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CSTG 254: Call Centers Are Your Hidden Revenue Machine with Tyson Chen

37m 38s

CSTG 254: Call Centers Are Your Hidden Revenue Machine with Tyson Chen

The podcast discusses how home service businesses can optimize their call centers to drive revenue. Chad Pederman introduces Tyson Chen, co-CEO of Avoca, which uses AI to manage customer journeys. Tyson highlights three common mistakes: not tracking booking rates, failing to handle after-hours calls effectively, and missing daytime opportunities due to rigid scheduling or lack of callbacks. He explains the difference between raw booking rate (calls booked vs. total calls) and true booking rate (booked vs. bookable opportunities), noting that many businesses overestimate their performance. Avoca’s AI evaluates calls using custom rubrics, scoring CSRs on inputs like empathy and script adherence. This enables targeted coaching, such as ensuring CSRs mention memberships on every call, which can boost membership sales. The call center also provides operational intelligence—e.g., identifying capacity constraints or high dispatch fees that prevent bookings. Chad emphasizes that sharing business context with CSRs, like lead costs, improves their effort and alignment with company goals. Overall, the conversation stresses treating the call center as a revenue driver rather than a cost center, using data and AI to capture every opportunity.

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Hey, Chad Pederman here. If you're investing in marketing but still missing calls, booking slowly, or losing leads after hours, you're not alone. Probook helps businesses capture, qualify, and book leads instantly using AI, so no opportunity slips through the cracks. Whether it's inbound calls, text, or web leads, Probook makes sure your business responds fast and books more jobs automatically. If you're ready to turn demand into book revenue, check out [email protected]. If you're serious about growing your home services business, you've got to check out Camp Digital. They specialize in digital marketing that's built for the contractors. Not just clicks, but real leads that turn into real jobs. If you're ready to stop wasting money and start scaling smarter, book a demo with the camp team. Link in the show notes. So powerful of all the intel that you can get out of your business and where you need to take it from the call center. And reality, a well-running call center is an absolute revenue driver. Chad Pedermen here, and you are listening to "Can't Stop the Grove," a platform for leaders and teams to grow and thrive. We highlight the importance of personal development, pursuing greatness, and always chasing your potential. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome to another episode of "Can't Stop the Growth." I'm your host, Chad Pedermen, and today we are going to talk about something that I've been talking about for quite a while. And I've been talking about it for quite a while because it's something that we're actively looking to improve within our own business at Pedermen Brothers. And I thought when we talk about call centers and data and training of the call center and all of these things, I thought of no one better to bring on the podcast than my friend, founder and co-CEO of Avoca, and get this, host of a brand new podcast, "Trade Secrets from the Ground Up," Mr. Tyson Chen. Welcome to the podcast, Tyson. Thanks, man. I have me, Chad. I'm so excited to be here with you, too. Yeah, absolutely. I think that if there's one area, especially as we roll into summer, companies are getting ready for summer, getting ready for the busy season. And so, how can we kind of bolster those internal ops to make sure that they're capturing all the opportunities that come in the door? I guess first, maybe give, I mean, I'm sure people that are listening to this podcast have heard of you guys know what you're doing, but once you give us kind of a brief overview of Avoca, and again, listeners, the goal of this is not to be a sales pitch. The goal is to educate. The goal is to provide you with useful information. And perhaps, I do know, because we use the product, Tyson's product may be able to assist in that. So, Tyson, give the listeners a little bit of background on what Avoca is. And obviously, it's always evolving and you guys are coming out with new stuff. But what is Avoca and how does it help customers? Yeah, I think at the highest level, the way I describe Avoca is an agentic platform to help allowing your customer journey. And really, I love the way you describe it, Chad, which is a lot of folks in this industry think the call center they view it as a call center. We have to have the call center to handle the customers. And reality, a while running call center is an absolute revenue driver. It's the first glimpse that a lot of folks have into the entire business. And it needs to be treated with a immense amount of care. And really, that's the product that put Avoca on the map, which is our AI CSR. And you know, it can sound like your best agent answer the phone on the first ring provide reliable consistent experience that augments and up levels the overall cost of our experience for your customers. And over the last two, two and a half years, we've also started to create a suite of products across coaching, outbound, and even speed to lead to make sure that no revenue leakage happens for home service businesses. Awesome. Yeah, absolutely. I guess my first question for you, Tyson, obviously you've been doing this two to an half years, developed this product, helping a number of customers out there. Like when you when you and you may not do this as much anymore, but obviously you're aware of it. But like, what are the most common like mistakes or oversights? Do you see happening in, you know, call centers today in home services companies? Like what what are people? What are people missing? And then hopefully, you know, educate the listeners on things that, oh shoot, I'm not looking at that either or shoot. We need to get a KPI on that. Like what what have you typically seen out there? Yeah, you know, a lot a lot of different ones. But if I to summarize into the top three kind of heavy hitters, I'd say one right off the bat is just having an understanding of what are the KPI's of the call center? And I think the biggest one is booking rate. And obviously it's a very easy concept to understand, but in practice, I am always amazed by how little I would, if I had to estimate probably under 10% of home service businesses where we work with have a true grasp of what their booking rate is. And you know, without understanding even the number one real metric, you're essentially flying blind. And so I think that's the first place to start. The second place is understanding, you know, there's this huge after hours of overflow where a lot of your most valuable leads in a generally a pretty considerable amount of volume, you know, comes and not having a good solution there. So whether you have like an answering service or a ghost of voicemail, there's a lot of kind of sub-optimal things that people are doing. And if you just patch that hole, you can easily drive a lot more revenue. And then the final thing on the call center piece, I would classify as missed opportunities even during the day. And here there's probably two caps. One is just like not booking enough jobs and not being aggressive enough. So for example, when a really high opportunity aged HVAC install comes and you're denying that because your board is full, that's just one of the easiest things, right? You know, you can you can reschedule maintenance to be able to have a shot at a $20,000 job. Obviously you take that 10 times out of 10. But because of, you know, processes, a lot of companies don't do that. So doing that and then also the and then on the same kind of level there, calling back every single opportunity that you do not book right away, I think those two things can easily get you, you know, an extra 10% of revenue uplift. So again, the three things, understanding what your actual booking rate is, having a good solution for after hours over a flung weekends, and shoring up kind of missed revenue opportunities during the day. I say those are the big three for me. Awesome. Yeah. Let's dive into this. Let's unpack the booking rate thing because I talked to so many people and like the way that they calculate it, what they're looking at, like it's skewed. What are you what is booking? Like how do you guys class? What is booking rate? Like I always say there's booking rate and then there's a true booking rate. How do you guys kind of look at booking rate and how is how should that appropriately be calculated? Yeah. So I we kind of think in similar veins like two concepts, one, raw booking rate. This is super easy. Denominator is the total number of calls you get during that day. For example, let's just say 100 and then the numerators, how many of those calls you booked. So let's say it's 20. So then your raw booking rate is 20%, 20 divided by 100. Then we also have a similar concept. We stopped. We used to call it true booking rate. Now we just call it like just booking rate like raw and just, you know, but let's just say true booking rate in this case. They're the numerators still the same, the number of booked calls. So let's just keep it at 20. And then the denominator instead of total calls that came, the denominator is the amount of calls that were bookable opportunities. And so let's say instead of 100, that then goes to 50. Now we're doing 20 divided by 50, which is 40%. So that would be an example. And yeah, I think the struggle with a lot of operators is that raw is generally a lot easier to calculate. So I always say if if you don't want to spend any effort, just index on raw booking rate because that number can't lie. And if you do have the time and energy, you should be really thinking about true booking rate. But where a lot of people get caught up is when they start using service titans booking rate or they have their own CSRs like rate like kind of disposition and calls, you think you have an idea of true book and rate, which is like 85, 90% in a lot of people think. And it's actually like 50, 60% because you're not actually classifying correctly what is all of the bookable opportunities. And that's kind of where obviously I know you guys are have just started using coach, but that's where you know coach helps out a lot. Yeah, absolutely. I can speak to that because we use it, you know, the ability for AI to review basically every call, categorize it right, and then also provide our CSR manager and our internal ops team like coaching opportunities. Like I think the best part of the of the whole coaching platform is the ability to give a CSR a KPI on how they handled the call. So whether booked or unbooked giving them a score based on did they hit the parts of the script that they show empathy. All of these things to me is the most powerful tool because it's so hard to like like like if you're trying to tell somebody, hey, you're not using enough empathy. What the heck does that mean? Like how do I use more like you know like it gets very convoluted where this to me is very like cut and dry. Like I mean you figure out how to calculate I mean how do you guys go about like determining that I forget what you guys call it, but like the score that they get on how they handled the call. Yeah, so yeah, exactly. I think there's that kind of goes into and generally in any KPI I think you should have input metrics and an output metrics. And the input metrics should be the things that you track to make sure that the laggurting outward metrics eventually get there. And I think yeah, in this same way in sports, right? You do the right things over and over again and eventually the results will come. But for us, you know, there's a variety of different rubrics that you can choose from who can create your own rubric. But effectively you, you know, some people use like the next star CubeSat evaluation form, you know, what have you variety of forms that you can choose. And the way it works is that you assign every section a weight and then the AI listens to that call and gives you a grade zero to 100 based on how you how well you did in every single section. Yeah, absolutely. Which has been huge for our team just to be able to see that. And then come in every morning, they know how they did yesterday. And then we can approve upon that. What are the things we need to work on? Where are the things we need to coach or the areas that you may be forgetting? Obviously, there's a lot to do when a call comes in. You can kind of see what the top performers are doing too. So it's like, you got exactly what they're doing, trained to that. And you know, you add spits, you know, all these different things. But first things first, you need to have a good way to understand objectively. Did they do the right things and did they make the right play the same thing in poker, right? Doesn't matter if you win or lose a hand in poker, the main point is was your decision making sound and did you make the right play? And if you make the right play over a large enough sample size, the results will come. Yeah. One of the things and I'd like you to touch on this. So one of the things that I look at a lot is how what what what things our call center tells our operations. Meaning, you know, if we are struggling from a booking or cancellation rate in a certain location on a certain trade line, to me, the beauty of your tool is the ability to quickly see why are those people canceling? Like, if I listen to all the canceled calls or all the unbook calls, I can quickly determine why they are canceling. Tell me a little bit about like what you've seen as like those things that like people aren't looking at like mostly calls center like booking rate, cancellation rate, how they're doing. Like, what are what are some of those things that you feel like, hey, AI and the ability to go very fast can help us with the operation side of the business. Yeah. Love that question. So I think a few things, right, on the statistics, some of the most interesting things that you can quickly discover is one like out of your unbooked reasons, what are the main root causes, whether that's availability, whether it's like your CSRs aren't trained properly in, you know, objection handling, whether the dispatch fee is too high, you can quickly see, okay, what is keeping my, my true booking rate from getting as high as possible? Like, why isn't it 90%? You might discover it's a capacity issue. You know, you just, you're, you're just not staffed well enough and you can't take, you know, great demand calls because you're, you know, overbooking too much with like the maintenance and, you know, those are operational changes that you can make. You might discover that the dispatch fee is just like way too high and you're, you're getting like, 20% of calls, they want a book, but they can't, it's a dispatch fee. So I think really having a firm understanding of what's preventing you from booking a higher level is, is like fundamental, it's like a very easy thing to then go and fix operationally. And then the second thing is, and what I've seen, you know, a lot of companies have great success with is really big kind of membership pushes and things of that nature. So let's say you want to have a big membership push in the months of like, you know, May and June and sign people up. Well, one of the easiest ways to get membership, it sounds so stupid, is just as being, is just telling them about the membership and the benefits. And I'll always remember, there's a company we worked with early on when we developed in coach, where they couldn't figure out for the, for why they weren't selling more memberships. And then they did an audit of 100 calls. And after a cameraing to their CSRs for weeks about like every single call mentioned the memberships, Chad, like, guess how many of those 100 calls that they audit it, they actually talked about memberships. When they first did it, probably zero. It was like 20, like 20 only 20 out of 100. And they had made it a rule. It was like, guys, like you, you have to mention memberships, the most important thing. And it turns out only 20% like 20 ish out of the 100 that they were actually doing it. And so our, our simple thing we added to coach was we just waited. Did you ask, did you talk and ask about the membership in every call as 10% of the entire grade? Instantly within literally the next week, that number was like over 80, over 90% I believe. And they, and suddenly they saw membership spike up like two acts in terms of the memberships that they sold over the phone. Yeah, I think that's a huge point. I, I, I am a firm believer that the best place to talk about the membership, whether you close it or not is in the call center. Because it's my belief that if you can get a small commitment out of the customer, that is a really good thing. Also, if you, they become a member and then you send a technician out to their house, oftentimes our membership has a discount or whatever, but it's not the discount anymore. It's, well, I'm a member. Like, why wouldn't I buy this service? Like, I'm not going to go somewhere else. I already signed up for the membership. Like, it's kind of one of those things that I think is, is truly powerful. And then the other thing I wanted to kind of, kind of talk a little bit more about is that capacity piece. And I think this is so important because your call center and operations need to be talking. And the biggest reason they need to be talking is because our people on the front lines, whether it be a service manager, an office manager, a general manager, when it comes to adding capacity, we are restricted by the information that we do not know. And the information that they do not know is all the calls that came in and weren't able to be booked, not because the CSR did not do their job, because there was not a place to put that call on the board. And so you've got operations going, well, I can barely keep the two guys I got dizzy. And it's because they only see the eight calls that actually hit the dispatch board. They don't see the 16 that actually came into the call center, but the other eight customers didn't want to wait. And so I think that's so powerful of like all of the intel that you can get out of your business and where you need to take it from the call center. Like they're going to tell you the full story where oftentimes, I mean, I hear this, we don't hear it anymore because we've taught through it, but it's like, you've got to get all these people in the same room to understand what is actually happening in the business because so many people only see parts of it. Yeah, exactly. It's like as a business owner, it's clear as day to make like an overbooking happen. It's like, why wouldn't I want to just reschedule a customer if I have an opportunity to kind of do this incredibly large job. But to the individual, they're just silent. And they're like, well, you know, the rule says to not book it if there's no more space. So I'm not going to book it. And then you're just letting it competitor have that job. So yeah, exactly. I do think that a lot of the value here is like being able to start thinking in a more global perspective and getting everyone in the room. together to understand, like, it's kind of, you know, Chad that one time, I think we might have met at this conference, but it was the one where it was Tommy's home service freedom where he brought in Jocco. And Jocco was telling us about his concept of decentralized command. And I always remember, like, that's, that's kind of exactly, you know, the right mentality. You need people need to understand the bigger picture in order for them to make the right decision in their own swim line. 100%. I mean, I think one of the biggest things I think about this that's perfectly related to the call center is, I'll never forget when we told our CSR's how much leads cost. And you think it's like a simple thing, but like, if that CSR team knows that when that lead comes in and it says PPC that we already paid for the lead, they're going to work harder to book that. Like, it's just, it's, it was so like, it was such a little thing. And we were like, Oh my God, how stupid are we? Like, we didn't tell them that these leads or leads that we've already paid for. And what we found out was the call center because we had not educated them on how the business worked, like the entirety of everything, they were like, well, we just thought the phone rang. Like, we're just here to answer it. What do you mean? Like, we just thought it rang. And it, it wasn't like, Oh my God, you're so silly. It's like, Oh my gosh, we forgot to tell you this such a critical element of how this business operates and your role within it. So I think you're spot on with everybody's got to know how the whole thing works. Yep. Exactly. And then put the onus on them to kind of, you know, make, make the right decisions. If you, if you put the top, the right players in the seats. And the funny anecdote, when you mentioned the PPC, this, this is, uh, this is way back in the early days, actually over four years ago, when we were just starting up with Voka, I was outbounding and cold calling people. And I had a pretty good set because it's like, you know, oftentimes they don't, they, they miss it. And then I say, Oh, well, you know, if you had a Voka, you know, I, I could have been a customer. You might have just lost like $20,000. But one time I called an owner and I was, I was, I was, I didn't have any sophisticated tools. I was just calling based on, uh, like Google. I called an owner. He was so pissed off. He's like, Oh, damn, like you just cost me $60 for, for, because I called him on his paper, click ad. And I had no idea if the title was like, what are you talking about, man? I just, I just called this number, um, but I'll never forget he was, he was livid with me because I cost some $60 on a call call. That's awesome. Um, what, um, let's dive into this, this coach thing. Like what, what other intel, uh, does this product help give kind of your CSR manager? Because I always think about it like, you know, back in the day, like, you know, a CSR manager would like, well, hey, part of the one on one with the CSR is review three calls. Well, okay, cool. Like they took a hundred. Like what kind of sample size is this? Like what other data, what other data are you guys helping provide through the coaching, um, platform that, that you think owners would find useful? Yeah. I think there's a few high level KPIs that we look at at both a macro, like a whole team perspective. And those would be like, what are the most common objections that people are getting? What are the most common unbooked reasons? And then being able to act accurately, dissed addition, every single call that comes in. So oftentimes for a lot of owners, this is the first time that they for every single call they have certainty that they, they, they disposition it in the right way. And the way when we work with your team to do that, I know Chad's team in particular has like 20 different distributions. So we had to do a lot of fine tuning to make sure the AI is like, you know, 99.9% accurate. But that's probably one of the biggest ones. And then, uh, and then more at the micro level, um, yeah, I think it's a super powerful tool. What we are able to do is we identified five, what we call hero metrics that the top CSRs like across the US all exhibit in terms of talk to listen ratio, general talk speed, um, you know, filler words, gaps in silence. And we have the optimal ranges for all those things. And so as a CSR manager, it becomes really easy at our next one on one. Chad, you go, okay, well, Chad, you're doing really well in three of these things. Here's an area you need to improve. You need to talk slower when you're handling customer injections or you need to, you know, talk less and let the customer speak more. Like those things, um, are end up being super, super helpful for individual coaching. That's awesome. Yeah, I think, um, you know, I dove in a little bit just to kind of understand the product and what we're getting into and so on and so forth. But, um, yeah, I think it's going to be a hugely powerful tool for us. Um, let's talk a little bit about, I feel like some of the controversy has subsided a touch. Um, when it comes to AI answering phone calls. Um, what are you seeing out there as people kind of navigate this? I feel like, you know, even, even the last time we talked or, you know, like, I'd say six months ago, like the sentiment was one way, but it's slowly shifting. Like, what are you seeing out there as, you know, obviously you guys believe in it. You built a product around it. But like, what are you seeing out there as far as like customer sentiment, you know, company sentiment? Like, what, what, how do you see that evolving? Or where is it today? You feel like? Yeah, it's, it's fascinating landscape and, and yeah, obviously, it's moved a lot faster than even we could have imagined. I think, you know, two years ago when, when I went around trade shows kind of pitching this, um, I think like 90% of people just thought, thought I was an absolute lunatic. And, uh, and obviously, you know, we, there's a lot of, of, of learnings and, and kind of scar, like, you know, war scars that we had. Um, but it's great to see the excitement now. I think, you know, just to kind of break down your question a bit, I think on the customer sentiment and acceptance rate, we've seen pretty clear progress. So one statistics that we track very, uh, closely is the percentage of calls in which, like, uh, a human asks for, uh, to speak to an actual agent when they learn it's AI. That number, like, you know, when we first started was over 20% and probably the loads 20s. Now it's gone to the low teens and just over, you know, around a year and a half. Uh, and so what that means is that people are more and more willing to have the problem solved by AI when they know it's intelligent and it can get the job done. Obviously, people are interacting daily, much more with other AI agents, you know, whether it's, you know, their banks, airplanes, etc. Um, so that's a, that's obviously a very strong trend. Um, and then I think the other thing that we're seeing from the business perspective, and especially for us, like, we probably work with like, you know, many of the largest home service enterprises. Um, and what we're seeing is that the boards of these companies are more and more pushing for stronger AI adoption and obviously, like utilizing AI to drive real world business value. Uh, and, and what that has led to is, um, you know, more, you know, a lot of times we start with our core use case of like being the best answering service you're ever half in terms of, you know, book and rate, containment rate, but like, after ours overflow, now more and more, we've seen a rapid adoption, not just of after ours overflow use cases, but to actually sit at the front line and have the AI answer at each and every single call. Um, and the acceleration towards that mode, um, I, I could not have expected to have gotten this fast. Yeah, it's a, it's pretty powerful stuff. I mean, we don't use it. We kind of give customers like an option, like whoever they want to talk to, like, hey, if you don't want to, if you don't have a way to hold, um, you can talk to an AI agent and get your, get your stuff booked. Um, I would say, you know, I still think we get a little bit of mixed opinion, but I think overall, like, I feel like it's, it's positive. Like, if you got a problem, you just want to make sure that someone's coming. So like, if it can book the call, like, I don't need to sit. Yeah. You don't need our certain call for three minutes. Yeah. Like, I don't know what the problem is. That's why I'm calling you. Um, you know, there's, there's other calls that, yeah, they want to talk to somebody. They want to talk it through. They're not sure what they're looking at. So on and so forth. But, um, yeah, I think that's a good, I think that's a good thing. And I think to your point, like, it's becoming more and more common. Like, people understand that this is out there. And like, while you want to complain about it, like, I think people are starting to realize, like, well, I guess it's, yes, fits. So it's going to be, you know, uh, I think people, people complained early on about like the subscription services. I'm like, I don't want another subscription and this and the other. Well, now everybody's got seven. And probably four of them were the same thing that they forgot that they have on two different credit cards. So, uh, you know, I think people will eventually get there. Um, one of the things too. And I know we talked, we were on a call yesterday talking about this. Like, what, what are you guys looking at as far as like, I love I love how you put avocas, not your just, they may have started like that. Like hey, we're just gonna answer calls. Obviously with AI that the possibilities are fairly endless with this stuff. Like what are you guys looking at right now? Like that's like, you know, in and around what you guys, you know, typically like your base case, here's what we started on, but like how are you guys expanding that? What are you guys looking at where AI can help solve problems for business? Like what are you guys developing? What's new out there on the roadmap? - Yeah, the big thing right now we're starting to look at is marketing. But yeah, I mean, really I think the way I really think about it and every innovation of avocas is squarely and primarily meant for our customers. And we obviously, as you know, we have a very tight, like, you know, set of what we call customer advisory board for which they help us think about all of our product evolution. And it's usually, once we get like five or six of our top customers all asking for the same thing that dictates and we are end of building it. But I'd say the general evolution of avocas kind of like this, which is, we started off with the phone call where 85% of leads come in. We want to be the best platform for being able to close calls into leads. Then we realize, okay, 85% of revenue does come from the inbound phone calls, but there's a lot that come from other leads and stuff too. So then we added speed to lead an omnichannel web scheduling to be able to capture all of those leads that convert them to jobs. That's kind of the phase one act. Phase two is kind of two things. One was obviously a coach, which helps augment the call center. And that's probably more 1.5. And then being able to autonomously book more leads, like always slow your board up. So like when you don't have enough leads, how do you draw upon your membership base, how you do outbounding, always have your board full and do that in an autonomous manner, taking into account things like weather patterns and historical data. And then now on the customer journey path, we're starting to dive into marketing. So you have all of these different, you know, awesome, amazing kind of marketing agencies. And our next thing, which we're working with a very select number of folks on, is figuring out an agentic way to do a lot of, you know, what these large marketing agencies are charging hundreds of thousands of dollars to do in terms of managing SEO, Google, because the way we see it is like, all of these things need to work in harmony, right? You need to turn on the marketing, optimize SEO's friend for paper, like when you need to kind of use that lever to fill the board. Like all of these things should be in service of filling the board in an optimal way. Marketing is simply another lever and something that we think that our agents are able to actually, you know, do pretty well. So that's kind of what's the most interesting kind of new things that are brewing for us. Yeah, absolutely. That's exciting stuff. I mean, I think you look at it, at least I look at it this way, like, okay, we've built the stuff that like takes the call that's coming in now, like how do we farm either our database and a membership base, like with stuff and how do we, to your point, how do we say, hey, all of these people had estimates for water softners in the last six months. Like how do we build that list quickly? How do we deploy a marketing strategy so that we can get the phone ringing so that all of a sudden our AI agents can pick it up? Our CSRs are coached to book the call. And if 10 leads came in, we're booking eight or nine of them. Like, to me, it's like, it's all very cyclical and how we think about flat, flat, - We'll effectively. - You got it. Yeah, how do we drive more stuff into what we already have bolstered? It's like we have the base, we can book calls with the best of them. Now, how do we book more calls that are coming in? So I think that's a super smart idea and super smart way to look at it as it comes, as it relates to helping out customers, for sure. I guess Tyson, anything else that we missed here as far as things that you think either you're developing or things you're thinking about or things that you're seeing before we kind of wrap up here? - No, I think we covered a lot of them. I think, yeah, I mean, especially as summer is rolling around, obviously, speed to lead is going to be incredibly important, as it relates to, you know, you want to be the first person to kind of leap on and answer them. And we've actually done some pretty interesting results around like having drip campaigns. And so not just hitting them with a text or phone call and the lead aggregator, but doing all of those together. I think that's, yeah, that's kind of one area. But yeah, I'm generally, you know, very, very excited. I think the AI landscape is changing extremely rapidly. And so there's even day to day, the amount of contractors and friends, the mind that are using things like Clawd on their day to day operations is rapidly growing. And it feels like we're at one of these very interesting reflection points also where, you know, if you're able to use these AI tools effectively and really get the most out of them, it's almost like before, it's like, you know, you might have get a 20% boost. Now it truly feels and we feel this internally at Avilka, the people that are able to leverage AI tools to their fullest extent are almost like three to five times as productive as someone that's using AI tools, but like not as good. 100%. Yeah, it's crazy what they're pumping out on the daily. Clawd is maybe one of the most unbelievable things that I've ever seen in my entire life. Like the amount of stuff that you can give it and then it just pumps out all this data is just, just crazy. So hopefully, like you said, we're able to leverage this to make smarter, faster decisions about the business. But, you know, all in all ties, and I appreciate you coming on. I appreciate you spending a little bit of time. I think we gave a list of a lot of things that they need to be thinking about, a lot of things that they can kind of course correct. Obviously, some of those things could be solved even faster with some of your guys' tools, which is awesome. They will have a link in the show notes if they're interested in learning more about Avilka, anything like that. Any, is there a better place to go? I think when we first did this, you gave out like your personal email. I'm sure there's another way to get there. As you guys have grown, what's the best way for people to get like ahold of you guys? Yeah. Well, you can always still reach me at [email protected]. But yeah, if you're still learning more, there's obviously visit the website and we'll get you set up with a wonderful demo from our amazing sales team. And last but not least, Chad, I actually am launching my own podcast in a few weeks. It's called Fanky. It's called Trade Secrets from the Ground Up. And it's a podcast truly, really, really dedicated towards kind of interviewing successful home service entrepreneurs, exploring kind of the trials, tribulations and their whole journey of building these massive companies and success in a multitude of ways. Folks that have sold into PE, folks that have just built long lasting businesses and everywhere in between. So yeah, that's that's my fun announcement. Awesome. Good stuff. Well, listeners, be on the lookout for that. I'm sure there'll be a lot of great content that we can gain from there. But again, Tyson, appreciate the time and all the best. And I'm sure I will see you soon, sir. Thanks for tuning in. If you'd like to connect, you can find me at Chad M. Peterman.com. To see what our teams up to, you can visit Peterman Bros. Don't forget to check out our YouTube channel and as always keep growing.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Many home service businesses miss opportunities due to poor after-hours handling, lack of call center KPIs like booking rate, and missed revenue during the day.
  2. Avoca offers an AI-powered platform that includes an AI CSR, coaching tools, and speed-to-lead features to capture and qualify leads instantly.
  3. True booking rate (bookable opportunities vs. total calls) is often miscalculated; AI can help identify root causes of unbooked calls, such as capacity issues or high dispatch fees.
  4. Coaching CSRs on specific behaviors (e.g., mentioning memberships) can significantly improve performance and revenue, as shown by a case where membership mentions rose from 20% to over 90% after adding a weighted rubric.
  5. Call center data provides critical operational insights, such as unbooked demand, that help align capacity and strategy across teams.
  6. Educating CSRs on business context, like lead costs, motivates them to work harder to book jobs.

Summary:

The podcast discusses how home service businesses can optimize their call centers to drive revenue. Chad Pederman introduces Tyson Chen, co-CEO of Avoca, which uses AI to manage customer journeys. Tyson highlights three common mistakes: not tracking booking rates, failing to handle after-hours calls effectively, and missing daytime opportunities due to rigid scheduling or lack of callbacks.

He explains the difference between raw booking rate (calls booked vs. total calls) and true booking rate (booked vs. bookable opportunities), noting that many businesses overestimate their performance.

Avoca’s AI evaluates calls using custom rubrics, scoring CSRs on inputs like empathy and script adherence. This enables targeted coaching, such as ensuring CSRs mention memberships on every call, which can boost membership sales. , identifying capacity constraints or high dispatch fees that prevent bookings.

Chad emphasizes that sharing business context with CSRs, like lead costs, improves their effort and alignment with company goals. Overall, the conversation stresses treating the call center as a revenue driver rather than a cost center, using data and AI to capture every opportunity.

FAQs

Probook helps businesses capture, qualify, and book leads instantly using AI, so no opportunity slips through the cracks. It handles inbound calls, text, and web leads to respond fast and book more jobs automatically.

Avoca is an agentic platform that helps automate the customer journey, with a key product being an AI CSR that answers calls on the first ring. It also offers coaching, outbound, and speed-to-lead tools to prevent revenue leakage for home service businesses.

The top three are: not understanding the booking rate KPI, lacking a good solution for after-hours or overflow calls, and missing revenue opportunities during the day by not being aggressive enough with high-value jobs or failing to call back unbooked leads.

Raw booking rate is the number of booked calls divided by total calls. True booking rate uses only bookable opportunities as the denominator, giving a more accurate picture of performance.

AI coaching reviews calls and scores CSRs on script adherence and empathy using customizable rubrics. This provides objective feedback and helps identify areas for improvement, leading to better booking rates.

Operations often only see booked jobs, missing unbooked calls due to capacity limits. Call centers provide intel on missed opportunities, helping teams adjust scheduling and avoid losing leads to competitors.

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