.png)
Join John Wilson and Jack Carr on 'Owned and Operated' as they dive into the cutting-edge world of AI-powered call centers for home service businesses with Tyson from Avoca AI. Discover how Avoca AI is transforming the efficiency and effectiveness of call centers in the trades, optimizing everything from after-hours calls to specialized CSR allocation. Tyson shares his extensive background in AI, his journey into the trades, and the groundbreaking features of Avoca AI's platform. Learn about best practices, the impact of empathy statements, and strategies to enhance your call center's performance, all while setting up your team for success.
Don't miss this insightful episode filled with practical advice and future-facing trends in AI technology for home 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
Special Thanks to Avoca AI Coaching and Training
Looking to train your call center and technicians back on their calls? Get better performance today with the power of Avoca AI, as your staff learns their pain points and improves end-to-end. We have a special promo code available if you schedule now: ‘OWNED’.
Click here to schedule your Avoca AI demo today.
https://calendly.com/d/cp54-9jr-nht/avoca-ai-demo?month=2024-06
Leave us a Review
More Ways To Connect
John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
https://www.wilsonplumbingandheating.com
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC
https://rapidhvactn.com
Avoca AI and Tyson Chen - Owned and Operated Episode 131 Transcript
John Wilson: I'm John Wilson. Welcome to Owned and Operated. Twice a week, we talk about home service businesses, and if you're a home service entrepreneur, then this is going to be the show for you. We talk about our own business in residential plumbing, HVAC, and electric, and we also talk about business models that we just find interesting.
John Wilson: Let's get into it.
Jack Carr: Welcome back to Owned and Operated. We have an exciting podcast today. We have Tyson from Avoca. We've been touching on AI the past few weeks, and we love this product John's currently using it. And so we're really excited to dig in today. How are you doing Tyson?
Tyson Chen: Doing well. Couldn't be more excited to be here.
Jack Carr: Awesome. Can you give us a little rundown, a little background about yourself, the product just a general overview of who you are?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, absolutely. So I can quickly start by introducing what we do, the platform and then, yeah, I'll give a brief background on myself. We are the AI call center platform for the trades.
Tyson Chen: We specialize in specifically serving folks in HVAC plumbing and electrical. We're in over 45 different States now and and have multiple product lines, all surrounding, how do you get the most out of your call center? Which is oftentimes one of the most neglected, but high value things that owners can do.
Tyson Chen: Brief background on myself. I I've been in the AI world for over 10 years. Started in the voice AI lab at MIT. That's actually where I met my co founder and that over the years I've helped instruments early generations of AI chatbots at many fortune 500 companies, such as the largest banks in the U.
Tyson Chen: S. And then during my time in consulting. And then I spent over three years working on self driving cars and helping to commercialize that technology at at one of the leading self driving car companies now called neuro and and yeah, just really excited to be helping to bring AI into the trades, which I think is one of the most underserved niches but but an area in a space where AI can actually have the most profound and dramatic.
Tyson Chen: Impact.
Jack Carr: Very cool. And so how did you end up in the trades? Like you said, banking, self driving cars. There's so many opportunities. What actually drove you? What was the defining moment that said AI trades call center, let's do this.
Tyson Chen: Yep. Yep. Great question. So one of the factors was that my co founder who actually has family in Michigan in the trades they're a bit smaller.
Tyson Chen: They're not they're not in, in one of the larger companies, they're a bit more man in the band, but we also during the early days of the company, We actually looked at a few different industries and where where we can apply the research that we've been doing for so long.
Tyson Chen: And we discovered that the trades was actually much better because when you compare AI and the trades versus let's say something like restaurants. When you go to a restaurant, first of all most of the orders don't come from phone calls. O in fact, only less than 15% come from phone calls. And when you miss a an order, a call at a restaurant that's that may be a 20 $30 ticket item.
Tyson Chen: And so it's really not that impactful. And also people aren't usually making phone orders late night. And so when you compare that to the trades it's just a much different ball game. Where phone calls are matter significantly more a single missed call can be a 20, 30, 000 opportunity that those just miss.
Tyson Chen: And over 90%, 80, 90 percent of. A home service company's revenue. Comes from phone calls. So we just discovered in, in the startup world one of the most important things to do is to always be solving a what we call a hair on fire problem. And so we discovered that, in, in applying AI to the trades, that was what we're solving, whereas it just wasn't that important for some of the other industries.
Jack Carr: Okay. So we chatted a little bit about it already, but cool. Avoca is a AI for the call center. Can you talk a little bit about what that means, how it's changing the traditional call center and what best practices are you seeing out of that? What's the, where's the metrics?
Jack Carr: What's the numbers that you get to talk about?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, absolutely. So happy to share more broadly on what makes a good call center. Some best practices maybe I'll start briefly and, to address the 1st point of your question around what is a vocal brain to the table from an AI perspective?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, absolutely. Really, it's 2 main things. So 1, and I think it's 2 areas where especially in the trades I see so many people can dramatically improve their business by focusing more on the call center. And those 2 areas is 1 after hours overflow calls. Where a lot of times, especially folks, just starting off doing maybe more like 1 to 5Million in revenue, they oftentimes really don't have a good process for handling after hours and overflow, I would say level 1 is.
Tyson Chen: First of all, you just need someone to answer the phone. When calls go to voicemail I've talked to so many folks where they're still using voicemail. That call is as good as gone. When it's 2 a. m and your air conditioning is broken, you're not going to leave a voicemail.
Tyson Chen: You're just going to call the next 2, 3, 4 people until you find someone that can fix your air conditioning and get you scheduled. So voicemail, that's the The absolute low hanging fruit. If you're using voicemail for after hours you're just leaving a lot of revenue on the table.
Tyson Chen: So that's the 1st point. And then the 2nd point is, once you get a little bit more nuanced than that there's a lot of additional things that you can improve upon. 1 is abandonment rates, traditional after hours and overflow call centers. They may have 10, 15 percent abandonment rate.
Tyson Chen: Especially in the heat of the summer when everyone's calling and your traditional call centers are just being completely flooded again, no, one's going to wait 2 minutes to just talk to someone. So that's the 2nd point and then finally, I think the other thing that a lot of folks, once you get these kind of basic things done, you're already, at a pretty good state.
Tyson Chen: Then you got to think about overall as a call center operation. How do you put the right people to the right phone calls? And so what I mean by this is, certain campaigns, that the expected value on that lead is going to be higher. So you want to be putting your more experienced CSRs to those leads.
Tyson Chen: That's another thing. And then and then one final thing I'll mention is around handling every call the right way. And this is really where we saw, John, how big is your call center? And is it around 18 people last I checked? Yeah.
John Wilson: Yeah. It's 18, 19 people.
Tyson Chen: Yeah. Yeah. So when you have that many people obviously, there's a lot of effort to maintain a high quality and a high bar, and there's usually a disparity and it's not any really anyone's fault that, between newer CSRs and top performing CSRs, there's a very large variation, top performers might be closing rates at around 85, 90 percent newer folks might be booking more at around, 50%. So there's a huge disparity. And 1 of the things that. That separates the best call centers from more, mediocre or newer call centers is how do you make sure that everyone is saying the right things, adhering to all the principles on salesmanship and increasing the booking rates.
Tyson Chen: And that's the kind of final piece around optimizing your call center and kind of all the different aspects.
Jack Carr: Yeah. Fair enough. We, so we have a, have you noticed go for it, John.
John Wilson: Have you noticed a difference in like incentives for the takers and performance out of that call center?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, absolutely. So great question. And I think there's some different. There's a few different thoughts I have on this matter. I think generally when you have, the first thing to mention is that you're exactly right.
Tyson Chen: The call center itself is oftentimes thought of as just customer success customer support, but in reality, it's actually sales. A customer, oftentimes when they're calling a trades company, they have. At least five or six different options they, they can go for. And so really in order to book the lead properly, you need to convey your brand.
Tyson Chen: And because of that, it is actually very important to treat your CSRs like your sales folks and provide the right incentives. So I totally see companies that instrument incentive programs, kind of commission based booking are actually the ones that are doing
Jack Carr: a lot better.
Jack Carr: Do you have an example of
John Wilson: a commission based program you've seen?
Tyson Chen: Yeah. I think we see actually a few examples. We're working, I think there's two ways to do it. One is just on how well that you feel. Followed the procedures. We have a company that is using us for coaching their CSRs.
Tyson Chen: And at the end of every week, the CSR that has the highest rubric score gets a 50 gift card. So that's actually worked really well. And they've seen their booking rates shoot up across the board. And then, yeah, more traditional one may just be, offering a SPF per booked call.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, I've seen anywhere from from 10 to 20. But but yeah, those have also been effective.
Jack Carr: Interesting. When we talk about call center a lot, we you're focusing a lot on the CSR as a specific position when you're inside, like John's business it's not just a CSR in the call center, it's a CSR dispatcher, ISRs out, bounders.
Jack Carr: There's a lot of different positions. Is that the typical model that you see in the call centers you're working with or is there any kind of specific model that you can talk about today that kind of threw you off or sub or su surprised you?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, I think it really depends on the stage of the company.
Tyson Chen: All right. We work with some companies that they are just starting to get their first CSR. And so the level of sophistication is obviously very very different. And a lot of our companies have anywhere from five to 10 CSR. That's another tier. And so I'd say, once you get past the 10 CSR, that's where you really start the specialization.
Tyson Chen: Some people are really great at outbounding. Some people are doing more inside sales. Yeah. So yeah, there, there's definitely some of that kinda stratification. I will say though, that one thing that I think is really important, especially once the CSR group gets larger, is being able to maintain that high quality.
Tyson Chen: Because we see this a lot, when you go over 10 CSRs, that's really when you see a pretty sharp drop off between the ones that are experienced and the ones that are a bit newer. And there's also, there ends up being a lot more there's a lot more room for folks to not really know, the full kind of range of scripting.
Tyson Chen: And so
Jack Carr: that's where you end up in trouble. And. Curious. So we're talking about bandwidth and CSR is being good or bad. So what do you see in field as the optimal number of calls a CSR should be receiving per day, receiving outbound, how many can they handle?
Tyson Chen: Yeah. So I would describe it less as number of calls because sometimes call duration is typically, can change.
Tyson Chen: I would describe it more as, what percentage of the time are they on calls? Because. Frankly, if they're over yeah, if they're over 50%, their call time is on calls, they're just not going to be play, playing their a game. They're just gonna be too tired. Kind of their voices might be worn out.
Tyson Chen: They're just not going to have the same level of compassion and empathy you want. I say the sweet spot for the amount of time that. Your CSR should be on the phone versus, doing other tasks to be around 35 to 40%. And and yeah, I think, and that's talk time.
Jack Carr: Yeah.
Jack Carr: John is that currently a metric that you measure? We don't measure. Time on call. We measured like the length of the call, but not specifically the percentage per day that they're talking.
John Wilson: Yeah we measure minutes, minutes a day on phone.
Jack Carr: Interesting. Is that in service Titan?
Jack Carr: We pull it off of air.
John Wilson: We started doing it because we found some people were on the phone 45 a day sliding under the radar. , just like underperforming. So then we started tracking it and I think right now we're at like 180 to 200 minutes a day on average.
Jack Carr: So that's three hours out of eight.
Jack Carr: About 40%. That's pretty spot on.
John Wilson: 37.5.
Jack Carr: What's that? We
John Wilson: were aiming for much higher. So this is interesting. That that people do well at our current level.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, I would say definitely don't go above 50%. That's that's a level where it's usually not sustainable yet more burnout. So yeah, you guys are at 37.
Tyson Chen: 5. I could say you guys can ratchet it up to as high as, low forties. There, so there's a bit of room to optimize a bit, but
Jack Carr: you guys are at a good level.
Jack Carr: Interesting. And so we were talking offline a little bit about I believe the term is man in the middle. Is that what you're using? Yeah. Human in the loop, human in the loop. Thank you. Human in the loop. Can you explain to us and the viewers what I'm changing base a little bit, but what human in the loop is and how you're using that in this call center context.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, absolutely. So human loop is a concept. It's been around for a while. And it's been around, in, in other industries where AI has really taken over. But the basic premise is that, the AI even let's say even for self driving and self driving space.
Tyson Chen: AI is not going to be perfect, right? You're not going to, and you can see behind me, I have the little Nero bot from my time at Nero but there's always these instances in self driving where the vehicle it may be at a specific point in time where it's, it encounters a situation that it's never encountered before.
Tyson Chen: And in that time, the AI is actually not going to know what to do. And so you need a human operator to actually come in and essentially save the day a bit and take over. And so there's the same idea in in AI. And so I see this all the time and there's a lot of. Folks that are trying to do what we do now, which is have these essentially AI receptionist.
Tyson Chen: And and I think the thing that people forget is that at the end of the day, AI is a great tool but it is just a tool and you want, and then they've more than anything to have the highest performance. And what does that mean? It means that you want to represent your brand the right way.
Tyson Chen: You need to treat your customers the right way and you need to ensure high booking rates. And we see this a lot where, especially for certain demographics, when they hear an AI, even the best sounding AIs. They still know it's an AI, and so they may not be happy and they may just drop off.
Tyson Chen: So the point of human, the loop is AI can do a lot of things really well, but there's still things that a human is just fundamentally better at. For example, it's 4am and your AC just broke. You want to hear that you're talking to another human. And so we've developed this system at Evoco where.
Tyson Chen: We actually are essentially able to have AI working with humans highly trained humans in the U S in synchrony. And that that degree at which you're able to intertwine the two transfer the call at the right time, provide the right context to the human when they come in That's that whole kind of system is human in the loop.
Jack Carr: Yeah that's fair. We joke about sometimes there have been a few companies that we've tested their a hundred percent AI phone systems and, you give them some wonky questions like, A rat has eaten through my air conditioner. What should I do? And they just go off the wall.
Jack Carr: And so that was one of our big moments where we said, it's not there yet. Cause of course, with all this AI, we are or this big push for AI, we are always testing and figuring out, Hey, is the time. And we found it to be a fairly. Comical conversations, but I could definitely see a situation where AI is coaching, like you mentioned before, and AI is also like setting them up, taking a few questions and then giving it to a human to really find it's human.
Tyson Chen: And it's all about setting that human. So then really what it comes down to now is that instead of completely replacing him, the humans. You can have one human do the job of five humans. You're essentially giving more leverage for each of your individual CSRs to think about it this way during the course of a day.
Tyson Chen: Maybe we don't realize this, but a lot of the calls are just not important. And you can, we can call them non revenue sense. I have
Jack Carr: noticed that.
Tyson Chen: On average it varies quite a bit regionally, but on average, 60 percent of calls you get are actually non revenue sensitive. These calls can actually be handled very well by AI because it's usually just, someone looking for a job where, you just want to collect their content, their information, their background.
Tyson Chen: AI can do all that really well. There's, vendors are trying to call spam calls. Someone's leaving a message for the 60 percent of jobs AI can handle really well. And then that means that you can stop having this 60 percent of the job being handled by your great CSRs. Let AI take care of that.
Tyson Chen: And then for the actual revenue sensitive jobs, when someone actually needs service or something else, then you can have transfer that to a highly trained CSR. And then even within that 40 percent of revenue sensitive jobs, some of them may just be things like scheduling routine maintenance.
Tyson Chen: That's something that's simple enough that I can handle quite well. And the nice part is that for us, we allow each customer to basically configure that. But yeah, in general, I think I think, it is critical to have this human, the loop component and have a the system that is able to transfer and transfer the knowledge of what's already happened well enough so that the human can Come in and take over the call in the best way possible.
Jack Carr: I love that so much. So you talked a little about like setting the human up for success, not including all of these kind of. points that we just touched on in terms of is this a revenue generation call? But for purely revenue generation calls, what are questions that should be asked prior to talking with a human or even as just in generalistic terms your CSR should be asking the customer, what do you see are some of the most valuable questions that put into the software To make sure that they're asking prior.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, absolutely. That's a great question. I'll start by saying that, the first thing you want to do is express empathy for the customer situation. And so you have to understand their issue their yeah, whatever issue they're dealing with and then express empathy. That's always the best way to, to start out every call.
Tyson Chen: And there's specific wording that you also want to use. After that, there's a few things that are important. It really depends on what the what kind of problem they're
Jack Carr: facing. Real quick. So you're saying when someone calls in and says, I have a 10-year-old unit, it's broken. HVAC, you don't wanna answer.
Jack Carr: Hell yeah. , you don't say yes. Sorry. Good, good to nice to meet you. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get out there.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. We definitely don't want to say that. And in fact, so John
Jack Carr: uses, right? John uses how can we make you smile? I wouldn't say that's an empathy, empathy term, right?
Jack Carr: It's a, how can we serve you? I would say. Oh, so just to clarify, this would be after. So you start with the first line, which is, a nice, Okay. Great, how may I make you smile? How may I serve you? There's a variety of folks that, folks like to use afterwards.
Tyson Chen: Then they'll usually say their issue like, Oh man, I came home and my air conditioning my, my air conditioning was hot air or it's making a rattling noise after they say that, then you need to hit them with the empathy statement. And then that is that after all of that you've established the empathy then you want to go into, The information gather.
Tyson Chen: So there's a few ways to do this, but one thing is especially for AI systems is you want to try to collect the information like their contact information relatively quickly so that if the call, for whatever reason drops, you still have that as a lead. And then. Afterwards, you want to identify some information that will help you understand the size of this opportunity.
Tyson Chen: And that is obviously different based on what they said their issue was, if they, if the issue was regarding their air conditioning or heating unit you obviously want to ask age of equipment for other things, you might want to ask about the age of the home whether they're a member, then it gets a little bit more custom.
Tyson Chen: But, yeah those are just some general principles around starting the call
Jack Carr: real quick. I'm Austin cut here. I need to plug in my computer. It's going to die.
Jack Carr: Oh, good.
Jack Carr: Do you find a spot? Do you think there's
John Wilson: ever, do you think there's ever like a time when the human in the loop becomes the client company?
Jack Carr: What's the client company? Oh, what do you mean by that exactly?
John Wilson: Could we ever become our own human in the loop?
Tyson Chen: Yeah. Like you have your basically we give you the AI and then you your humans are on the other side.
John Wilson): Yeah. I think there's an interesting as you were describing that, Problem and solution.
John Wilson: I thought it would be interesting if so many of our phone calls, it's like hundreds a day or non revenue. It's it doesn't matter. And it would be, and everyone's trying to solve for that. They either, they put in like a maze or whatever the menu at the beginning, but then you, your abandoned rate just jumps when you do that.
Tyson Chen: So then your Google ratings also drop because they look at if you're using an automated system, they're humans collecting it. Yep.
John Wilson: Yeah. So we haven't done that cause we don't want to mess with that. But what would be sweet is if the first answer was always AI and then hand it over to a human, maybe not always AI, but if a lot of the sort of unnecessary stuff got handed over or even maybe by channel.
John Wilson: Cause like our legacy, like our 60 year old phone number that probably gets way more spam That would be like vendors or something. So we could probably set that one number up to be fully AI. Exactly. Hand
Tyson Chen: over. No, that, that's you're spot on. I think the way to do it is to do it by some type of smart segmentation where certain numbers you use in your marketing campaigns, you may be paying $500 per that lead and you know that's gonna be a hot lead and they're probably shopping around and you may just wanna bypass the ai, the AI is getting a, better every month, but for now you want to probably during the daytime.
Tyson Chen: Route that directly to your best CSR with the highest closing rates. And then for the other numbers, the main numbers where, we have to look at the statistics, but if you have one number that is like 60, 70 percent non revenue sensitive, you can have that handled by the AI. Then another step that you can do afterwards which is you already have an understanding of all of your customers numbers in service Titan or whatever CRM you're using.
Tyson Chen: And you can even do something smart there where if you recognize the number, You can just directly and if you see that they have a job today, then you can probably determine that they're most likely calling to about the job or rescheduling it. And so that operation is something that I can handle, right?
Tyson Chen: So you can route it based on that information as well. Yeah. So how would that happen? Would they get like an, like a different phone number? If it's an in progress job, or how would you even make that part happen?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, so that part would just be handled by the basic by, in your case by us, we would we would be able to handle that routing based on looking at the caller ID and then routing it in the right direction.
Tyson Chen: In terms of the the setup from your telephony system, you would just pass that number on directly to us. And then you let us handle the rest of the kind of complex routing.
John Wilson: Yeah, that's fascinating. I don't think I've ever actually thought about cSR, call.
John Wilson: Like we think about right tech, right job all the time. Oh yeah. I don't think I've ever thought about right CSR, right call.
Jack Carr: That's good. So hard to measure, you'd have to
John Wilson: grade route. Like how do you manage that? That's the problem is how do you get Yeah, I'm going to go down a rabbit hole.
John Wilson: Now, this is,
Tyson Chen: it's not that hard, right? Because, first of all you have statistics. Our platform provides statistics on CSR performance. So you can easily just see who the best CSOs are. And then, a lot of these telephony systems, for example, a dial pad, each CSR has their own number.
Tyson Chen: So then you can just route specific calls to those numbers and create, a group in dial pad, which is your highest performers. And so then those guys always get first priority at, let's say the 500 lead 500 per lead calls that come in through your
Jack Carr: your marketing campaigns.
Jack Carr: Shit. Yeah, this makes sense. That's super interesting. Real quick. Aside before I get back to that, do you have a preference of call software? You mentioned Dialpad before we use Grasshopper. We're not overly thrilled with it. Is there any anybody that sticks out as they do it really well?
Tyson Chen: I'd say Dialpad is pretty good. A lot of our customers use it and seem to like it. I think that there are also a few other ones that are at a similar level. Green Central, for example. And yeah, I think you really can't go wrong with the main ones. Grasshopper I'm, I think is a bit lighter weight.
Tyson Chen: And exactly. Yes. So I think for the slightly smaller companies that could also work. But yeah, I think the two big ones are Dialpad and RingCentral, and I don't think you can really go wrong with either.
Jack Carr: That's great. Cause like we, we get a lot of questions surrounding that just as small companies who have all any of these smaller less hefty VOIP switch from like what we're doing a small one, like grasshopper, and then move to one.
Jack Carr: That's going to be able to sustain us with our growth. We just, we're trying to find it. So we'll keep that in mind, ring central and dial pad. Yep. I appreciate it. Sorry for derailing conversation. I know we get that, that one probably once a month.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, 1 other thing I would mention a lot as we're talking about the topic of just general best practices and, how do you improve your general performance?
Tyson Chen: And again given that in this industry, 90 percent of your revenue is coming from call center. You have to keep in mind that any percentage improvements that you make with your call center, that's just going to cascade basically the top line revenue. So yeah, 1 thing 1 thing I did want to mention is.
Tyson Chen: Regarding calls that aren't booked. And especially in the summertime, when people are overloaded with calls, I've actually been seeing this happen quite often, where folks are a missing a lot of calls, but be they're just not, they're not closing the call and they're not booking a job. And so how do you deal with this?
Tyson Chen: And the best companies actually have very specific processes they use to ensure that. If their, if the job comes in and if the job they deem to be a high ticket value job, like a, like an install or yeah an order, 10 plus year system they will have mechanisms in place to instantly text and call that customer back.
Tyson Chen: And so one thing that coach has actually a new functionality we just launched a few weeks ago. And John, I think we still need to get you guys on this 1, but what it does is when it detects a job is bookable. There's an intent to book and we detect that it's not booked.
Tyson Chen: We actually will send an automatic alert whether it be email, slack text to the call center manager and to the dispatcher to let them know of this opportunity. That was just missed. We'll let them know why it was missed. So the reason that the customer didn't book may it be you weren't able to come out fast enough.
Tyson Chen: The dispatch fee was too high or something else. And so that way, you can, you have probably a 5, 10 minute window before they call someone else that you can call them back and say, hey, for you, I'm going to make an exception and waive that dispatch fee so that you can essentially recover.
Jack Carr: That is something that keeps me up at night.
Jack Carr: So that's absolutely incredible. As you go back, like I said, we're a three to 5 million company. So we don't have the same kind of capabilities to listen to every single call and there'll be a once in every blue moon where we go in and listen and go, why didn't we just waive the dispatch fee here?
Jack Carr: Come on. It was an eight year old system with a blown compressor. Like either way, it was a win. Yes. That's all. That's absolutely an incredible function and feature. Exactly.
John Wilson: That was the benefit. Cause we did have a call listening team, but we've been using a VOCA the coach side of the program for I think we're two months in now or six weeks.
John Wilson: And yeah, we literally our old call listening program was like three or four people. And they used, they could only get to a third of the phone calls, maybe less. But now we do, let's do a hundred percent. It's wild.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, they're probably doing it. What? Like maybe once a week or so. And then
John Wilson: they were full time on it.
John Wilson: They were like people in the Philippines, but it's like 1000 phone calls a day in and out
Tyson Chen: if you
John Wilson: include all the outbounds and everything.
Tyson Chen: It was just a lot to keep up with. Totally. Totally. Yeah. This is we see this all the time. Folks are just, listening to calls themselves, spending a lot of time.
Tyson Chen: You're not even getting to all the calls. Yeah. And then obviously that just some of these other things, like being able to classify jobs correctly, which is something that a lot of folks struggle with. If I were to ask you guys for example, Jack, do you have an accurate idea?
Tyson Chen: Of what your true booking percentage is across. Absolutely
Jack Carr: not.
Tyson Chen: Yeah.
Jack Carr: We try to get it as close but we're still in the phase where we just implemented service Titan this year. And so we're taking down all of the big, the big wins one by one. And. That's coming up to try and figure out, Hey, are our metrics on call center?
Jack Carr: Correct. So we don't know what's
John Wilson: challenging because a lot of it's self reported. So like I can tell you what ours is self reported, but I believe that it's wildly off.
Tyson Chen: And we find when we do a in depth analysis, it's usually at least 30 percent off. Because a lot of time it's a lot higher because CSR is, by default, they have a bias of, Hey, if I didn't book it, then it wasn't a lead.
Tyson Chen: And yeah. The thing I always tell folks is how can you really improve something when you can't even measure it?
John Wilson: Yeah. Part agree.
Jack Carr: Yeah. And then warranty, how figuring out like what's a warranty, what's an actual callback versus what's not. Cause then that we're, that's the one we're dealing with right now, because realistically this, we are performance pay, so not hitting certain performance metrics for the text because something was booked incorrectly.
Jack Carr: Absolutely kills them. So this is a big rock for us.
Tyson Chen: Yep. Yep. Absolutely. And yeah, you brought up a good point. It's actually not, part of it is booking the job. Obviously we want that. But beyond that is also presenting the brand in the right way and then setting your text up for success.
Tyson Chen: Once they get into into the house and, there's ways in which you want to speak and convey and guide the call that that is, is very difficult for for the average CSR to do well. And yeah, I think there's many levels to it.
Jack Carr: Do you, this is a another interesting one. Just a curiosity. Do you have metrics on say, if you were to not insert that initial empathy statement, what does the call booking rate look like? Does it physically drop? Are you guys able to measure that?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, that's a really great question.
Tyson Chen: We are able to to be honest, we haven't run that analysis yet.
Jack Carr: That'd be super cool to see.
Tyson Chen: That would be a good one though. Because yeah, we, what we do anecdotally see is that with, if you don't have the empathy statement. The tone of the call is usually quite different. And yeah, I think when folks feel that they're just, being guided through a mechanical process you just, you're just not really building the connection and And there is a chance that even if you book them, they may just end up choosing someone else.
Jack Carr: Yeah, it feels more transactional is the word I like to use. So that's super interesting. I'd love to see the data on all, on all those kinds of things, because we, I think we play this game a lot where we believe the psychology of the customer is going to work in X, Y, or Z way, but the reality of it is it just doesn't at all.
Jack Carr: So I think a big one is wrapped trucks versus unwrapped trucks and how that affects closing rate and average tickets. And do you see that? And John can speak to this one is it affects it, I'm sure, but not to the extent that I think a lot of people believe it would. So we, No, John's talking to someone else.
Jack Carr: He was muted. So I'd love to see the data when that does come out because that would be incredible to see what are actually the points in which the conversation happens that truly make a statistical difference to booking rate and eventually down the road and like average order value and total revenue.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, I have a few of those data points. I don't have that empathy statement one in particular, but we actually do have metrics on a few other things, one of them being the what we call the longest dead time. And what we actually see is that any time there is a dead time of. 10 seconds or more, there is a 15 percent chance that the the color just drops.
Tyson Chen: And by just removing instances of that of that occurrence, you can you can instantly improve your booking rates by virtue of having less people drop. There's other things like, being able to when you're on a call, and I was just talking to, to Doug Wyatt, actually he's he's industry leader and how to, coach folks, how to say the right things. He's very he's very opinionated and an expert on how to think, say things the right way. But he was telling me an interesting point around one of the things he always coaches his CSRs is when you're talking to a woman on the phone you don't want to ever mention the word issue because that is something that he just has found through his research.
Tyson Chen: Is not well received and and that, that's just one kind of one call. You can incorporate and similarly, you don't want to use the word problem when you're talking to men that statistically that if you don't use the word problem when you're talking to to men on the phone, that can also increase your booking rates.
Jack Carr: I think the coolest thing is that we're going to actually be able to track this in the near future. I know that this gentleman is saying that, and he's probably an expert in his field and, everything like that. But at the end of the day we're going to be able to listen to every call across you guys are.
Jack Carr: Every call across, hundreds and hundreds of companies, hopefully for your business. And you get these giant data points where, you know, I can't I can't imagine how you would do that with a smaller study. I'm sure you could, but like in this way in shape and form, you guys are going to be able to test these subconscious word cues and then put all that in action.
Jack Carr: So that's going to be super fun. At least it would be fun to me. I would imagine.
Tyson Chen: Yeah, I know. I've always been a data nerd myself. I love this stuff. And yeah, the good news is actually in the platform. It's so configurable. John, you guys, you obviously know this more than anything, but you can set up the rubric.
Tyson Chen: You can have the AI listen to exactly what you want it to listen to. And yeah, even things like, Hey, Okay. Rubric item, do not say the word issue when talking to a woman on the phone is something that you can just build in and the evoke evaluator can help you track that.
Tyson Chen: And then you can and then obviously you can coach based off of that. Something else that is super helpful. Do you guys have membership programs? Yeah, so memberships is key. It results in a significantly higher lifetime value and the non members. And so 1 of the things that we've been helping a ton of especially larger companies with is making sure that their CSRs are Are mentioning that on virtually all their calls and so before there was really no good way to measure that.
Tyson Chen: A lot of companies we worked with they've continued to emphasize this. They would continue to mention this at every weekly meeting, but still we saw through the data. Less than 10 percent of CSRs were actually mentioning the membership option in their calls. And then after using the coach platform, and after actually tracking that, that number moved from 10 percent to over 50%.
Tyson Chen: And and that and that actually resulted in a significant increase in the number of memberships sold. across a number of our customers.
Jack Carr: Yeah, I could definitely imagine that to be true. And the utilization of that kind of feature is really interesting because I know John and I both have used a strategy when opening up.
Jack Carr: Secondary verticals of just offering secondary verticals of at least offering that. And I know that Hey, we're offering plumbing now, or, Hey, we're offering electoral, just giving you a heads up. If you wanted to book we have that opportunity. And I know that it was a struggle on our end getting our, three CSRs to all do it every single time.
Jack Carr: Oh, I forgot. Oh, I was busy. But we didn't have percentages to be able to and follow up with them on. So that's. An awesome feature. All of this sounds like an awesome feature. I think if anything today, you at least have one new customer. So
Tyson Chen: nice. We'll get you guys rolling.
Jack Carr: Yeah,
John Wilson: this was great, man.
John Wilson: I appreciate the dive in the call center. I'm going to, this is, there's a couple episodes that I like re listened to later. This is definitely gonna be one of them because it, it stretched the brain a little bit and I've been working with you for a few months now, but this was good.
Jack Carr: This will also be a fun one to listen to a year from now and see just based on the speed of the J curve of how A.
Jack Carr: I. S. Going see where evoke is in a year and like what you guys are all doing then.
Tyson Chen: Yeah. Yeah, I think, even a focus side, there's just a lot of opportunity, especially in this industry in a lot of other industries. They've had sophisticated analytics and really emphasis on cost center performance, but it's 1 of those things.
Tyson Chen: It's just really not top of mind for especially a lot of the earlier kind of companies that may not be. May not be over doing over, 30, 40 million, or maybe just starting out, more in the one to five, one to 10 million range. They just, there's so many things obviously focus on that they end up really not thinking at all about the call center.
Tyson Chen: And if anything, even beyond just all the AI innovation that's happening in this space. Just to actually track and have processes set up to do some of these different things, I think can make a world of difference and really accelerate the growth for owners.
John Wilson: Yeah, no, I think so too. And I know that we've seen I think we're still in learning phase. We're still like trying to understand how to best use it, but it's showing up more in our trainings. And yeah, I think it's going to compound pretty fast, like a cumulated advantage. Yes, absolutely.
Tyson Chen: And this was sick,
John Wilson: man.
Tyson Chen: Look at the book. Yeah. Thanks guys. Yeah, I really enjoyed this. It was great to meet you, Jack. I heard so many episodes, but it's great to finally meet you.
Jack Carr: So we're on our Tyson, where can people learn more about Avoca learn more about you? Is there a place for each? Where can people hear more?
Tyson Chen: Yeah, so there's there, there's a variety of things. If you're interested in the platform more than happy to give you guys a demo with one of the members of our team. So you can just go to our website and press book a demo, and then for the promo code make sure to put in the promo code owned to get a special.
Jack Carr: So that answers that question. No, I'm kidding. And then if are you on, I know, we had a startup on Twitter, we met a lot of people. Are you on Twitter or is there anywhere that people can connect with you directly if you want that whatsoever?
Tyson Chen: Yeah I'm actually not too active on Twitter but but you can connect with me if you're interested in anything feel free to email me, my, my name, my email is just Tyson at Avoka.
Tyson Chen: ai otherwise I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so that, that's that's an avenue, but but yeah, yeah, I really enjoyed this.
Jack Carr: Awesome. Thank you very much. If you liked this episode, go ahead and give us five stars so that our moms know that we were actually doing something with our lives and go ahead over to the website owned and operated.
Jack Carr: com. And catch us on Twitter. Appreciate it. Everyone.
John Wilson: 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.
John Wilson: You can find me on Twitter at Wilson companies. I'll see you next time.
Get more Owned and Operated on YouTube, on Twitter, or with our weekly newsletter.
.png)
.png)
