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Jack and John revisit their previous discussion on how to use and integrate AI into their home service business endeavors, analyzing its transformative impact over the past few months. They reflect into their experience with Avoca, an AI-driven call center software, and discuss its role in enhancing CSR coaching and overall call center efficiency. The hosts highlight initial successes seen in just a few weeks, the potential for field operations, and their aspirations for AI in marketing. The discussion also explores the broader implications of AI on business scalability and future industry trends. Tune in to hear about their journey, insights, and a special promo code for Avoca's services. Click here to schedule your Avoca AI demo today with the promo code 'OWNED'.
Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on Twitter
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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
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Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
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Owned and Operated Episode #128 Transcript
John Wilson: Okay, today on Owned and Operated, Jack and I follow up on a topic that we talked about I think two or three months ago where it was, how does AI improve a home service business? And it's been kind of crazy because we talked about all these different ways we thought it could happen. And then As those months unfolded, like some of them have started to work and the big one that's come out of the woodwork for us has been using aI inside our call center, which I thought was gonna be like a year away.
John Wilson: And it ended up being just a couple months away. So, Today we talk about how we started working with Avoca, which is a call center AI software to help coach your CSRs, and they have a few other products, but that's currently how we use them at the moment. And we talk about what that sort of first 45 to 60 days looks like inside our business.
John Wilson: And we talk about AI in the field, we talk about how it's been happening in our marketing. It's a wide ranging conversation. And evoke is great. They have a really small team. So I told Tyson who's their co founder. I was like, Hey man, like we, we mentioned you on the show today. This is really cool. You should give it a listen.
John Wilson: And he threw up a promo code. So I special pricing. If you check out the link below, so make sure you check that out. If you want to talk to Tyson and his team about how Avoca can help out your call center in coaching and in picking up overflow calls, check out the link below and use the code Owned - O W N E D. Thanks, Tyson. Appreciate that and enjoy the episode.
Jack Carr: Welcome back to owned and operated with your hosts, Jack. I want to give myself a bad ass middle part, but I don't have one on, on, on Jack, cue the screwdriver car. That's terrible. Jack, the truck car and John Wilson on our 22. Wilson. Ooh, that's a good one.
Jack Carr: See it. Like I could use something like that.
Jack Carr: What's going on, John?
John Wilson: Dude. June.
Jack Carr: It feels like June, which is nice.
John Wilson: June is definitely Juning. I remember last June, last year was my least favorite year. Of all time, just so we're on the same page. 2023 was the worst, but I remember like usually our business picks up midway through April and last year it didn't, and then it also didn't pick up in May and it also didn't pick up in June.
John Wilson: So as you can imagine, I was not a happy camper and the phrase that we kept using to ourselves, it might've even used it on the show before, but it's like this June isn't Juning like other Junes. That said, this June is totally Juning. Yeah. And we are, we're on June 4th, but we feel pretty good.
Jack Carr: Yeah. It's a good start.
Jack Carr: I think we sold like three quarters of our first week goal. May, or yeah, May 30th and 31st, like right coming into June. I mean, we're, our goal, we're trying to hit half a million dollar months for all of summer. And I mean, we're almost at a hundred thousand for the first week. So a hundred thousand dollars a week keeps the doctor away.
Jack Carr: Yeah. As somebody said on, on Twitter the other day. I think
John Wilson: it was a day though, or every two minutes. My smart ass tweet was a hundred grand a day keeps the doctor away. Yeah. Which it does, in my defense.
Jack Carr: I believe it. I could get there. It does. I mean, the world.
John Wilson: Yeah, we're we're like, we're flirting with it.
John Wilson: Yeah. But we did, we had our first ever two million dollar month in May.
Jack Carr: That's huge. That was
John Wilson: crazy. And we're really excited about that. And then we feel like I said this on Twitter too, but like, it took us like 64 years to get to our first million dollar month. It took us like 19 months to get to our 2 million a month.
John Wilson: And I think that 3 million is going to be somewhere between like 12 and 14 months. So. That's good. We have a ton of momentum and we're, and we're excited. So everyone's feeling good. That's sweet.
Jack Carr: Yeah. I mean you can feel the ramp sometimes. Like, I mean, it's slower when you're like trying to get there.
Jack Carr: I think that's why people sometimes say, Oh, building to 1 million is so much harder than building to 10 million, but realistically it's just different problems. I mean, you can feel the momentum, but it doesn't make it any less hard. I mean, your problems just grow and become. there's still momentum behind you, but it's not, it's faster.
Jack Carr: It's not easier, I guess is probably the better way to put it.
John Wilson: Yeah, yeah, I think the thing that I'm enjoying and it's a two part It's like a two part problem like the moves you make have greater leverage So like if I have a friend Who runs like a three or four tech business and if he made a move on pricing or if he made a move on Buying materials or like, Hey, I want to launch drain cleaning or, you know, anything like the difference would only be like 50 to a hundred grand a year, which is still like, as money at, and at that size, that's like a 10 to 15 or whatever percent increase.
John Wilson: But like we're doing right now in our drain business, we're, We're making a few moves. We're like adding sewer lining and we're adding another excavation crew and like those two things Which take me roughly the same amount of time as my friend like changing pricing or whatever Maybe a little bit more to like obviously that takes energy Yeah, but like that's gonna be four or five million dollars in like still this year we think
Jack Carr: You finally giving through has
John Wilson: like more leverage
Jack Carr: You're finally giving drain cleaning some love, like you've been avoiding them for a while and now you're like, okay, we're going to, we're going to, next is going to be septic.
Jack Carr: You're going to come back a couple months from now and go. Septic is on the rise.
John Wilson: Drains are going to get some love. Well, we, I think drain, so, and this is like leverage. So like you make these little, you little or big, you make these moves. In a department or in like a, a thing and it, it's like moving a mountain with a small lever.
John Wilson: So like with HVAC, we more than doubled their revenue this year. I think we almost will triple it from last year. And like the moves, there were a manager. Two salespeople and top grading some technicians. So like we actually only had count increased only by like four or five people. And we tripled the revenue like from, from 4 million.
John Wilson: So it's not like it was like 200, 000 or something. So it is a, so we think drains is the same thing as what HVAC was, where we're going to take this department, which is like three and a half, 4 million right now, we're going to. We're adding new install crews. We're adding a new capability with high gross margin, which is lining.
John Wilson: And then we're going to basically add marketing dollars and a new sales practice, but like headcounts only going to adjust by like three, four people. And we think it'll double or triple. So it is crazy. Yeah, but drains is getting some love again. Yeah, we have a path, but see, that's the downside. So I said there was an upside and the upside is like moves have big leverage.
John Wilson: The downside
Jack Carr: moves also have
John Wilson: is like you can ignore a department for a while for whatever reason, because maybe you're focusing on the one with the bigger leverage and like. Yes, when you get around to doing drains, there's, you can unlock 5, 000, 000, but then it's also like, why, like, that sucks that we couldn't have unlocked that 5, 000, 000 two years ago.
John Wilson: Like, why? Because it just gets ignored. Like, it just is sort of the thing that produces cash.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I mean, it's a good problem to have. I mean, it's not really, I don't view that as a terrible downside. I view the downside on that being if you pull the wrong lever. It's
John Wilson: an annoying problem.
Jack Carr: Yeah,
John Wilson: I'd say that.
John Wilson: So like with HVAC. I think I, I think I told you about this a week or two ago, but like we started actually charging money on service calls, which like we really weren't good at doing. And that added 2 million a year of revenue to our, to our business, just like, Oh, Hey, we should probably charge appropriately for this part, or we should get, you know, two sold hours in an eight hour day.
John Wilson: It's like nothing complicated, nothing groundbreaking, but like, Hey, we should probably cover our payroll. And we added 2 million. And so we're just like, so, and so that's annoying because it's like, well, if I just added 2 million, it means I've been losing 2 million. Cause I didn't add any, I didn't add a single person to add that money.
Jack Carr: Yeah.
John Wilson: It was just like straight bottom.
Jack Carr: Well, so I mean, Tommy Mello, I mean, I don't know if the episode has dropped yet, but he actually talked about this in pretty deep depth and you'll hear it on the episode. So Giving you a little bit of a foreshadowing in super cool episode. He talks about this. He talks about how, like, as you grow, you find these pockets of money just sitting everywhere you look.
Jack Carr: And I mean, you just got to pick the biggest ones, start going after them one by one. And that's where the momentum comes from is finding these pockets. But yeah, like we utilized we're, we're in the process this the last two weeks since we didn't, You did the live last week. We didn't talk, but we started implementing the multiple options and we're really tripling down on options, options, options.
Jack Carr: Yep. So HVAC did our first week of required options and their average tickets doubled.
John Wilson: Yep.
Jack Carr: And there are still only sitting at like an average of like 2. 1 options. And I'm saying guys, 3. 6, like get it up past three. And you're going to see more increases. And then I was able to take that plumbing and show him be like, look, proof in the pudding.
John Wilson: Yeah,
Jack Carr: they had this many jobs. Look at this guy. He offered the most options. His revenue is the highest. His average ticket's the highest. And then this guy offer 0. 68 and needs to go on a pip because he has the lowest revenue, lowest average ticket, lowest options. So like, The, all these things we're talking about, the kind of fun part about you and my relationship and, and the juxtaposition between the sizes of our business is I, we get like in real time, try these things and they work and it's exciting how much they work.
John Wilson: Yeah, totally.
Jack Carr: Real silver bullets hidden throughout this, these talks. And so we're now doubling down on that again saying, Hey, no, we need to get above three. Two is not good enough. Yeah. And then on the management side, we are creating those for you and showing you and, and training you on like, from the HVAC side, like that.
Jack Carr: Nobody here sold AC Renew. They don't know what that is. Like, that's now an option. This is the script when you want to sell this. This is like, we can, like, you can't have options without having the supplies and then training people on what these supplies do. So there's, there's a lot behind it. But Like it's starting to show what it's starting to produce.
Jack Carr: It's also June, so it should go up. Like, let's be real guys. Come on. If you didn't, if your average tickets didn't go up in the middle of June, we have problems.
John Wilson: Yeah, but yeah, we're seeing that across drains and HVAC, which which we think is fun and it, yeah, it's working, but like basically between both those departments, we basically added 10 grand a day of revenue.
John Wilson: Just like straight up 10 grand each which is good, but it's also like, where in the hell was that revenue previously? Like, cause then you just like, you try not to do the math of like how much money you lost. Like just cause they didn't feel like holding up their end of the bargain.
Jack Carr: I'm an expert at that.
Jack Carr: I saw my, all my real estate spreadsheets when I used to do real estate. I still have all my Bitcoin spreadsheets from when I ran the Bitcoin mining farm. And if I continued, I extrapolate, I just love the pain of knowing that I missed out on two ginormous opportunities in my life. And if I would have stuck with either one of those, we wouldn't be here today.
Jack Carr: So now this is third time, the char we would be here just in a different here. Like it'd be eight, it'd be Bitcoin Jack having like 16 times as much Bitcoin. But not, not the point. Anyway, Good times, pain, pure pain.
John Wilson: The thing we were going to dive into today, we did an episode and it is like, I should, I should relisten to the whole thing, but we did an episode a couple of months ago while I was on a ski trip, which I am ready to go skiing again.
John Wilson: And it was like how AI will get used in your business. And what's been really interesting for us over the past, like, I don't, I don't remember all the different ways. Like we thought it could be used. Do you, do you remember him? Yeah. So we,
Jack Carr: we, we talked about content, which was the obvious one, right? SEO, content, pages, and then that was one focus.
Jack Carr: And the other focus we talked about was AI being used as call center. Like as the calls come in, AI call center or AI dispatch. Yeah. for service type. And yeah, it's been what, five months. And like, I'm sitting here going, there's a thousand more applications that AI is coming out every single day. And some of these are really cool, but way too expensive for me.
Jack Carr: So I'm excited to see you try them.
John Wilson: Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. We've been we've been adding them in. And it is kind of funny cause AI is like, I, it's going to be fascinating to see what it looks like next year. Because I think right now AI is like, it's early adaption, right? It's exactly what you just said.
John Wilson: It's like, Oh, I want to see you try it. I want to, I want to see what other people do. And then a lot of my peers are using it or like folks bigger than us are using it, and then what we're hoping is it gives us the edge over, over the, over the non early adopters. But this is you know, this is back to I didn't even try to make this link up as well as I accidentally did But this is back to leverage of like you do this one thing and like because there's it could touch 40 people or 80 people or a hundred whatever people like you get so much more leverage from each of these things.
John Wilson: So yeah, one of the So we've been adding in more AI things. So the one I want to talk about today was the call center AI one, which is kind of fun.
Jack Carr: So you did end up going with it.
John Wilson: Yeah. So we're like, we're kind of into, we're kind of into it here. So we, we added it in we added it in like, I want to say a month ago, might've been a month and a half ago, we are, we are running it.
John Wilson: Now there's, there's a couple different approaches. So there's like a few product lines that you can add in here. You ready?
Jack Carr: Yeah. I'm just like, I feel like you're just dancing around it. Like spit it out. Like what is it? I'm
John Wilson: just like, I'm, I'm getting my, I'm getting my
Jack Carr: building the story. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
John Wilson: Okay. So Fred, yeah. Friend Rick, Rich recommended it to me. So I, so I looked into it and so what we, there's a couple different product lines. There's a full AI call center, which to me, that's like, that's still a little bold. I think, and we can talk about that full AI call center, there's a hybrid AI call center.
John Wilson: Which is like human assisted ai and then there's a coaching program.
Jack Carr: That's where I wanna be. I think the coaching program is why, where the hell are the
John Wilson: coaching program is insane. So that's what we've been doing. So, and I think there's also a web chat. There's a web chat like responder to, so yeah, it's been really interesting.
John Wilson: So a lot of other folks are using the software. But so what we started with was coach and the coach product, it's like, well, one, how are you listening to calls now?
Jack Carr: Manually. Yeah, we have somebody goes through and listens to a few different calls, manually
John Wilson: picks them up. Yeah, that was ours too. So like we had like VA's like listening to it.
John Wilson: Yeah. And like, Hey, and it was more like the way we described it was they were doing quantitative, not qualitative. So like, did you do a greet? Yes, no. And it wasn't really like, did you do the great? And was the great good? Which is what we're, what we're getting now. So we had, I think we had three or four people listening to calls, like that was their freaking job.
John Wilson: And, I, our quality was low. We couldn't listen to every calls cause there's literally a thousand phone calls a day that go through that call center. So we just couldn't keep up with it. So what this thing does is it listens to everything and you like preset it to like what you want. So like, Hey, I want the greeting to be, Hey, thanks for calling Wilson.
John Wilson: How can I make you smile? Which is ours. And then I want. You know, this next step to be empathy. I want this next step to be, you know, whatever you can make it flexible. You can make it rigid you can make whatever you want, but now I should probably screen share it. I don't know if I can log in here or not, but you can literally just listen to every phone call and it pulls out like coachable moments.
John Wilson: It pulls out like, Hey, here's where we. Missed. Here's where we didn't cool. It's freaking nuts. It really is like insane. And I think we're, they're starting to use it successfully in trainings, which is exciting because it's now we can listen to every single call and it's like they grade the call. So then you just look, look at the worst calls, like, Oh, that the grade on that call was like a 30 percent or something.
John Wilson: Let's look at that versus the grade on this one was a 70 percent and we booked it. So like, We're good to go. The thing that we're trying to get them to do now, and they're, I think they're about to is they already live integrate with service Titan, but we're getting them to how do they market call is booked or not booked.
John Wilson: Because that's a big, that's a big problem that we have an issue with of like, we don't trust the data because it's
Jack Carr: hard to maintain, especially if you can't listen to a thousand calls. It's really complicated to maintain.
John Wilson: It's really complicated. It just takes a huge manpower versus like, yo, did we book this or not?
John Wilson: Like, that's all I really need to know is like our actual book rate, but like, depending on who's tags, what, in what way, 80%, 70 percent or 95%. And book the same quantity of calls.
Jack Carr: Yeah. So do you, do you foresee like that? That's a, an awesome example of the way I think that AI should go. I do have a hot take that I want to make sure that we mentioned here.
John Wilson: Oh dude, give us.
Jack Carr: Super hot take.
John Wilson: Let's go.
Jack Carr: Is as the world moves more towards AI on all of these fronts. So, you know, AI software becomes so amazing for Phones and it's indistinguishable and they're perfect. I think it's going to put extended emphasis on in person sales. So once your emails are pure AI, once your phone calls are all AI, and we know that because everybody's doing it, having, there's so much more benefit in having a comfort advisor or project manager, whoever show up at your house and actually sell it to you.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: I think that I think it'll be novel.
John Wilson: I think it's like a novel experience.
Jack Carr: I just think when a eyes are all competing against each other, right? There's nobody's winning.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: And so it's comes back to the salesperson actually in person at your house. And so this coaching that you mentioned and having that coaching in the field listening because I know some states are single party listening.
Jack Carr: You don't actually have to tell the other person you're recording. I think single party listening is going to become a huge thing. It's going to become another privacy issue because I think AI is going to be listening to us at all times. And coaching us. So, I mean, it's crazy because in my mind, I can't, I can't rationalize and wrap my head around like a computer program knowing like what is a coaching moment.
Jack Carr: And other than like, Hey, you didn't say X, Y, and Z, but like understanding tonality and understanding. Yeah. Well, yeah, it's crazy, but it does
John Wilson: notes are crazy because it'll be like, it'll give a summary and it'll be like, Hey, so the caller disengaged when you use this phrase and let, and it's like, what the hell?
John Wilson: Like, this is why now, granted, it's going to help us improve like crazy. So like, And, and I think, yeah, one, I think I agree. The in person things can be crazy. And then two, I think this is another leverage thing where one of the things that you see with, with scale or that I see, so like we just recruited we just recruited a plumber from a company that has not changed since I bought our company seven years ago, eight years ago, which I obviously that's like very difficult for me to comprehend.
John Wilson: Yeah. As my life has changed so much in that same, same time period. And I think about like how they get leads, how they handle call center, how they handle everything and just like, we are so like, we've continued to make one or 2 percent changes every day, every week, every month, every whatever. And like now we are, there is such a world of a difference between us and them.
John Wilson: It.
Jack Carr: Mm-Hmm.
John Wilson: to me, this is like one all of the AI products that are coming out for the early adopters. This is like one more of those things that's like an additional 1% maybe even 10%. 'cause like being able to listen to 100% of your phone calls in almost real time in grade and coach Right. There is like a superpower.
John Wilson: Yeah. That's crazy.
Jack Carr: I fully agree. And I think when it hits the field, it's also going to be crazy. It's, it's crazy now in dispatch pro the way that it's assisting, like, I think the AI doesn't take over in the way people imagine it taking over. I think instead it becomes a coaching tool that really allows like from step one person calls in, how are the humans doing as we go through like, Hey, you should, you dispatch them incorrectly.
Jack Carr: This person has a, this a better, you know, Chance of doing this, this, and this, and then the phone calls out. And then now the techs in the field selling and getting AI coached. And now, you know, just a lot, the whole thing. Well, the, this, this installer uses 20 percent more material than this installer on, you know, like, I think it's going to become a coaching and a background tool to let us know how we're doing.
Jack Carr: But yeah, it's going to be interesting to see. I'm really excited because like I said, even in the last five months, of tools that have come out to assist are, are huge. They're absolutely like, it's wild how much is out there now.
John Wilson: Yeah. I wonder what happens with like pricing or like do the early, do the early movers win?
John Wilson: Like do the early movers on call center grading and coaching and home services win? Cause everyone starts using them or like field coaching. Do they win? Or I don't know. That's just going to be, cause it is like, it's a really interesting moment where there's so much cause everyone's pushing in, but when do they start separating and like differentiating?
Jack Carr: And then, and then I go into like, I continue that train of thought and I think, well, does the homeowner get do the homeowners get AI too, where, you know, you go and you give them a bid and you, you know, they, they go through, then they send it through their AI system, and the AI system says, this price is too high, or this price is too low.
Jack Carr: Or the salesman, this is a sales pitch, like it goes through and it tells you like, oh my gosh, that would be funny. The homeowner, what the hell is going on with a tech coming out there and, and trying to upsell you and like all this kind, like the anti ai ai. So I, I think the world's gonna get a little bit.
Jack Carr: Wild here in the future with this stuff because hey, if anyone wants to do that idea, let me know. We'll we'll go in on it. But, but it'll be interesting. Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. But yeah, we so we rolled out what else have you guys put in days ago? I mean, the big stuff, like this has been the biggest So obviously we've touched like marketing has seen a huge impact from AI and like how we think about emails, how we think about or even just like review responding Like content.
John Wilson: So marketing has seen a really big push from AI. And that was probably the most impacted department up until call center four weeks ago. Cause before that it was just like a tool like, Oh yeah. Okay. I need to make this thing. So I'm going to go click this button. I'm going to go do whatever I'm going to feed it these inputs, and it's going to spit me out something that I need to edit and then post.
John Wilson: But now it's like, yeah, it's deeper. And then we're looking at the options for the field too. Like we were checking those out to see what that looks like versus the call center one, because we do now that we're running it in call center we're like, Holy smokes, this is impactful. Like, this is going to change booking rates.
John Wilson: This is going to make customer experience better. Like this is going to work. And then on top of that, there are companies and that's just for the coach thing. Like I do see a near future where we do have a backup call center. That's full AI. Cause I don't like,
Jack Carr: I think that's a great utilization of that weekends, nights.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack Carr: Cause it's super easy to program. And honestly when someone's calling at one in the morning, I don't know if they're expecting to get their situation taken care of and you could design for that. I don't, I don't think they really care how it gets taken care of as long as they've been confirmed.
Jack Carr: So
John Wilson: like, what are you, what are you really missing? You know,
Jack Carr: that's what I mean. The only, the only thing I have is when people are under stress, they are not necessarily level headed. And so they want to talk to a person, but that being said, like, as long as it's just focused on getting them booked and confirming somebody's coming to help you, like, I really think That's a great utilization.
Jack Carr: That's probably where we will implement first. So we'll, we'll take our full
John Wilson: AI. Well, it's like, yeah, to me, so the fully I call center it's an interesting, so we're going live with like, they have a hybrid thing and it's Like human assisted
Jack Carr: AI
John Wilson: and I don't know exactly how that part works. That's what we're going live with, but rescue air, which is around our size down in Texas.
John Wilson: They are going live with full AI, like next week or week after, which I was like, holy smokes. Cause the way I think about the full AI call center backup is it's a backup. It's not like their full call center, but it's the backup. The way I think about that tool is, or the way I did think about it was that makes the most sense for like a small shop that can't have 24 seven coverage.
John Wilson: But like now, now I'm like, okay, I think it just makes sense in general. I was really surprised by a larger contractor. but
Jack Carr: early adopters. I mean, like if they're, they're going to get a better price, they'll get locked in early. Like it's a win in the long run if it's the right idea and it works. My, my worry is the same worry that we run into with like overseas talent is will people respond well to AI phone, you know, phone assistance.
Jack Carr: And I don't think at the moment they will. Until it's like near perfect. I just don't think, I think people are crude creatures that you know, they just, they don't like change and they don't like new stuff. I know when I get AI for chase or Wells Fargo banking or anything like that. Always zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.
Jack Carr: Talk to a person. Talk to a person like I don't want to go through your menu. I don't want to do that. I just want to talk to someone. And so I want, I mean, I've heard them. They're good. They sound like people. They kind of act. There's a slight pause. And I think when people get smarter and they pick up on that you'll run into some issues.
Jack Carr: You know, I draw the linear line. It's like, okay. How do you sell to millennials and Gen Z versus how you sell to boomers is completely different. Yeah. And I think that's what AI will have to delineate is like a boomer I don't think will notice or care maybe. But I think the gen Z, the newer generations, they're not affected in the same way by ads.
Jack Carr: I don't think there'll be affected in the same way by AI. They can spot it, they can tell, and they can, you know, choose if they like it or not.
John Wilson: No, it'll be probably right. I think, yeah, most people. Like literally won't notice, which which kind of is interesting, but yeah, I, I don't know. I think
Jack Carr: John, we need to get into AI.
Jack Carr: There you go. That's the real answer is that's John's next business. Buy an AI company of some sort.
John Wilson: It's so crazy. Didn't operate at AI. Yeah. Yeah,
Jack Carr: it's an operator that runs your entire business. I mean, large,
John Wilson: there was Apex was starting to use like full AI and some of its branches. Yeah. Again, as a backup.
John Wilson: I don't think anyone's using a full call center yet, but I do think that happens. I mean, because I, I think realistically the cost savings. Like one, it will get good enough
Jack Carr: versus
John Wilson: like humans. Like it will, it will outperform a human. It'll never take off. It'll ne, you know, it'll never do all the things that that takes.
John Wilson: And it will also cost 98 percent less than running a call center. So I don't know, like, I don't know when that happens, but seeing that they're already like, this is already a possibility now. And like, I think when we talked in February, we were like, ah, maybe by next year and it's like three months later and like, yeah, I'm like, okay.
John Wilson: So maybe in three more months, like, or maybe it's maybe this is next year. This, it becomes viable to run. Like, I think this is a leverage thing. Like what if you could do a human AI assisted call center, except our team is the humans that like assist and like live onboard and jump into calls if they need help, but instead of needing 20 people, you need.
John Wilson: three.
Jack Carr: Yeah. It's pure leverage, right? One automation system can handle as many calls as you want. You don't need to ramp up people.
John Wilson: You
Jack Carr: don't need to ramp up anything. It's just,
John Wilson: yeah.
Jack Carr: And then it automatically talks to dispatch and automatically dispatches based on a set of criteria. Like it makes sense from a logic standpoint.
Jack Carr: We'll just have to see because on the back end, my mind goes there's where there's always a pendulum swing. There's always a swing back. Right. Yeah. And so, People in the same way that nobody's going out and buying AI art or reading AI generated books or listening to like the artists who are making songs, it's not AI generated yet.
Jack Carr: In the same way, I think people want humans for certain things. And even like at the expense of wanting a human interaction. And so it'll be interesting. Like, and then the question is like, well, what if they don't know? And so, well,
John Wilson: I mean, I want to test out rescue air. Like, I want to try it out.
John Wilson: Cause like, I'm kind of nervous about that. I was like, yeah, we're for sure going to do the hybrid option. And then he's like, rescue air is your size. And they just, and I'm like, Oh my God. Okay. Like, yeah. Okay. Okay. Because I think, I think it is sort of funny. Like we're all obviously looking for the next thing.
John Wilson: So everyone went from like American. To Philippines to like, Oh, what if you don't need wage? Yeah, it's like and maybe a better example of this is like robots at McDonald's or something like that where like they got leveraged by adding these tools. So instead of needing 20 people in the kitchen, you need three.
John Wilson: But those three people just like Hit a lot of buttons with robots. And I think it ends up being the same thing. Like call center never goes away. It's just that like each person has way more leverage.
Jack Carr: Yeah. I mean, that's, that's probably the easy answer is that's for sure going to happen no matter what.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Jack Carr: I'm excited. Like, either way that it goes, we'll have to do something, but super excited because it's such vast. When do you think you
John Wilson: start looking into it?
Jack Carr: Probably end of this year. I mean, so the way that I see
John Wilson: it,
Jack Carr: well, the way I see it happening is like this weird It's very expensive right now and doesn't work very well.
Jack Carr: And then it gets better and better and the price goes down and down and down price goes down. And eventually it's the cheapest option, right? It costs me a thousand bucks a month to have a full CSR team and it's, it's vetted. It does well versus in the beginning it costs you 10, 000 and it like, eh, it kind of works well cause it's new.
Jack Carr: It
John Wilson: doesn't cost 10, 000 now. Like what are you looking at?
Jack Carr: No, no, I'm just, this is vast generalities is how things work as they start off expensive. And then as you know, The law of Moore's law kicks in like it gets better and better over time at half the price.
John Wilson: That's what I wonder too. Cause I think like everything's coming out and everything is so expensive.
John Wilson: Like we're looking at some of the field options and they are, they're very expensive. And what's been kind of crazy is like, yeah. What does that look like in six months? Because with call center or any of these Like there's a lot of competitors coming out of the market for the field. One really surprised me.
John Wilson: Like we're trying one out right now, but like, there's like five or six viable options for that at the moment, which is crazy. And that's why I'm wondering like who, who wins and how, how does that impact? Pricing. And how does that impact all that?
Jack Carr: Yeah. I mean, I don't think anybody, I don't think it's like, it's like a comp, it's like the computer system or the computer chip, right?
Jack Carr: Start out super expensive, took up a whole room and then by, you know, 20 years, I wonder how
John Wilson: fast, I wonder how fast that will go.
Jack Carr: I mean, look at how fast we've gone from chat GPT 3. 2. 0 to like 5. 0. That can now take the bar and run call centers. So, and it's been like a year, two years. So I don't, I don't foresee it taking another year before we really get good direction on, is it going to work?
Jack Carr: How's it working and who's, who's having success with it and why. So we're going to hang tight for probably. Six more months, eight more months, but we're, we're going in that direction as well.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack Carr: At least after hours. It's gonna be fun.
John Wilson: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Cool. Well we just covered how we're starting to use AI.
John Wilson: I think we'll probably have another one here shortly. Cause we were thinking about doing this in field too, now that we're seeing the success in the office. So we'll probably be talking about like which one we ended up landing on. We are piloting one right now. I don't want to name it yet. But we're piloting one of them out right now.
John Wilson: And then. Basically once we land, we'll, we'll start talking about what that actually looks like, but in the early stages of pilot, it, I'm so excited. Like
Jack Carr: it's cool.
John Wilson: Insane. It is. We're not piloting
Jack Carr: it and I've seen some stuff and it's insane. It's so
John Wilson: cool. Like. And, and this is between this and the call center, it like, they're both like coaching programs between this and the call center coaching program.
John Wilson: It's like, like, yeah, I think we are going to hit our first 3 million a month relatively quickly because like, this is going to really work. Like it is. I don't even know, man. It is insane. Like it listens, it coaches, it points out exactly where you missed, how to do better next time. And the team is bought in.
John Wilson: It's like, holy smokes. This is crazy. Crazy.
Jack Carr: Well, I'm excited. I'm excited for it. And then I'm excited to ride the coattails. So
John Wilson: yeah, it'll be fun.
Jack Carr: We'll hit our monthly month too. Yeah, when I said we will hit our first million dollar month right after that.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think I mean, well, we we talked about the field one with Tommy and he said his average ticket almost doubled.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I believe it I mean, it makes sense, right? Because you, if I could clone myself and send myself out into the field, I'd love to do that. That'd be amazing. But there's so many different personalities now that like, it's very hard to manage individuals in the field when you don't hear or see how they're doing and what they're talking.
John Wilson: And I would say the same, it's the same problem with call center. Somebody takes 80 calls a day. How do you, how do you, how do you like really improve that rapidly?
Jack Carr: Yeah, but at least that's recorded. So you can, like there's a, there's a pathway to be able to listen. Yeah. And make coaching in the field.
Jack Carr: There's not like you have numbers. You don't know where they went wrong. You don't know what they're saying.
John Wilson: You're coaching by results instead of coaching by like symptoms or like behaviors. So like, and I, I remember that was like a next star thing is like you coaching by behaviors is how you win, not coaching by results.
John Wilson: Because like, Okay. Coaching by behaviors is like, Hey, let's talk about how you effectively listen so that you can offer good options. Coaching by results is, Hey, you didn't have three options. I need three options. And then they give you three bad options because they never learned the behavior. So I think this, both of these tools are like, They will give you the way managed by behavior.
John Wilson: So you're like, I really, we're really early stages. We're a lot farther along in the call center one, but we're really early stages on the field one. Like I think we're three days in. And has been genuinely insane. Like
Jack Carr: I'm so excited to hear it. I'll
John Wilson: send you some screenshots. Yeah, that's awesome.
John Wilson: That's crazy. All right. Well, everybody, thanks for listening. Make sure you give us a five star review wherever it is that you listen. And also make sure you check out the Facebook group. That's really been popping recently.
Jack Carr: The Facebook group has been really cool.
John Wilson: Yeah. People are asking, like, I'm really excited by the, like, people are asking good questions, thoughtful questions.
John Wilson: I'm enjoying it.
Jack Carr: There's good answers to like legitimately the advice given in that group has, has absolutely surprised me. But I mean, realistically you have what I think I looked at a 248 249
John Wilson: we're, we're 275. We actually add, it's like 10 members a day right now. Yeah, dude. I like, I honestly don't know where they're coming from and I keep asking Christian
Jack Carr: and like no idea, but it's, it's awesome.
Jack Carr: I don't know. And that's, that's how like. That's cool. Cause it's, it's something that's legitimately helping that many people that they've, that it's spreading out and it's really driving value. So if you haven't checked it out, I definitely would. I keep referring people there. It's neat. I'm excited about
John Wilson: it.
John Wilson: It's been really good. It's called the plumbing HVAC and electrical business growth hosted by owned and operated. But yeah, it is really good. And I've been what I think has been, I do love Twitter. I love Twitter. I love it. I do think what I've been finding is like I'm spending more of my time on Facebook because I'm finding act like Twitter is really great for like SMB community, which I love.
John Wilson: I have so many friends there. Facebook is the actual people that will move my business forward. And so more of like a lot more of my time is going in like my personal, like I'm reading groups, I'm asking questions, I'm trying to figure out my next thing, which has been like, that's kind of a big shift for me.
John Wilson: Cause I haven't used Facebook since I was literally 15 years old.
Jack Carr: Yeah. I think what it did is it like SMB Twitter two years ago was very different than it is today. And now it's a lot of engagement baiting and stuff like that, which don't get me wrong. I still love, I still love seeing what people are doing, but as the Facebook page is getting a lot of traction in like, Questions and actually answers and helping people out.
Jack Carr: So really neat. Feel free to join, ask some questions. We're here to help as well. I'm, I'm on there not as much as I should be, but I'm really focusing on on committing to getting on there a little bit more as well. Yeah.
John Wilson: No, man, it's good. All right, everybody. And make sure you check out on an operator.
John Wilson: com. It's a new website. And I'm really proud of it. So yeah. Thanks, guys, next week. Thanks for tuning in to owned and operated the podcast for home service entrepreneurs. If you enjoyed today's episode, please hit the like button and subscribe to the podcast. If you have any questions or topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reach out you can find me on Twitter at at Wilson companies.
John Wilson: I'll see you next time.
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