Owned and Operated - A Plumbing, Electrical, and HVAC Business Growth Podcast

#173 - "We Booked 400 Calls a Week": How Avoca AI is Shaping Home Services

• John Wilson • Season 1 • Episode 173

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Tyson Chen from Avoca is back to break down how AI is changing the game for home service call centers.

We dive into Avoca’s AI tools—like Coach for CSR training and Responder for automated call handling—that have helped us book more jobs while cutting costs. We also get into the real challenges of bringing AI into traditional call centers and what’s coming next in the AI space. 

If you want to know how AI can boost efficiency and improve customer service, this episode is packed with insights.

Special Thanks to Avoca

Looking to train your call center and improve technician performance? Avoca AI is here to help your team identify existing issues, improve call quality, and drive results from start to finish.
 
Click here to schedule a demo: https://calendly.com/d/cp54-9jr-nht/avoca-ai-demo?month=2025-01

Special Thanks to Modernize

We’ve been using Modernize them for our water quality leads, and it’s been smooth sailing from day one. 

If you’re serious about boosting your leads, definitely check them out: https://modernize.com/pros/leads?utm_campaign=owned-podcast

Episode Hosts: 🎤
John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on X
Jack Carr: @TheHVACJack on X

Episode Guest:
Tyson Chen on Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tysonchen17/

Contact Owned and Operated:

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John Wilson, CEO of Wilson Companies
Jack Carr, CEO of Rapid HVAC

Tyson Chen: The vast majority of folks were very hesitant and we had to show them this is empirically better.

They were booking at a 43 percent rate and we instantly were able to bump that up to the low nineties. Not only do we want the AI to be the best in class in this industry, but we also want the best in class. human component as well. 

John Wilson: We're about eight months into using Avoca, and Avoca has been an awesome partner for us in our call center.

So what Avoca does for us is they do two different things. One, they have their Coach product, and Coach has been helping us do what it says. coach our CSRs every single day. It listens to every call and uses AI technology to basically pick apart that call and tell us where we can improve. And for the last eight months, we've been consistently improving our scores, 

The other product they have is just conventional booking. And it's an AI tool that books over the phone customer calls in and it either handles overflow as in our phones are full or it does nights and weekends for us. And a customer will call in and actually deal with an AI Agent all the way through booking and the savings inside call center has allowed us to ramp up our marketing to continue to grow even more.

Welcome back to owned and operated today we've got a return guest. We have Tyson Chen from Avoca. Welcome back to the show. 

Tyson Chen: Thanks so much. 

John Wilson: Yeah, this will be fun. There's a few episodes that I've had where like I refer so many people to, And our last one was one of those episodes, mainly around the whole idea of write, call, write CSR. So if you haven't heard that one, I wish I remembered what number it was, but search Tyson Chen and check back through the feed because that made a real impact.

On how we thought about call center staffing and routing. so yeah, that was awesome. But, I'm excited to have you back. I'm looking forward to whatever nugget we get out of this one. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah, excited to be here. Great to see you again, Jack, as well. 

John Wilson: Alright, for people that didn't catch the first episode, I'm also going to encourage you to just listen back.

How about you just describe your background really briefly and just What Avoca is all about, and then we can get into the meat and potatoes. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah. in summary, Avoca is the leading, AI agent platform for the home services, focused on call center. we have two main product lines, a coach, which listens to every single call that your CSRs take and gives them feedback and allows them to be the best version of themselves.

And then we have responder, which takes incoming calls, books them directly into server side or whatever CRM at a higher rate than any answering service you've ever used. we have some more features, which I'm excited to share a little bit later on.

John Wilson: I think we're about a year in. March, of last year, we started working with you guys. it's been awesome. 

Jack Carr: It's crazy because it feels like that episode was that long ago. it was one of the first two that we actually dove into AI and the capabilities of AI outside of just like chat GPT to help us out with emails or something like that.

John Wilson: Yeah, I guess that would be an interesting place to start is just from. AI has obviously moved fast in every industry. but home services really felt like it's moved very fast. obviously you guys are at the forefront of it, but what else are you seeing in industry? 

Tyson Chen: Yeah, I think there's a lot of different places. there's a lot of other builders in the space that we're very close to. Obviously there's, the folks doing, the ride along software, Rilla, zero, and, many others in that space.

There's a lot of exciting stuff happening in the world of dispatch as well. And Probook, automating the role of a dispatcher. there's also, text automations. So software's Chirp and Hatch. so yeah, I think there's a lot of different things, coming.

I think also, especially in the last three months, even, within all these different domains, us included, there's been an influx of additional entrants as well. So I think it's one of those, things where folks are starting to see. the impact that AI is making and there's an abundance now of folks that are trying to enter the space after seeing how well the police are doing.

Jack Carr: How do you view this competition? Is this competition more along the lines of all the boats in the harbor rise together or is this direct competition stealing market share? 

Tyson Chen: Yeah, I think for us, it's, when the first CRM, Cloud CRM came into play like Salesforce and we viewed a very similar way where, right now, if you look at the percentage of any home service industry that is using AI.

Although it may sound like a lot of, because a lot of big players are adopting it, in terms of overall fraction, it's still very, low, like probably significantly lower than 1 percent of the entire industry. So we view the competition as validating more than anything.

we're the first, really to, have a kind of clean and, production ready product and market. And so we see all these new folks coming in. Really is validation and that this market is really going to grow. And I think for us, it's just about, continuing to push our lead and capitalize on that.

John Wilson: Yeah. I remember, it's feels back to CRMs, it feels like service Titan has this like dominant, share of the market. And I think, I don't remember where I read this, but they only have 10, 000 customers, which is a lot. Like out of millions of like potential customers, they have a percent and it was just, it does feel like heavy adoption, but 

Tyson Chen: yeah, we feel like, yeah, the thing that's, definitely going to be displaced in a very big way very soon.

Is after hours answering services. So there's hundreds of legacy answering services. Yeah. Those businesses, unless they adapt in a very significant way, are probably going to be, fading pretty quickly. And we feel that. competition generally, it's also very good for the consumer, right?

And then the businesses like, the ones that you guys own, right? continue to push each other to improve, and, raise the quality bar. 

John Wilson: It has been interesting to watch more and more, use cases come out, we're starting to see some movement in sales apps that have an AI component, which I think that's interesting.

Pro book has been cool. they have been really cool. I think they're in New York too, right? are you guys like, yeah, they're a good group. but yeah, it's just interesting as more and more. I always think back to it. I was on a ski trip last February, probably a year ago and Jack and I did an episode and the episode was like, what do we think AI will change in the trades?

And I think about that friggin episode all the time because a lot has happened. it's, been fun to look back to as you're bringing on these, as you're bringing on. Like clients, into a VOCA, what's a, win? what have you seen been the big victory out of implementing AI and call center?

Tyson Chen: Yeah. that's really the thing that gets me excited, to wake up every day, I think are, some of the ways that we've really, transformed and impacted customers, I think to come to mind, super, recently, one is we did an implementation for, a large, company in, in, Tennessee.

within the first week, the previous answering service, which is a big recognized like national brand, right? They were booking at a 43 percent rate. and we, instantly, were able to bump that up to the low nineties. And that's just booking rate. That's not even impacting abandonment rate. And so when you think about net booking rate, it's even higher than that, over two X, increase.

It got so it was so immediately tangible that when you looked at the actual boards of how full it was the week previous, and then after implementing a book, it was ridiculous. And they got so much, it was so many jobs that they had not booked that they had to hire new. Technicians, they had to hire new personnel to be able to keep up with the demand.

So I think that was one of the ones that, that was immediately, like recently, a huge win. The other one was, 

Jack Carr: before we jump from there, Tyson, I'm not gonna ask you who it is. Not just because I'm in Tennessee, but HILLER! 

All: Hiller, one of the big 

Jack Carr: but on a serious note, what, aspect did they, or are you referring to specifically, is this the automated after hours service? Or is this the coaching? Where are you seeing the most, 

Tyson Chen: This was purely the, the AI responder. And I think the interesting part is, I think last time we spoke around nine months ago, John, it was, we were focused predominantly on I guess what we would consider the biggest pain point, which is everyone's after hours overflow answering service sucks.

And we can provide a much better version of that. Now I think the AI the point where we've, iterated on so much, we've improved every little detail. Every time the AI It's very similar to my time in working in the autonomous vehicle industry where every single mistake the autonomous vehicle made, we would figure out why it made that and then correct that.

And so that's the same level of, intensity and iteration we've applied to Volca. So now. it's significantly better and we're able to not only take just your after hours overflow calls, but a significant portion of your, day to day. And even for like large, a hundred million dollar companies were able to take sometimes 80 to 90 percent of their entire call volume.

to answer your question originally, Jack, it is the AI CFR product called Responder. 

John Wilson: I visited, this was in August, I think, of last year. I visited Josh down at Rescue, Josh Campbell. Yeah. And I think they had just switched over to like full AI.

answering. And I was like, what the fuck? they still had a few, but their call center high teens, low twenties business somewhere in there. And, they had two call takers or something. It was like an outrageously low number, maybe three. I don't even remember.

There was only one there that day. 

Tyson Chen: I just got an email from one of the, larger customers that we had onboarded around four months ago. and he was like, yeah, it's pretty ridiculous. We're able to run. An entire a hundred million dollar business with just nine CSRs through utilize Avoca, which like before they would have needed 40, 50.

John, like I think, what's your experience? 

John Wilson: So we've had two really big changes to our call center in the past year. One of them has been Avoca and one's been, like a compensation change that we've really championed. So I think like a combination of those two things, but right now we're running the leanest call center that we've ever run team wise and like our abandoned rate is obviously very low because we set, if we don't pick it up in seven seconds, then I think we set it. So Avoca picks up at seven. but I think we're down to, seven, maybe, it might be eight, but like at one point we were at 18, 19.

Yeah. so it was significant and, now some of that's like a bunch of that was overflow and weekends. That's where we saw a ton of our dynamic changing because we had, I don't know if our daytime changed much, we might have tightened that up by two, but we had a ton of people set for 24 hours. We had them set up for weekends and we just don't have to do any of that anymore.

Tyson Chen: The interesting thing there is it's the types of things that CSRs are spending their time on is a little bit more aligned to what you want them to be. Which is like all of those things where 50 percent of calls are not at all revenue sensitive, right? It's, an inquiry about billing.

It's someone wanting to, perhaps reschedule. Ask about an EPA is an extremely common one. All of those different Things where you don't need an amazing CSR to sell the brand, can be automated now by our, by the Avoca agent. So I think that's really where, there's been a pretty large inflection.

And, yeah, great to see that the results that you're experiencing. 

John Wilson: It's like right time, right? Everyone's looking for savings. Everyone's having pressure on their top line. Everyone's having margin compression. So being able to, for us, it was like 30 grand a month of savings.

So it was a lot, that's a lot of money. so being able to just add that back in and use it for marketing or literally anything else was a win. 

Tyson Chen: With just the fact that we are able to pick up every call in the first ring, that just adds so much to your true book rate, getting rid of any abandonment rate, and then all these other things that we've added on top in terms of callbacks, textbacks, like all these things, and really learning. We have just launched a few new functionalities.

John Wilson: What else have you guys pumped out? I'm going to follow up with Laurie on the callback and textback. That sounds cool. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah, big thank you. I'll say one thing on both Responder and Coach. So on the Responder side, one of the new things we've launched is outbound calling. So being able to do happy calling.

Jack Carr: That is wild. 

John Wilson: I'm gonna ask the first question that came into my head that probably came into everyone's head. Is that legal? Because I thought there was some restrictions on what TCPA, whatever it is. But I thought AI agents outbounding, I know there's some limits there, right?

Tyson Chen: Yeah, there's a lot of limits. It's different state by state. Generally speaking, if you're allowed, if you've gotten written consent to market to them. and if we're, announcing that it's an AI agent, that it is legal. beyond that, there's already a lot of, folks that do, AI text campaigns and stuff like that as well.

John Wilson: Okay, walk us through the AI outbounding. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah. So with AI outbounding, there's really a few different use cases. The first two that we're focusing on is one is pretty simple on happy calls. So being able to automatically trigger a happy call after a visit, seeing how well, you did getting actual feedback.

I think the nice part is it's actually an advantage that it is AI. Because, folks we found are actually a lot more receptive to telling actual feedback as opposed to if it's a real person. sometimes people don't, give the real because they're afraid of hurting their feelings.

We're putting this out where if the, person gives a 10 or 9, we actually ask them to then, leave a review. So it helps in getting more five star reviews as well. 

John Wilson: Are you tracking that for like MPS? Because I feel like that would Yes. You'd be able to like, yeah, record that, almost print it into MPS.

Tyson Chen: So we, yeah, exactly. And we, show all of that in a, dashboard, exactly like that.

Directly, you can see your MPS. Then the second thing is routine maintenance. So for members, when you, need to fill out the board, automatically, scheduling an outbound call and saying, Hey, we, you're on your member, membership. You get a free, check up, when do you want to schedule that?

And then we can schedule that directly into your CRM as well. So that's the second use case. And then the third one is actually running promotions. So let's say you guys are really not getting much business in the month of February, the month of March. You can use, our outbound to actually, provide promotions like, Hey, we're doing a, 55 off, drain cleaning, stuff like that.

Jack Carr: And is there any success stories with this? Because I'm trying to wrap my head around me receiving an AI phone call. And I don't know if I'd be as receptive to AI versus. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah. So we've seen, again, we've only launched the first two things. We've seen pretty good success with the first one.

Happy calls. That's actually a lot more successful than even a human calling and then, around routine maintenance, we've, only been beta testing this with three folks, but it's been pretty good. Because it's free. It's not like a tough sale.

It's not Hey, like convincing you to pay money to an AI. it's okay. This is a benefit that you have. We can schedule it for tomorrow if you want. And we're directly integrated into ACP so we can see. Exactly the availability as well. 

John Wilson: I want to hear it. I'm just sitting here that's crazy, I want to hear it.

But I mean I can see the huge amount of leverage. I mean at this point, yeah that would be crazy. It's almost I could, see it being like, like too much. what's the limit? Too much as in you could burn out a whole list in ten minutes? cause there's no limit, right?

Tyson Chen: Yeah, exactly. there's really no limit with the amounts that we're talking about here. 

John Wilson: How do you deal with, one of the things that we dealt with as we like ramped up our outbound discipline maybe a year ago was because I don't remember exactly why.

It has something to do with, like, how many calls you make that don't get answered or something like that. But our, number was showing up as spam. And we had to, we had to bring on this extra software to, unspam the phone number. How are you dealing with that? Especially with AI, because you're, like, pumping out more volume than humans basically ever could.

Tyson Chen: Absolutely. So great question. and yeah, exactly like the pickup rate, just like for email influences the stuff a lot. we do, monitor that quite a bit and, make sure that we're always basically using new numbers so that the numbers are not making it to spam. so that's the way that we're, able, we're essentially cycling through these new numbers in the backend.

So that is, it always shows. And also we always use the local area code. So whatever area code you're in, it'll call from that area code, and then You know, as soon as we notice that, numbers that are being marked as spam, we'll swap it to a new number. 

John Wilson: You know what'd be sweet? Yeah. it's like speed to lead.

Tyson Chen: Yeah. 

John Wilson: We just did a home show and we got 300 contacts. I think we got 85 or 90 appointments, but like the big thing you optimize there for is you have your contacts appointments and then what's your demo rate or your sit rate.

And like, how do you fix the gap? So if we booked a hundred appointments, but 40 canceled, so we only demoed. 60 of them. how do we, get another 10 on the books? And it's all through like persistent outbounding basically, to the point of obnoxious outbounding. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah, no, that's actually something we also have.

So for Yelp, Angie's list, through LSA being able to instantly respond and then initiate an outbound call to that person. that's something that, yeah, we have that functionality. yeah, we'd love to, I'd love to have you test it out as well. 

John Wilson: I will literally do that today.

Jack Carr: I know it's an issue for our team as well. It's like, when you're running all these aggregators, you can get bombarded with calls at any point or excuse me with leads at any point in time And if you do not get back to them that somebody is Somebody to it and we've tried to automate me. John's personally. It's me if you go on manny's and you go to Wilson, you'll find john at 10 in the morning 

John Wilson: how do you deal with how do you deal with the Like with, Angie's specifically, it's like how it interfaces with hatch, right? I don't really know about the other ones, but with hatch, the way it works and they're, actively fixing this.

I think they, they might've just fixed it, but it's not like a pipeline. So like I get a lead and the lead comes in and there's automatically. I don't know if it's an API. I don't know exactly how the lead connects, but it connects somehow. And then we send a message out, and then it doesn't become a conversation until they respond back.

And the problem, is that we can't outbound that person because we don't actually have their data. Inside Hatch, it's only native to whatever the lead ag is. have you guys, like, how would that work? Because that's a part of the problem we're trying to solve, is, and I think Hatch launched like a pipeline thing, so now we can manage that a little bit better.

But okay, if I, got 100 leads from Angie this week, we sent all the messages, we sped to lead for text, but only 50 of those 100 responded, how do we get the other 50? So you guys think you could somehow interface, put yourself in the middle.

Recently we've been experimenting with lead aggregators, and one of the ones I'm most excited about is a company called Modernize. So what Modernize does is they do direct inbound calls for home improvement. So it's a direct phone call. Booking, which is way easier to book and has a much higher book rate than an ANG list or something like that, where you have to re contact them and try to find that customer.

Modernize has a direct connection to our call center, so that's been a huge win. It also has some of the services that we've really struggled to get good leads for. Water heater replacements, HVAC units, and water damage restoration and water treatment. Quality. Those ones have been challenging for us to get leads and modernize has been a really great partner for us.

Tyson Chen: Yeah. we're able to directly access, energies in Yelp through, through either, yeah, or, API. And it depends, customer to customer, depends on their API level access. and then otherwise, we can even use, computer control to directly read this stuff off.

And so in that case, with 100, as long as they're in there, and we can read it off, you can actually, develop sequences. So basically being able to, first, shoot a text. If they don't respond within a certain, call it at 12 hours, then you can fire a phone call as well.

So you can essentially, initiate sequences, within the speed to lead capabilities. 

John Wilson: For, you, a couple of minutes ago, you said the big, probable loser in this. like next year or so is going to be a traditional call center, model. Have you seen some of these traditional call centers pick up AI in a meaningful way?

Tyson Chen: I've seen a few try. I think the issue is that it's just fundamentally a very different, paradigm and a very different business structure that they're used to. anyone can build something very basic That sounds like cool for a demo, but to actually get the AI and also to build in the human in the loop component that is able to continue the conversation, not drop context, and give the human all of the things that have happened in the conversation in a very fast way, so that conversation is smooth.

All of those individually are extremely difficult engineering challenges. And so the issue with traditional call centers is that they just don't have the talent, really necessary. and then even on, on the onboarding front, there's just so many things that we've learned and refined in how do you figure out onboarding to change management associated with it.

There's just so many layers to it. that in order for an old, like BPO or traditional pulse runner to do this effectively, they'd have to completely transform the organization. 

John Wilson: Yeah, what, I've seen start to happen is eventually, disruption disrupts, right? it is what it is.

But I've seen almost, a dissection of, hey, over here, we're gonna adopt AI. And do the thing. And over here, the opposite argument is, Hey, our advantage is that we're not AI. we're a human component. That's been, their argument. Is oh yeah, we're, more hands on. Has that been something you guys have, dealt with?

Or competed against or have you, has it just been all signs go recently?

Tyson Chen:  Yeah, in early days, I would say the, vast majority of folks were very hesitant and we had to show them case studies and all this to, show them that this is empirically better. recently the, we've been getting more and more interest.

I think it's really in terms of the adoption, the, innovators, the early adopters, the early majority, I think we're squarely. In the early majority now, where folks that wanna get a leg up are actually thinking about this. I think the nice part with Avoca in particular is that we're not just ai.

We have AI, but we also have a staff of highly trained RSRs that are actually very much trained in a sales way, so that they're always trying to book the calls. And so our whole idea is that not only do we want the AI to be the best. and even for customers that really are in, let's say, really rural parts of the country, that they're able to, also have an amazing experience.

John Wilson: Yeah, it'll be interesting over the next few years, and like, how long does an advantage last to an early user? Because I think right now, there's a, cost savings component, but what happens in two or three, five years when more of the industry's on there? is that cost saving component gone, for some reason?

is this like are the next few years, the years to win? 

Tyson Chen: Yeah. we absolutely feel like it. I think for us, as again, as I mentioned, there's, definitely a lot of, competitors, new competitors that are entering now.

I think in terms of our advantages, one is that even on the go to market side, we're, capturing a lot of, and working with a lot of the leading industry leaders that's going to help the product forward. And then, realistically, I think technologically. we have a multi month advantage, but the thing is about the industry that's so interesting that because the technology is moving at such an incredible pace, where we are now versus three months ago is light years different.

And where we're going to be in three months, our motto is the Avoca three months later is going to put the Avoca today out of business. It's how much that, just a few months difference makes. And that's how we see it. And, yeah, I think, exactly the next two years, it's really when, I think what we'll start to see a clear, market leader emerging, I think in these kinds of industries, it's really The number one player, if you look at, for example, Salesforce versus HubSpot, there is such a massive difference between the number one and the number two players.

Jack Carr: Speaking of, Avoca three months from now, what, do you see, or what can you talk about that's on the horizon that are going to be just these awesome projects you guys are working on or awesome features that you see come into fruition? 

Tyson Chen: Yeah. there's, a variety of things, but I think, our thing has always been focused.

We want to create number one AI CSR. We want to be. not just on the cost side, right? Like our primary value propositions. We want to build this DSR that is able to book your jobs at a higher booking rate than anyone else. So that's still going to be our kind of top insane focus. I think there's some interesting things that we're also doing upstream.

So on, bringing AI into marketing and kind of helping to operationalize. And improve your, where your marketing dollars are spent. and yeah, I won't share too much about that, but yeah. That's something that's coming, 

Jack Carr: and then the outbounding thing is huge in itself. if that can be locked down and works well, that's an absolute game changer.

John Wilson: Yeah, I think it's cool because it's up and downstream. One of the downsides of Service Titan is, it's literally too big. I don't even know what the minimum size is anymore, but it's probably like 10 trucks or something.

Which is still big. I don't even know if they onboard you under that. but it feels like there's a use case here for 100 million and there's a use case here for I'm a one dude. and maybe even a better use case for the I'm a one dude, because like they literally can't support a human.

Tyson Chen: Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. the interesting thing is in this industry home services, while there's, more and more aggregation, we hear about all the private equity rollups. We were just talking about that a little bit before the show. If you look at where most of the revenue is 

It's still in that long tail If you're a man in the van, before you even get a CRM, you're probably going to need to get someone that can pick up the phone for you 24/7 and just, confirm a time. That's exactly what we can do.

I think you're exactly right. The use cases are a little bit different, but I would almost argue the upside is even larger. Because, for you, John, you had an after hours answering service before, so the value for you is A, cost reduction of whatever the 30, 000 a month, but be, we're able to increase your, revenue a bit, maybe booking rate increased by around 15, 20 percent for a man in the van who goes to the voicemail, that increase isn't 15%.

That's from voicemail that has like an efficacy of 5 percent to all of a sudden, 85 percent with our booking rate. So that Delta is just so much bigger with a smaller gas. 

Jack Carr: Is that typical of what you're seeing, Tyson? Is that going from a after hours booking service to a VOCA will save you that kind of money?

Tyson Chen: Save you the money, and also better service. save you probably around, anywhere from, 30 to 40%, based from your previous answering service and also increase your booking rate by around 15%. Mic drop.

John Wilson: Yeah. it's a big. I know, it was for us, like we were, we were using, probably schedule engine, I think. And they went through just a shit show of an acquisition with ServiceTitan. I mean it was a good, it was a really good, like the product itself, the widget or whatever, is still good, like we're still users of that, but their after hours at one point was better.

Then our internal call center, like we, we like downsized our call center cause it was just, they were better and then they got acquired by service Titan and that was just absolutely awful. 

We saved a ton of money. it was awesome. And just, frankly, a better experience because it was really very bad. 

Jack Carr: Tyson, can you talk a little bit about, specifically, what does onboarding look like for something like that? What's the lift that it takes, say, for me? So I don't, we don't have an after hours service.

But if we were going to switch to Avoca, what does that look like for me? How do I, how do I get onboarded? What does that look like? 

Tyson Chen: So basically two weeks, total onboarding process. we've start by understanding, your general scheduling. we have a few templates like best in class templates, that we've worked with a lot of our customers based on.

So based on the size of your business, whether or not you do emergency, whether or not you do weekends, what type of services that you guys do, we'll have, already a general template that should get you around 90 percent of the way there. Then you just give us access to your service Titan or use service, right?

You give us access to your service Titan, you fill in the knowledge base of my questions, you give us a job type mapping, and then we take all of that, we train the system, and then we give you an initial, number to test with, in the first week. And then we have structured testing, which is Hey, here are all the different types of paths that a customer can go down so that you're completely covered.

We'll usually that's one more turn. And then the second week we'll do a final kind of testing call. and if everything works well, it'll go live. yeah, it usually just takes with your call center manager around three, three to four hours.

You get a dashboard. If you're using voicemail right now, that's there, there's a lot of upside that I can see from guys using us. 

John Wilson: I'm sure you have the data, but what do you think the, percentage of your clients that are using the full AI phone service? How many people are like, yes, AI take over my call center versus the hybrid, right?

I think we're still hybrid, but I'm sure people would, I know I'm curious of just like, all right, how many of my competitors have AI running their call center? 

Tyson Chen: Yeah, I would say, out of our customers, it's typically what we recommend is that larger customers use hybrid because hybrid, you're just going to get a higher booking rate.

Full AI the booking rate is actually significantly higher than it was before because of how human like we've gotten it and how well We've been able to engineer the conversations, but it's still probably around 5 percent lower overall booking rate And so usually it's companies that are under 10 million under 5 million.

There's a larger percentage that use full AI Maybe 60-70 percent And then for the companies that are larger than 10 million, the vast majority, we recommend, and also they do use hybrid because they want, every single percentage of that booking rate matters to them. 

John Wilson: What percentage of clients?

Tyson Chen: Our full AI of overall clients. It's still, around 30.

Jack Carr: 30%. That is a lot more than I would think. 

Tyson Chen: But we've gotten recently, a lot more of the smaller, like under 5 million shops. 

John Wilson: Yeah. And I think for them, just the, argument is so good. I was talking with a friend of mine and he was like actively trying to solve this problem.

And for some reason, I don't know why I didn't think about it. So I'm going to have to text him, but he was like, yeah, dude, what do I do about this? and he's like a four truck operation. 

Tyson Chen: What was the main problem that he was trying to solve? 

John Wilson: Hours. so, he called me up and he's Hey man, I'm talking to the CSR.

And she's, great. She's amazing. And, she said, she can pick up the phone after hours and I can make that a part of her job. And I was like, yeah, I don't think that's really going to work the way you think it's going to like. She's going to be busy with her life. It's going to go to voicemail.

You're going to lose it. Maybe you should bring on additional staff or you should do something. And, for, him, he literally just can't do it. it's a, four per, it's a four truck operations, a very small operation. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah. I imagine even during the day if folks are busy, like he's the only one that's taking calls, right?

John Wilson: Yeah, he has a call taker now, but they're like replacing with the new one. maybe he must have asked me, it must've been hiring related. I don't even know. I'm like, how did that not cross my brain? fully, I think would be like, obviously just make a ton of sense for that size of a business for that size of business, significant improvements. 

Tyson Chen: A huge profit win, and again, like I've said before, even if, he's on the job, like he's taking 30 seconds to pick up or, his one CSR, if you only have one CSR, if they're on a call, you're done, right?

Then you might miss two or three calls. and so even, and even if pick up in 40 seconds, that's still quite a while you're already leaving the customer feeling in a, in kind of not a great place. So imagine being able to take, pick up each of these calls on the first ring.

John Wilson: This was awesome, dude. I feel like I'm really walking away excited as hell about this outbounding thing. Like I'm about to look into this, the speed delete, especially I think the happy calls really interesting. The routine main is really interesting, but the speed delete is that's an actionable, like I would win.

Lorie will be calling you in 20 minutes to get that set up. That sounds amazing. all right. If people want to learn more about Avoca, how do they get it? Where do they find it? 

Tyson Chen: Yeah. easiest way is to just book a demo on our website, www. avoca. com. Avoca spelled AVOCA, and then, yeah, otherwise happy to, folks to email me as well.

I'm just, Tyson at Avoca. 

John Wilson: All right, dude, thanks for coming on again. This was fun. I'm looking forward to bringing you back on in like another three to six months and be like, what changed? 

Jack Carr: Avoca three months from now. 

Tyson Chen: Yeah, always a pleasure guys. And, yeah, Jack, I thought, we'll get you set up soon. Yeah, 

John Wilson: Cool. All right. If you like what you heard, check out ownedandoperated.com and make sure you check out our upcoming workshop. Avoca is, going to be there. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to talk about best in class call centers.

Ownedandoperated.com.