you are maybe a smaller shop and having that

pricing upfront because you can kind of build some trust with the folks,

especially if your name is not quite big yet in the area

same time, you can price yourself out, right? Unless you go in very low

there now have that price and they’re going to try to find somebody

cheaper. So you want to make sure you’re not locking yourself out of

that opportunity just because it’s, you know, the unnamed price. And

maybe that’s not even what they needed.

this is very specific that you kind of have to test that and see what

works for your for your customers and for your audience. But we’ve seen

it work very well where, you know, they can give a ballpark, hey, it’s

likely somewhere from here to here. But and you know, the dispatch fee

that that we have, we will apply that towards that cost.

that will also help you if you have something like that. But it kind of

depends on the size and, and the vibe that you’re trying to have. Right?

I think it’s tough when you tell the price up front, it becomes a price

conversation rather than an experienced conversation. And and a at the

end of the day, people want to feel taken care of, right?

focusing on beating another person’s price, but on are we providing the

experience that people want to come back to is key. And I’ve had it. I

own I own a house myself, and we’ve had multiple things happen over the

years, and I’ve had multiple of those conversations. You know, like, I

do want to know the price, right?

of dollars unprompted. But there were definitely businesses where I felt

like I felt like they were going to do a good job. And even if at the

end of the day, it ended up being 100 bucks or 200 bucks more than

somebody else, I felt like I was taken care of.

remember. And that was of the people you go back to.

As common as people think that a lot of us CSR managers are having

trouble in the trades. Like you see, I have had no idea that’s

happening.

historically. Or sooner availability, like people wanting somebody to

come. Now that’s a tough one. Especially if you don’t have a lot of

flexibility on that. That’s a tough one. Yeah, I would say the dispatch

fee just kind of gets everybody everybody’s struggles with that one

because it’s just like nobody wants to pay 50 bucks for somebody to come

out.

ready to go. When when that. Okay okay. Let’s

availability there’s ways around that. Right. Not just saying, hey our

soonest availability is Friday and it’s Tuesday, but saying okay I’ll

get you on a cancellation list. Let me see what we can do. You also as a

CSR you know potentially. Right. Like, does it sound like a person unit

or is this a more of a smaller issue.

back to your management. So having backups, not just saying hey

availability is Friday. Deal with that. It’s okay, I can put you on a

cancellation list. Let me see what I can figure out. Let me see if you

know what the options are. And again, it’s creating that human

conversation.

thing. There’s ways to do that. So it’s really just focusing on creating

that customer relationship.

if they have the ability to serve the same day, they can do the same day

appointments. That’s going to increase their conversion rate

tremendously because the speed is a big factor. And people actually

willing to pay more money if their, if their if they get the think about

the Amazon, it’s it they have instant gratification to live an instant

gratification society.

is an issue that they’re trying to resolve, right. Like with home

remodeling is a little bit different because you can have people redoing

their bath and redoing their kitchen. It’s not urgent today, but if your

AC is broken and it’s 115 degrees, I mean, you’ll pay a little bit more,

but get somebody today.

service based businesses like Hvac, plumbing, roofing versus, you know,

project based businesses like, you know, like I said, remodeling

bathroom. Those are they take a little bit longer time to sell. And

that’s actually and also there are different platforms. One is more

Google Focus. The other one is actually more Facebook focus that you get

the most success.

factor if you’re the way the way I actually think about it. If you if

you’re like you know, a service based business, it’s usually two

businesses, emergency based businesses, emergency type of business. And

then you have the the bigger ticket items if you’re trying to replace, a

roofer or trying to replace a water heater, it’s going to take a little

bit of time and people are going to take some time because there’s a

bigger ticket and they’re going to take the time to actually replace it.

think about it. And you should have different scripts and different

prompts for that as well. Right. And different ways how users can handle

it and know where where to put value.

looking at in place, or just in general speaking like for for when

booking rate? When you’re, when you’re looking at the numbers on on the

marketing actual numbers, what kind of numbers should they be looking

at?

and rate is a pretty easy one qualification rate as well. Right? To know

how many qualified leads you actually get in the door versus not I would

say outbound. How much, how many of those, how much just exactly in the

off season, how much outbound are you doing and how much outbound are

you you booking maintenance again?

marketing, not just in hey, this is a lead gen and, you know, the funnel

kind of go goes like like we’re in the funnel. But think about, okay, we

need to also prep for offseason. What what kind of campaigns are you

running? Which ones are successful. And that can be again maintenance

happy happy calls.

offseason? Are you preparing them for the busy season? Right. Instead of

saying, hey, we’ve serviced you or your unit two years ago, you probably

want to get a rechecked before it’s 115 degrees outside, right? Or

before it’s negative temperatures. So let’s get you on the board now

before it’s very busy and then you’re scrambling to call somebody.

success rate not just on the lead gen funnel coming in, but are you

retaining those customers. How many of those repeat customers, how many

do referrals. Right. Like kind of building out the rest of your final

and not just thinking we need more leads me more easily. We need more

leads.

doing with the leads that you have and what is the success rate there?

That’s where I would start.

with doing on the actual up on site on the maintenance. What kind of

cap? Enjoy that running.

business season. It’s just a constant outbound. And I is perfect for

that. You can have an a CSR is really rarely want to sit there. And do

you know, hundreds and hundreds of outbound calls. It’s a lot,

especially during the busy season. So having I do that in the back is

great.

That works very well. Hey, here’s a $60 to an app that we’re going to

do. Well, here’s a free check or you’ve been a customer for this long.

Let’s do this. You know, let’s do this kind of a check in, or a

maintenance program where it’s a monthly pay, but your, you know, your

service in them consistently.

the outbound and test, test, test, test. We suggest also testing the

channels, in case you can set up a, you know, sort of an AB see test

campaign. With how many emails do you want them to get, how many texts

versus calls. And you can see what channels are working the best and

what combo works the best.

calls, two emails, you know, three text messages. Or maybe it’s all text

messages and really figure out what’s the what’s the channel that your

customers really resonate with and, and connect with. And then use that

use that more consistently. So outbound is is key. As especially

especially kind of at the tail end of that busy season to prep for the

slow season.

so that again, it’s a motion that your customers know that if something

like you can’t conscious on the top of mind. Right. So the next time

something happens or somebody needs something, you’re the last name they

saw the the last name they remember speaking to.

CRMs and dieters with server side. And being the deepest phone owner who

isn’t technical, what is connecting the phone to the CRM? Actually let

them see that they couldn’t before.

said, that server side makes it incredibly, incredibly easy. All we need

is a is your server site and ID and then we can connect from there. And

it’s about 30 minutes to set that up and kind of connect to that data.

Other great ones that we’ve worked with that are again, pretty easy set

ups is RingCentral dial pad.

five, nine, eight by eight that we see consistently that really easy to

work with, real easy to connect with. And you can kind of see the data,

very quickly and easily.

they think about the gimmick still. Right. It’s still kind of slow

adoption and like a robot sealing jobs. What do you think they’re

getting wrong in both directions.

recording with one of our customers. Quality service. Company. And, I

will give a little, anecdote there. They came up, they recently started

using, what, a couple months ago, started using our ECR right. To answer

the calls after hours. And when they’re busy and overflow, and book the

jobs.

with, one of the customers, he, owns a property management company, so.

And they service all of his properties, so they in contact with him

quite a bit. And so he end up calling, the owner of the quality service

company on the weekend and was like, hey, wanted to congratulate you on

the new lady that you hired.

And he was actually talking about it because, like, oh, Quinn. And he

was like, oh, that’s that’s I he was like, no, like, she was so great.

And he like, that couldn’t have been. I was like, no, that’s our new

way. I, I, agent that we’re using. And that was a great example of like

that happens a lot more than people expect.

sure. And that’s inevitable because it’s a big jump, right? You don’t

want to mess up your customer base. You don’t want them to get upset.

You don’t want them to, you know, call somebody else or not feel taken

care of. But the AI has come a really long way. And you can do it can

really help.

still feel a little bit reluctant and like, I’m not sure this is going

to work, start with after hours. This is a really easy one. If you don’t

have anybody answering after hours, and that’s going just straight to

voicemail with your agents calling them back in the morning, those leads

are done.

there. You’re not losing anything. Start there and you will quickly see,

oh wow, it actually works. And those jobs are not lost. And then that

kind of build some confidence. And the use cases and other use cases

that you can do. And then you trust a little bit more on that overflow.

to lead and and outbound. But you can build that muscle. We never

suggest to start with every use case possible. Right. Because it’s still

a process like build build kind of that experience for your customers.

Be intentional about it. Just because something has AI in it doesn’t

mean it’s fantastic.

to make sure that the experience that your customers are getting are

quite like that when right where it’s like, wow, what a great new person

that you hired. Build that experience. Don’t look just for AI or the

cheapest cost. Look for a partner that you can build and develop, and

make sure your business has an ability to grow.

after hours, right? Easier to implement, right? Typically. And at the

same time, when you start with that’s ours, guys. If you starting with

after hours, one of the, one of the big levers you can pull that that

many people have you’re not doing is is if you’re actually you’re able

to service 24 hours a day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, because

actually, when I read this, I should research, I think like 60% of the

leads come after hours.

can’t service, outside business hours, you’re losing a big opportunity

to, to generate leads from other campaigns. You already running.

work or something, right. Like they’re going to call you when they’re

done work or when they come home and something happens like so much like

you said. Yes. So many of those leads happen after hours, so why not

capture them? That’s a lot of money wasted on the table.

typically how long does it take to implement an actual, CSR after hours

that quickly from for the big. Not as long as the onboarding process

takes

probably a couple of meetings during that week. And then again, it

depends kind of on the readiness of the company. Right. So I will put a

phrase with that. We the best companies have a champion internally who

is interested in making this work. It doesn’t have to be an AI person by

any means.

manager or the operational manager, somebody needs to want to fix this

and somebody needs to want to do this. Otherwise it will be very

difficult. You need the thing, but AI, somebody still needs to manage

it, right. You still need somebody to look at the data. You still need

somebody to help fine tune that, that that bot.

key, and having that buy in from that advocate is key. Right. And then

it comes down to do you guys have your scripts ready. Do you have

scripts or do you have a playbook. Right. Some businesses we start

working with, they don’t have a playbook. So it takes longer because we

help them build out the playbook that they need.

It’s a couple, it’s two calls and then we just start fine tuning, right.

So we get on a call, our engineering team gets on a call with the CSR

manager or ops manager, and they start going through calls and aligning.

Hey, is this responding the way that you want? Is the accent the way

that you want?

wanted a southern accent because all of their internal CSRs have a

southern accent. So they wanted they didn’t want a very standard generic

sounding I bought that didn’t sound organic, so they wanted to really

nail in that that southern accent. And then it passed as a real person.

Right? So really fine tuning in, making sure that we’re responding or

they either are responding to the calls just like your people would.

initial set up was just like a couple calls over a couple days. If you

have all the stuff ready.

cases that you have, right? Like do you have different promotions that

you run? How do you handle them? How do you want people to handle? How

do you want AI to handle them? When do you want to for AI to pass the

call to the CSR, right. That’s a big one.

fine with AI kind of going through like two levels of rejection, right?

Or two levels of objections. Right. So if somebody says I don’t really

want to pay the dispatch fee, you can have an option where I says, okay,

let me transfer you to a CSR, do it to a person you can have I push back

like hey the reason we have this is so we can promptly respond and it

will go to your cost.

decide to go with us and maybe a person push back pushes back more and

you can give AI a chance to kind of come back with a rebuttal there. You

can ask, you can say, hey, no, I don’t want like someone’s getting

upset. I want immediately to be passed to a CSR.

structure you would want to have and where do you want to start

certainly helps. It’s not mandatory. We will talk you through it, and we

will discuss and figure out what makes sense for you. But having an idea

of how that how that what might work for your company is, is a good

start.

right already. And and they kind of they have their already set up and

say, I think this is going to work out to send it to you. And then you

just can execute on it.

share the playbook. It makes our life obviously a lot easier.

discouraged. A lot of people don’t still don’t have that figured out.

And you’re relying on, you know, tribal knowledge and just, you know,

figuring that out as you go. And we get help, you get organized and help

you figure that out together.

script.

building a relationship. If your whole script is tied to, hey, get off

the phone as fast as you can and book the job as fast as you can. A lot

of time that doesn’t end up working very well because people, again,

don’t want to feel like they’re transaction, even if it’s a painful

thing that they’re going through right now and they need help.

grab, right? So not just saying, okay, sure. Tomorrow we have time at

8:00 Am, you know, if they go with, hey, I totally understand that.

That’s got to be really sucky right now with the sweater to have to be

going through that. It kind of making people feel heard ends up making a

much better script.

people feel like that’s a waste of time, right? Like you can get to the

next call faster, but the show rate of those people to the actual

appointment and actually that job going through is much higher if you’re

tracking that, if your script is built on relationship building and not

just transactions.

it, can you just kind of use, examples of your best? As I say, a company

has your, CSR and and the best one. Right? They have one that’s really a

star. Maybe they could use examples of that, right? Like, hey, of all of

scopes of, of of their calls and how they do that,

for our scripts. Right. Because okay this works consistently great. I

would even take a couple like maybe top two, top three and do a blended

version just to see what works. Right. But then really train people on

it and give them different paths of how the conversation can go.

you if you’re expecting them to say, okay, that’s fine. And they don’t,

what do you do? How can you recover that call? So training specifically

on that recovery, if a person is upset or frustrated or, you know, how

do you handle that?

let’s what is the who is actually said that we mentioned earlier who’s

actual champion? Is it the actual owner that wants to kind of move into

this?

businesses it’s typically the owner. Some a lot of the time it’s the CSR

manager that we work very closely with. And they become kind of the

biggest champion because that makes their life easier first and

foremost. And so they see the value very, very quickly. That’s not

necessarily a monetary value that the owner sees, right.

that we’ve been able to save or book. But the CSR manager can see really

quickly. I’m out of time. They’ve been saving themselves. They can save

themselves. So I would say ops person or the marketing manager

sometimes, or it’s the CSR manager or CSR, you know, director or

whatever title that might have in the org or the owner, depending on

size of a business.

million. It’s typically the owner. And over over over over 10 million.

It’s like okay that different like leadership and structure and okay

CSR is that I have a like a real fear that, you know, I might replace

them eventually.

try to to so we always try to kind of deal with that upfront because

there is inevitably that feeling right of am I going to get replaced is

the other big one is, is the data can uncover something I really want. I

see right that nobody wants to see that they’re the lowest booking

booking right out of a team.

there’s a lot you can do upfront during that onboarding to really build

the relationship again with the CSR as well. The one of the big things

we talk to them about is you can’t get better if you don’t have the

information right. Like you can be the last person that you can be

running the mile the slowest.

know if the you’re the slowest, right? And what you can improve on. So

you can’t do anything until you have the data. It’s not a personal

issue, right? Like until you know, you can’t you can’t act up. So let us

provide you that data so that you feel comfortable and you can actually

make decisions and changes.

company. This is something that I personally love about lace. We build

our whole model around people. First, we never suggest that you should

be replacing your all of your CSR as our CTO. Boris. He came from meta

and he built AI there for for a long time and built some of the most

leading AI that that that currently exists.

replacing anybody.

structure that we help the companies create is very much people for us.

And what does that mean is creating it still should be focused on the

experiences that you can provide to your customers.

right? That’s where the transactional relationship doesn’t really work.

We want to make sure the CSRs have more time to actually work on some of

those more complicated calls, right? Where that people need multiple

touchpoints and but there’s multiple things going on that you might need

to deal with, but truly build a relationship, not just a transaction AI

can help with.

block and very straightforward. How about I just book so so you can

spend two more minutes with the customer that really needs your help and

really need somebody to take care of them. So it it’s not replacing

them. It gives them more time to focus on higher value calls that I

might not be able to take, and that they now have capacity to really,

you know, focus on.

our jobs is is a bunch of hype. I think it’s been it’s been four years

since that’s a, you know, ChatGPT really became popular. It’s almost

four years and there’s a lot of headlines that a lot of these companies

have laid off companies, laid off employees. And it’s true, they have

laid off a lot of people and they blame I oh, AI is replacing, but in

reality it’s just they’re just not doing that good and their business

and that they’re just, look, look, just they just use AI as a cover

story and reality.

just laying off people because they want to, like, make their profit

margins look better. So it’s been four years already. So I my opinion

with AI and everything is that I think it’s it’s just another tool. It’s

like similar to internet in the 90s obviously with the internet came

out, there’s a lot of, hype and a lot of interest.

a lot of jobs to go away. But they didn’t. It didn’t, go away. They just

had new jobs come. And that’s my opinion.

eventually, for sure, but it will also open up so much opportunity and

so much more. So many more jobs of a different caliber. Right? It’s not

a bad thing if somebody doesn’t have to manually listen to 40 hours of

calls. It’s not a bad thing. That manager can now do something more

useful with their time.

the manual part of their work, but something that again, why that that

advocate is really important, why that internal advocate is really

important. I still need people. It’s not a set it and forget it if

you’re expecting to set it up and then it’s done and is just operates on

its own, you’re not going to have a good result.

check in. It needs you to make sure to make edits because nobody knows

the business as well as as, you know, as that CSR manager or as that

owner. A guy still needs people. So this whole idea of, hey, let’s just

have I do everything, it’s really not going to work.

something that I personally really liked about about Larsen. We’ve had

customers actually, who’ve come in from competitors that where they

ended up getting rid of the entire org of CSR, and they went with AI

agents for everything. And guess what ended up happening? Their Google

reviews tanked in a month. They can come back with like, hey, it’s one

stars for for for for a month straight, and what do we do?

shouldn’t be the goal. There’s definitely some cost savings that you can

have. But if you look at it again, less transactionally and more, how do

I create a business that’s successful one term? It’s certainly not. By

firing everybody and keeping it.

service businesses put AI on their phones, what is a well-run call

center experience look like? How does the experience change for the

homeowner calling in?

that there’s a lot actually being done with, you know what those units

in in homes, right. What information they can transmit to the home

service businesses and how they can react to it before the issue comes

up. Right. So if you are AC is connected to, you know, a home service

company that that service in it and you can say, hey, I’m seeing this

being inefficient and you can kind of know about this upfront.

to reach out to somebody. And be can be a proactive, kind of outreach. I

think there’s a lot that’s going to happen there that will make maybe

home service businesses being less reactive and able to be a little bit

more proactive, which will make a big difference and allow people to

kind of rely on like, hey, I will know if something is wrong before it’s

really wrong.

businesses and the better, I guess what time right now is getting better

every year, every couple of months. So the better it gets and the more

trust people end up having in hey, I can fully trust it with these use

cases and we really focus on higher quality customer service.

different level. Like your CSRs are not just yep, okay, let me book this

job. They truly focus on those more complicated conversations and really

building that customer base that’s that’s loyal, that you know, that you

can really service that help. I think it will kind of jump a whole other

level in in the next year or two.

thing this week to stop losing jobs on the phone before they ever buy

any software, what would you tell them to do?

What do you make it, how and how quickly are you able to make decisions?

Just be honest with yourself and one thing we suggest, and I personally

suggest this,

figure out your customer journey.

your prospects have right now with you?

like? But just write it down and then think about your business, and you

likely know it better than anybody else. Think about where do you think

the gaps are? What do you think the biggest drop off is? And do you have

data to back that up and start that? It might maybe for you it’s not a

call center, maybe for you it’s the technicians or maybe for you it is

the lead gen.

you know, there’s so much noise. Again, we started with that. There’s so

much noise. So I always suggest, hey, sit down in a quiet room and write

out your customer journey and what do you want it to be and see what you

can back up with data. And then you’ll see the gaps and then work from

that rather than, hey, this is a fancy demo and I want to take it.

where they are or reach out to me directly. It’s K Lisanne Cahill. At

least that I and I’m happy to help, obviously, but you can find us

online or on Facebook. On LinkedIn. Always happy to help and answer any

questions.

appreciate it.

Home Service Pros. If you got value from today’s episode, do us a favor.

Follow the show. Share it with a contractor friend and leave a quick

review. Want help using AI or smarter marketing to grow your business?

Head to Contractor Marketing pros dot net and book your free strategy.

Call.