February 4, 2025 • 27 mins
This episode focuses on how AI can be used in home service businesses. It covers methods for automating tasks, improving customer communication, and creating efficient workflows. Learn how to integrate AI into daily operations to save time and enhance business performance. Join host Adam Sylvester and Kristian Protic of 365 Heating, Cooling, and Plumbing.
New to Jobber? Masters of Home Service listeners can claim an exclusive discount for Jobber at https://bit.ly/4d0KAEh
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Because you're not going to closeevery person right there on the spot.
It's just it's not going to happen.
You can do your best to ensure you'redoing all the right things to bring that
probability up,
but there's still going to be a percentageof people that you're not going to
close right away.
Welcome to Jobber Masters of HomeService, a podcast for home service pros,
buy Home Service pros.
(00:21):
We're in Las Vegas today we're talkingabout staying ahead with the latest AI
tools and trends for your business.I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
Today's guest is Christian Proti.Christian, welcome to the show.
Hello. Hello. Welcome.Thank you for having me.
Yeah, I'm glad you're here. So tell ouraudience who you are and what you do.
Yeah, so my name is Christian.
I own 3 6 5 heating coolingand plumbing out of Kitchener,
(00:43):
Ontario, Canada.
We specialize in residentialand commercial heating,
air conditioning and plumbing.
Cool. Yeah. Well glad you're here.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's still very new.It's a wave. It's come through.
It's hit us like a wall,
and I think there's a lot of listenersout there who are just pretty resistant
to the whole thing.
They've gone through a lot of digitaltrends before and there's technology
(01:07):
fatigue for a lot of people. Ijust want to run my business.
I'm going to turn my wrenchand fix people's AC units.
Would you say that they'reresistance is valid?
I mean, to an extent, yes.
Change isn't easy for a lot ofpeople no matter what you're doing,
but especially a lot of the tradespeople,
they're now entering that stage,
(01:30):
the older generation where they'renot comfortable with technology and
stuff like that.
So introducing something like AIand all of that that's involved
with it. It's not easyfor a lot of people,
so I get it where they're coming from,
but at some point you'vegot to adapt to that change.
It's going to make the businessoperate better in the end.
(01:52):
Yeah,
I think about when we had horsesand now we have cars and we
had pagers. Now we have cell phones,
we had the phone book and now wehave Google. We had snail mail,
now we have email. We had hugeledger books that were huge,
these huge things. Now we haveQuickBooks, we're accounting software,
email now even Slack.
(02:13):
So there have been a lot of iterationsand we can go on fax machines,
all that kind of stuff.
And I just think that I want to encouragethose listeners out there who are just
like, I don't want to deal with ai.I just want to live a simple life.
I really think this oneis here stay, obviously.
I really think this isreally here to stay,
and so just anything else we encourageour listeners to do to open their minds
(02:35):
to ai because it can feel overwhelmingand it can feel like I'm just going to
stick my head in the sand and ignore it,
but all their competitorsmay not be ignoring it.
We.
Have to make sure that people are stayingup to date with this stuff because it
really matters people's businesses.
Absolutely. I agree. Yeah, no,
the sooner I think they adapt tothat change, the better it'll be.
(02:55):
There's a lot of options outthere for business owners,
low cost, easy to learn,
AI tools that can really makea change for their business.
So the sooner that they start,I think the better it'll be.
And a lot of times learning aboutthis stuff is just one search away.
They just watch one video on ai. Okay.
So what are some tools that are commonin the home service industry right now
(03:17):
that are hot and making a big difference?
So a big one I think that a lot ofpeople use is Zapier for automations.
We just recently started using Chirp,
which has a lot of automationsbuilt in for text messaging,
email follow up, ringless voicemail.
Let's talk about Zapier for a second.
Explain what Zapier isand how it works really.
(03:39):
So it's an automation tool thatessentially can connect almost any app
that you've got on the internet andwhatever you want that one app to
do where it will communicatewith another app.
Zapier is your source of truththere for connecting the two.
So let's say an email comes in withimportant information and you want that
(04:01):
email to fill a line item on Google Sheets
automatically without having to manuallyinput it. Zapier can do that for you.
So yeah,
is designed to helpalleviate a lot of the manual
inputting of data entry. Weuse it a lot in our business.
We've got hundreds of differentautomations between many different apps,
(04:25):
and it saves us a lot of time.
Yeah. Another example would be,
let's say our listenerwanted to for the next month,
they buckle down on everysingle call that ever came in,
or let's just say lead for now.
They could create all yourleads are in jobber obviously,
but if you wanted to have all your leadsin a Excel spreadsheet or something,
Google Sheet,
so you could have a Zap that assoon as it became a lead in jobber,
(04:46):
it also adds it in as a row in the sheet.
So at the end of the month, you haveall your leads in a very tight spot,
and then you can go throughand say, okay, that guy bought,
that guy didn't boughtthat guy, bought that guy,
and that all happensautomatically to do that manually.
Most people wouldn't do thatmanually. It's just too much.
Work.
But Zapier, that would be freeand it's very simple to do.
(05:08):
Yeah. So we use it for justlike that. Like you said,
with the leads coming in, I have all ofour leads coming into Jobber anyways,
whether it's from Facebookor Google from our website,
but I like having a runningsheet of all the different
leads that we've got from the variouschannels coming in through one Google
(05:30):
sheet and just not having to manuallyinput each line item saves us
a lot of time.
It's a task that I'm okayto offload to AI or to
an automation tool whereit can help us save time
so we can focus on doing tasks that makeus money and that are of more value.
(05:51):
Right. Yeah.
I want to keep going with your listfor a second that you were going with,
but I have another example.
I think a really good automationis really effective that we use,
and I think you use this too,
is you can connect Zapierfrom jobber to Gmail,
and so you just simply new leadcomes in and instantly they get a
personalized email from your Gmailaccount. There's no unsubscribe button,
(06:12):
not from MailChimp. It's from your Gmailaccount That says, Hey, I'm the owner.
Let me know if you have any questions.I'm here to help. It's automated.
You wrote it once and it wassent hundred times after that,
and people love that email, andyou can get a more sophisticated,
you can put a timer onit so it's not instant.
It is like they submit and suddenlythe owner's emailing 'em at midnight.
You could make it 8:00 AMevery day, something like that.
(06:34):
But there are a lot of things like that.
I just want to make sure our listenerswho've never heard of Zapier,
it's not an overwhelming thing.
It's a very simple app to use and it canmake the redundancy of just sending the
same email over and over again or fillin the blanks. It's just so much easier.
I feel like it's gotten easier to use,especially with the introduction of AI,
because now you can essentiallyask Zapier what you want it to
(06:58):
accomplish very quickly,and you just tell it, Hey,
I want to connect this with this andI want it to do this, this, and that.
And in a matter of seconds it'll just spit
out that automation thatyou're looking for. And I mean,
you can do that withabsolutely anything nowadays.
So it's pretty crazy whatthe capabilities of it are.
(07:19):
Yeah, you used to, I mean, Zapierhad a small learning curve.
You had to build it out yourself,
but now you just literally just tellit in word form what you want to do and
then it'll build out the sophisticatedthing. So it's pretty cool.
You mentioned Chirp.What is chirp exactly?
So CHIRP is a centralized hub.
We have all of our messagesthat come in there from email,
(07:40):
from Facebook Messenger,our website, chat bubble,
Google. It all funnels in through there.
I have it all connected with Jobber now,
and essentially when a quote goes out or a
review request goes out,
you can set up differentfunnels within chirp.
(08:02):
So that stuff like that never gets missed.
So I've got for 14 daysafter an install is done,
every other day we have a review requestgoing out until we get that review from
a client.
And I've noticed a huge uptickin us actually solidifying that
review in the end. Whereasbefore, prior to all of this,
(08:22):
you're manually reachingout, it's not available.
Customers are taking theirtime. So now it's a lot easier.
And then also we have forany leads, quote, follow up,
stuff like that, it's all in there.
There's AI agents built intoit to start conversations.
And.
Keep a conversation going.Every time a lead comes in,
(08:45):
we try to call them within the first 60seconds. If we can't get ahold of them,
the AI is just starting a conversationright off the bat just to keep something
going and will follow up everyday until we hear from them.
At the end of the day, I'mspending money for these leads.
I don't want them to go to waste.
Very well. Once they fixed their AC unit,
they're not going to have to fix it again.
So you have to strike whilethe iron's hot. Right.
(09:07):
Exactly.
My marketing team flashed. They builtsomething similar for me like chirp,
and I was astonished athow many leads converted
because of all thefollow-up. I was astonished.
I didn't think it was going to make thatbig of a difference, but we had people,
I mean, this happens on a regular basiswhere people say, oh yeah, I'm so sorry.
(09:27):
My mom went to the hospital.I've been MIA for three weeks,
but I'm totally serious. I'mready to buy today. And otherwise,
I would've completelywritten them off and said,
no one buy us three weeks later. Buta lot of people do three weeks later,
and if you don't follow up with them,then you're not going to get them.
And it's just impossible scale.
If you're trying to do more than fiveleads a day, you can't call those people.
(09:48):
You can't.
Text 'em all, email 'em all.
It's impossible's learned in my timeas a business owner that a lot of the
money is in the follow-up,
and a lot of people let that just fallthrough the cracks, and you can't,
you're not going to close everyperson right there on the spot.
It's not going to happen.
You can do your best to ensure you'redoing all the right things to bring that
(10:12):
probability up,
but there's still going to be a percentageof people that you're not going to
close right away.
So having a very rigorousfollow up process is key.
One nuance about the automated followsI like a lot is let's pretend someone
goes to our website 11 o'clock at night,
they're night owls and theydo all their stuff at 11.
Pretty much for the most people,
if all their manual followup isgoing to be during business hours,
(10:34):
I had the receptionist callthe leads from yesterday.
But if you have all these automations setto go out 24 hours later, a day later,
you're hitting them up at the same timeof day that they hit you up initially.
I think there's power in that,
but you're not going to ask someonethat works for you to stay up all night.
That's crazy, but the automationjust goes out at 11 o'clock. Hey,
I think that nuance matters because we'remeeting people where they are and how
(10:57):
their life works and not just trying tokeep them within the nine to five that
we work in.
Yeah, I agree.
What other automations are youseeing on the horizon that are
making a difference in home service today?
I mean, there's lots.
We do a thing where whenwe get a Google review,
I'll have an automation where it'll post a
(11:21):
photo of that Google Review on ourdifferent channels. So stuff like that,
you can do a lot with theautomations to help fill your
social media with posts andblog posts and images and
pictures, whereas before,
it's like you'd have to manuallysit there and maybe spend,
(11:42):
I dunno, a couple hours creating allof the content and then you put it on
MailChimp or something like that, andyou have it just scheduled to go out,
so you can now do that, butwith AI and with automations.
So you just kind of set it up onceand then you set it and forget it.
So.
That's a big thing I think that a lotof people should start doing more of
(12:04):
because I follow a lot of differentaccounts on Instagram and Facebook and
there's so many accounts that justaren't putting out any content.
They'll put something out and then sevendays later they'll put something out
again instead of doingmultiple posts a day,
tips and tricks, stuff likethat, I think would really help.
Yeah, I definitely think a helps youwrite content for sure. Create content,
(12:27):
100% post it automatically.
I'm thinking about from a different anglewith responding to email to clients.
You don't have to use chat GBT anymore.
You don't even have to leave your inboxGmail. I'm sure Outlook has it too,
where it'll help you write the wholeemail so it'll understand how the
conversation's been going, andthen when you sit down and type it,
it might prompt you tosend this whole paragraph.
(12:50):
And.
You can just hit tab and it auto fills,
and then you might change yourorder too, and then it's good.
And that just saved you two, threeminutes times how many emails you send.
I just love all the predictive AIfeatures that are built in a lot of the
software that I use.
That just saves me a little bit of timeon each little thing on typing. Yeah.
We use Google Workspace Gmail, andI've got that Gemini thing set up,
(13:13):
and I get hundreds ofemails every single day.
So if I can save collectively an hour inthat day and focus my time on something
else, I mean, that's a win.
Yeah. Trish, I want to pause fora moment to talk about Jobber.
You've used Jobber copilot quite a bit.
Explain that and tell uswhat you like about it.
Yeah, so jobbers own kind of chat,
(13:34):
GPT within the software.
So if there's anything that you've gota question relating to your business,
you've got it available, top rightcorner, click the button, ask it,
and it'll give you insights intoreally anything when it comes to
revenue generated that day or that week,or how many quotes are outstanding,
(13:57):
how much money's owed. So Iam a big fan of the co-pilot.
The job was introduced.
Yeah, me too. Instead ofhaving to use the reporting,
which can take a little bit extratime, you can just ask it real quick,
how many invoices did we get paidthis month? That kind of thing.
I also like it. I consider myselfa pretty good job or power user.
I pretty much know everythingabout the software,
but every now and then I found myselfbeing like, where is that feature?
(14:18):
I know it's here, Ican just can't find it.
And.
I asked Copilot and told me exactlywhere it was. I was very impressed.
If you don't have an AI assistant likecopilot in your CRM or in your pen and
paper, then you need to use jobber.Go to jobber.com/podcast deal,
get exclusive discount and startusing copilot today. Christian,
one of my favorite AI tools that Iuse is responding to fast reviews.
(14:41):
So going back to Zapier, I just got sotired of responding to fast reviews.
Thankfully, we get a lot of 'em, andsometimes if I didn't keep up with it,
we had 20 or 30 to respondto, and that takes forever.
You want to make it uniqueand fresh. I just hated it.
And so I'd sit down and be like,what am I going to say this time?
And so I set up a AI response every fivestar review. It just happens instantly.
(15:05):
It's new, it's fresh, it'sunique to each one uses keyword.
It's a perfect response. It'sliterally a perfect response,
and I took that off my plate forever.I'm never going to do it again.
And you know what I also don't thinkabout is that I never think about that
anymore. It's out of my mindand I'm onto something else.
It's just there's so many thingslike that that people can implement,
(15:27):
just save time and not just time, likeheadache, frustration, anguish, Right?
Writer's block, it's.
The worst. There's this thing withGoogle where within the algorithm,
it knows how long it takes abusiness to respond to a review,
good or bad. So yeah,
having an automation set up like thatwith AI where as soon as a review comes in
(15:49):
within a couple of minutes,
there's a nice genuine personalizedresponse that goes a long way.
But also, let's say you screwed up.
You got a one or two star review.
You also want to make it sothat it's showing empathy and
showing accountability within what it'swriting and responding to that review,
(16:12):
and then notifying the clientthat someone will follow up.
We're here to look after you.We're here to take care of you.
I think that's equally as important.
I do not have it right responsesto One Stars LA handles those
responses personally.Okay. What are some trends,
because I know you're reallythinking about this kind of stuff.
What are some trends that you're seeingover the next one or two years that are
(16:34):
probably going to play out inthe home service space with ai?
Anything that comes to mind.
There?
One big thing that I've been seeinga lot lately is AI assistance.
So now what they have, there's awebsite, there's an app called ra,
SINT r.ai,
and they've got essentiallyAI employees that you
(16:56):
can train and develop torun your business for you.
I've seen it. Yeah. It's prettywild. They have collectively,
I think there's 12 different employees,
anything from accounting to marketing to
sales, web development, a bunch ofdifferent things. And collectively,
(17:16):
I think you can pay $97 a monthand you get access to all of them,
and you just teach it what youwant it to do in your business.
So it's pretty crazy.
I think there's going to be a big uproarin that over the next couple of years
as the AI really starts to learn more
(17:37):
and grow from there. So it's goingto be pretty interesting to see.
Yeah, I think that's pretty cool.
I think one trend that I see is voice ai,
so whether that's a.
That's another big.
Yeah, it's huge. And so whetherthat's jobbers, like AI receptionist,
or just even Google listens to phone callsfor tonality, body language, posture,
(17:57):
smiles, positivity, that kind of stuff.And so the whole voice recognition,
AI is going to grow tremendously.
I think because I can see today whereeventually you don't have to listen to
every single phone call of your CSR.
You just look at a graph or a spreadsheetand it tells you all the results of
every single phone call. Thisone is green, this one is red.
(18:17):
Go listen to this one. Bad tonality,bad mood, short with a client, cursed,
those kinds of.
Things.
That's all that's coming.
Yeah. Well,
I've seen that already insome applications where you have the sentiment of the
call if it was a good call ora bad call. And then, yeah,
if you're a call center manager,
you don't have to now listenthrough every single call.
(18:38):
You can just see at a glanceon your dashboard, Hey,
these calls in green are fine. Letme analyze the calls that are in red.
Let me see what the issue is, whathappened where we went wrong. So yeah,
there's a lot of cool stuffhappening in the AI space,
and I'm excited to seewhat else they come out.
With the voice. Some of theramifications of that can be,
(18:59):
A lot of our listeners have oneor two CSRs, and let's be real.
They don't really know how to grade them.
They just basically look at booking rateand how much money are we making? Well,
they must be okay, but withthis kind of technology,
it could assign a rating systemand your CSR might be doing an
amazing job. The AI saysthey're doing amazing job,
(19:20):
and now because hey, everycall is green, every call,
you get a 95% or higher score,
and you actually reward them forbeing great instead of just like, Hey,
I think you're doing pretty good.You actually have concrete examples.
And obviously the opposite is true.
You can fire somebody if they'renot doing well, but otherwise,
what going to do? Sit down,listen, 50 calls a day,
it's just not going to happen.
(19:40):
Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
Yeah. Any other trends?
What about texting and respondingto text inbound texts from clients?
That can be an AI driven thing.
Yeah, I mean, that's something thatwe do right now in the business.
That's pretty big.
I've been dabbling with that forthe last several months. Yeah,
I think it's super important,
especially when it comes toafter hours and stuff like that.
(20:02):
I only have staff that's in my officefrom 7:00 AM till about four 30
after that. And on weekends,
it's really up to me orwhatever AI tool I've managed
to implement into that process aswell. So that's a big one for us.
We get a lot of phonecalls, texts, emails,
(20:23):
Google messages, Facebookmessages, website inquiries,
all after 5:00 PM and on weekends.
So having something inplace that can respond right
away, I think that's super important.
You don't want to be that companywhere you get an inquiry and then that
client doesn't hear from you for aday or two, especially when you're,
(20:47):
in my sense, I am in theemergency repair space.
So for us,
it's very important when someone'scalling with an issue that we're able to
resolve it right away or atleast attend to it right away.
That's definitely a big thing too.
I also think that what you said there,
I'm going to elaborate because Ithink that's what you just described,
is the big long bridge betweenwhere we are now and the
(21:11):
long-term future is usingthese tools not to replace our
people, but to use them whenour people aren't around.
At.
Night, weekends, lunch break. Becauseright now, they're not as good as people.
They probably never will be, butfor now, they're definitely not.
And so let's use them when they'rebetter than nothing, essentially.
And.
I think that's the bridge thatwe're on. And I like that bridge.
(21:34):
I like being able to answer the phoneat nighttime with an AI assistant,
and we answer the phone. Googleknows we answer the phone,
especially if it was a paid lead, andthat's a big deal. If it's a paid lead,
we want to answer the phone. If itgoes to voicemail, that's not good.
And so there's all kinds of ramificationsof having AI answer the phone or
respond to a text or even respond to anemail that was never available before.
(21:54):
Yeah. Well thing, if you've gotsomebody working after hours,
you have to pay them for every hour thatthey're available or some sort of for
one call for some sort of setfee or something like that,
that can really add up. Donethat before. Good point.
And I've seen it where you're spendinghundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
dollars each week for someof these calls that come in,
(22:15):
and realistically, they can just gethandled with a few text responses,
or now having an AI assistantor some sort of AI receptionist,
and you just book it andyou put it on the board,
and then it just gets dealt with thenext day versus spending hundreds of
dollars to have somebody work fromhome just to answer that phone call,
(22:36):
open their laptop, and put it on theirschedule and job or whatever, CRM.
So yeah, definitely.
I'm big on that from a costsaving standpoint. AI is,
it's the future for sure.
Yeah,
I think that we've been talking aboutAI from a lead generation funnel
(22:56):
perspective, marketingresponse time, speed to lead,
but I also think that there's a lot ofroom for growth and potential with AI for
just giving a better overallexperience to the client.
A customer experience canbe improved. Obviously,
speed to lead is included in that,especially if somebody's in a hurry.
But I also think there's,along the way, there's,
let's say once they book the call andthey're more of a customer than they're a
(23:20):
lead, I think there's ways that wecan use AI to improve that experience.
Does anything come to mind for that?
Yeah, I mean,
the entire customer journey canbe drawn out with some sort of
AI functionality.
You've got to look at whereyour pain points are. Right?
Before I introduced allthis AI and everything,
(23:43):
it's like a lot of it was done manually.
And especially when you're presentingyourself as a premium company like I am,
customers expect premium service,
and that all starts from that initialphone call or email or whatever,
and they want to know that they'relooked after in the pipeline and they're
being taken care of.
So AI and all these automations canreally help with all that when it comes
(24:07):
to following up andensuring that things aren't
falling through thecracks and all that. So.
Yeah, I have a buddy who has acleaning business in Florida,
and he has a chat systemset up on his website.
I believe that clients can go in thereand ask questions specifically about
their work,
and he's done some work on the backendto really give that AI some content,
(24:30):
but people can find out all kinds ofthings about their service offering,
about when are we coming next,and those kinds of things.
And I think that's also in thefuture where for the last 50 years,
we've always kind of rolled our eyeswhen we call the bank or we call this big
company and we go through labyrinthof prompts, like press one, press two,
press three, just lemmetalk to a representative.
(24:51):
But I think a day is coming wherewe actually, the opposite is true,
where we just need a quick answer andwe'd actually rather talk to an AI who has
a vast.
Library.
Of knowledge versus a person who maybe brand new who doesn't know anything.
It's funny to say, but it'sdefinitely coming. It's true.
Yeah. Yeah.
We're building out right now withinCHIRP on the website chat bubble,
(25:12):
something similar where there's frequentlyasked questions because a lot of the
times we get a call like ourthermostat's showing this
temperature,
but this is the actual temperature and Idon't have any heat or I don't have air
conditioning.
So having some quick generatedresponses on our website
directly can help save a lot oftime. Right. So yeah, I definitely,
(25:37):
I see that working out. Good.
Christian, this is a great conversation.
I'm going to boil it down to threeactual items here for our listeners.
Number one is you need to automateyour reviews process follow up.
So you need to not rely on manual entryfor that. You need to automate it 24 7,
get reviews, get reviews, get reviews,
reviews with the life blood of yourbusiness. You need to automate it.
Jobber does that for you. Number twois the real money is in the follow-up.
(25:59):
Whether it's leads that haven't respondedyet to your calls or quotes that
haven't approved,
you need to automate that with AI tofollow up on all those people because the
money is in the follow-up.And jobber does that too.
And number three is use AIto extend your office hours,
maybe 24 7 weekends at nighttime.Jobbers, AI receptionist does this too.
Make sure that you're answeringthe phone pretty much all the time,
(26:21):
maybe even responding to texts and emailsas well. Christian, that was great.
How do people find out more about you?
Yeah, this is a lot of fun.
You can't find us on any of thesocial media platforms, Facebook,
Instagram, Google, just find 3, 6,5, heating, cooling, and plumbing.
Awesome. Well, thanks for beinghere. I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
And thank you.
I hope that you heard something todaythat will make your business more
(26:42):
automated and more AI strong.I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
You can find me@adamsylvester.com.
Your team and your clients deserveyour very best, so go give it to 'em.
Because you're not going to closeevery person right there on the spot.
It's just it's not going to happen.
You can do your best to ensure you'redoing all the right things to bring that
probability up,
but there's still going to be a percentageof people that you're not going to
close right away.
Welcome to Jobber Masters of HomeService, a podcast for home service pros,
buy Home Service pros.
(00:21):
We're in Las Vegas today we're talkingabout staying ahead with the latest AI
tools and trends for your business.I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
Today's guest is Christian Proti.Christian, welcome to the show.
Hello. Hello. Welcome.Thank you for having me.
Yeah, I'm glad you're here. So tell ouraudience who you are and what you do.
Yeah, so my name is Christian.
I own 3 6 5 heating coolingand plumbing out of Kitchener,
(00:43):
Ontario, Canada.
We specialize in residentialand commercial heating,
air conditioning and plumbing.
Cool. Yeah. Well glad you're here.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's still very new.It's a wave. It's come through.
It's hit us like a wall,
and I think there's a lot of listenersout there who are just pretty resistant
to the whole thing.
They've gone through a lot of digitaltrends before and there's technology
(01:07):
fatigue for a lot of people. Ijust want to run my business.
I'm going to turn my wrenchand fix people's AC units.
Would you say that they'reresistance is valid?
I mean, to an extent, yes.
Change isn't easy for a lot ofpeople no matter what you're doing,
but especially a lot of the tradespeople,
they're now entering that stage,
(01:30):
the older generation where they'renot comfortable with technology and
stuff like that.
So introducing something like AIand all of that that's involved
with it. It's not easyfor a lot of people,
so I get it where they're coming from,
but at some point you'vegot to adapt to that change.
It's going to make the businessoperate better in the end.
(01:52):
Yeah,
I think about when we had horsesand now we have cars and we
had pagers. Now we have cell phones,
we had the phone book and now wehave Google. We had snail mail,
now we have email. We had hugeledger books that were huge,
these huge things. Now we haveQuickBooks, we're accounting software,
email now even Slack.
(02:13):
So there have been a lot of iterationsand we can go on fax machines,
all that kind of stuff.
And I just think that I want to encouragethose listeners out there who are just
like, I don't want to deal with ai.I just want to live a simple life.
I really think this oneis here stay, obviously.
I really think this isreally here to stay,
and so just anything else we encourageour listeners to do to open their minds
(02:35):
to ai because it can feel overwhelmingand it can feel like I'm just going to
stick my head in the sand and ignore it,
but all their competitorsmay not be ignoring it.
We.
Have to make sure that people are stayingup to date with this stuff because it
really matters people's businesses.
Absolutely. I agree. Yeah, no,
the sooner I think they adapt tothat change, the better it'll be.
(02:55):
There's a lot of options outthere for business owners,
low cost, easy to learn,
AI tools that can really makea change for their business.
So the sooner that they start,I think the better it'll be.
And a lot of times learning aboutthis stuff is just one search away.
They just watch one video on ai. Okay.
So what are some tools that are commonin the home service industry right now
(03:17):
that are hot and making a big difference?
So a big one I think that a lot ofpeople use is Zapier for automations.
We just recently started using Chirp,
which has a lot of automationsbuilt in for text messaging,
email follow up, ringless voicemail.
Let's talk about Zapier for a second.
Explain what Zapier isand how it works really.
(03:39):
So it's an automation tool thatessentially can connect almost any app
that you've got on the internet andwhatever you want that one app to
do where it will communicatewith another app.
Zapier is your source of truththere for connecting the two.
So let's say an email comes in withimportant information and you want that
(04:01):
email to fill a line item on Google Sheets
automatically without having to manuallyinput it. Zapier can do that for you.
So yeah,
is designed to helpalleviate a lot of the manual
inputting of data entry. Weuse it a lot in our business.
We've got hundreds of differentautomations between many different apps,
(04:25):
and it saves us a lot of time.
Yeah. Another example would be,
let's say our listenerwanted to for the next month,
they buckle down on everysingle call that ever came in,
or let's just say lead for now.
They could create all yourleads are in jobber obviously,
but if you wanted to have all your leadsin a Excel spreadsheet or something,
Google Sheet,
so you could have a Zap that assoon as it became a lead in jobber,
(04:46):
it also adds it in as a row in the sheet.
So at the end of the month, you haveall your leads in a very tight spot,
and then you can go throughand say, okay, that guy bought,
that guy didn't boughtthat guy, bought that guy,
and that all happensautomatically to do that manually.
Most people wouldn't do thatmanually. It's just too much.
Work.
But Zapier, that would be freeand it's very simple to do.
(05:08):
Yeah. So we use it for justlike that. Like you said,
with the leads coming in, I have all ofour leads coming into Jobber anyways,
whether it's from Facebookor Google from our website,
but I like having a runningsheet of all the different
leads that we've got from the variouschannels coming in through one Google
(05:30):
sheet and just not having to manuallyinput each line item saves us
a lot of time.
It's a task that I'm okayto offload to AI or to
an automation tool whereit can help us save time
so we can focus on doing tasks that makeus money and that are of more value.
(05:51):
Right. Yeah.
I want to keep going with your listfor a second that you were going with,
but I have another example.
I think a really good automationis really effective that we use,
and I think you use this too,
is you can connect Zapierfrom jobber to Gmail,
and so you just simply new leadcomes in and instantly they get a
personalized email from your Gmailaccount. There's no unsubscribe button,
(06:12):
not from MailChimp. It's from your Gmailaccount That says, Hey, I'm the owner.
Let me know if you have any questions.I'm here to help. It's automated.
You wrote it once and it wassent hundred times after that,
and people love that email, andyou can get a more sophisticated,
you can put a timer onit so it's not instant.
It is like they submit and suddenlythe owner's emailing 'em at midnight.
You could make it 8:00 AMevery day, something like that.
(06:34):
But there are a lot of things like that.
I just want to make sure our listenerswho've never heard of Zapier,
it's not an overwhelming thing.
It's a very simple app to use and it canmake the redundancy of just sending the
same email over and over again or fillin the blanks. It's just so much easier.
I feel like it's gotten easier to use,especially with the introduction of AI,
because now you can essentiallyask Zapier what you want it to
(06:58):
accomplish very quickly,and you just tell it, Hey,
I want to connect this with this andI want it to do this, this, and that.
And in a matter of seconds it'll just spit
out that automation thatyou're looking for. And I mean,
you can do that withabsolutely anything nowadays.
So it's pretty crazy whatthe capabilities of it are.
(07:19):
Yeah, you used to, I mean, Zapierhad a small learning curve.
You had to build it out yourself,
but now you just literally just tellit in word form what you want to do and
then it'll build out the sophisticatedthing. So it's pretty cool.
You mentioned Chirp.What is chirp exactly?
So CHIRP is a centralized hub.
We have all of our messagesthat come in there from email,
(07:40):
from Facebook Messenger,our website, chat bubble,
Google. It all funnels in through there.
I have it all connected with Jobber now,
and essentially when a quote goes out or a
review request goes out,
you can set up differentfunnels within chirp.
(08:02):
So that stuff like that never gets missed.
So I've got for 14 daysafter an install is done,
every other day we have a review requestgoing out until we get that review from
a client.
And I've noticed a huge uptickin us actually solidifying that
review in the end. Whereasbefore, prior to all of this,
(08:22):
you're manually reachingout, it's not available.
Customers are taking theirtime. So now it's a lot easier.
And then also we have forany leads, quote, follow up,
stuff like that, it's all in there.
There's AI agents built intoit to start conversations.
And.
Keep a conversation going.Every time a lead comes in,
(08:45):
we try to call them within the first 60seconds. If we can't get ahold of them,
the AI is just starting a conversationright off the bat just to keep something
going and will follow up everyday until we hear from them.
At the end of the day, I'mspending money for these leads.
I don't want them to go to waste.
Very well. Once they fixed their AC unit,
they're not going to have to fix it again.
So you have to strike whilethe iron's hot. Right.
(09:07):
Exactly.
My marketing team flashed. They builtsomething similar for me like chirp,
and I was astonished athow many leads converted
because of all thefollow-up. I was astonished.
I didn't think it was going to make thatbig of a difference, but we had people,
I mean, this happens on a regular basiswhere people say, oh yeah, I'm so sorry.
(09:27):
My mom went to the hospital.I've been MIA for three weeks,
but I'm totally serious. I'mready to buy today. And otherwise,
I would've completelywritten them off and said,
no one buy us three weeks later. Buta lot of people do three weeks later,
and if you don't follow up with them,then you're not going to get them.
And it's just impossible scale.
If you're trying to do more than fiveleads a day, you can't call those people.
(09:48):
You can't.
Text 'em all, email 'em all.
It's impossible's learned in my timeas a business owner that a lot of the
money is in the follow-up,
and a lot of people let that just fallthrough the cracks, and you can't,
you're not going to close everyperson right there on the spot.
It's not going to happen.
You can do your best to ensure you'redoing all the right things to bring that
(10:12):
probability up,
but there's still going to be a percentageof people that you're not going to
close right away.
So having a very rigorousfollow up process is key.
One nuance about the automated followsI like a lot is let's pretend someone
goes to our website 11 o'clock at night,
they're night owls and theydo all their stuff at 11.
Pretty much for the most people,
if all their manual followup isgoing to be during business hours,
(10:34):
I had the receptionist callthe leads from yesterday.
But if you have all these automations setto go out 24 hours later, a day later,
you're hitting them up at the same timeof day that they hit you up initially.
I think there's power in that,
but you're not going to ask someonethat works for you to stay up all night.
That's crazy, but the automationjust goes out at 11 o'clock. Hey,
I think that nuance matters because we'remeeting people where they are and how
(10:57):
their life works and not just trying tokeep them within the nine to five that
we work in.
Yeah, I agree.
What other automations are youseeing on the horizon that are
making a difference in home service today?
I mean, there's lots.
We do a thing where whenwe get a Google review,
I'll have an automation where it'll post a
(11:21):
photo of that Google Review on ourdifferent channels. So stuff like that,
you can do a lot with theautomations to help fill your
social media with posts andblog posts and images and
pictures, whereas before,
it's like you'd have to manuallysit there and maybe spend,
(11:42):
I dunno, a couple hours creating allof the content and then you put it on
MailChimp or something like that, andyou have it just scheduled to go out,
so you can now do that, butwith AI and with automations.
So you just kind of set it up onceand then you set it and forget it.
So.
That's a big thing I think that a lotof people should start doing more of
(12:04):
because I follow a lot of differentaccounts on Instagram and Facebook and
there's so many accounts that justaren't putting out any content.
They'll put something out and then sevendays later they'll put something out
again instead of doingmultiple posts a day,
tips and tricks, stuff likethat, I think would really help.
Yeah, I definitely think a helps youwrite content for sure. Create content,
(12:27):
100% post it automatically.
I'm thinking about from a different anglewith responding to email to clients.
You don't have to use chat GBT anymore.
You don't even have to leave your inboxGmail. I'm sure Outlook has it too,
where it'll help you write the wholeemail so it'll understand how the
conversation's been going, andthen when you sit down and type it,
it might prompt you tosend this whole paragraph.
(12:50):
And.
You can just hit tab and it auto fills,
and then you might change yourorder too, and then it's good.
And that just saved you two, threeminutes times how many emails you send.
I just love all the predictive AIfeatures that are built in a lot of the
software that I use.
That just saves me a little bit of timeon each little thing on typing. Yeah.
We use Google Workspace Gmail, andI've got that Gemini thing set up,
(13:13):
and I get hundreds ofemails every single day.
So if I can save collectively an hour inthat day and focus my time on something
else, I mean, that's a win.
Yeah. Trish, I want to pause fora moment to talk about Jobber.
You've used Jobber copilot quite a bit.
Explain that and tell uswhat you like about it.
Yeah, so jobbers own kind of chat,
(13:34):
GPT within the software.
So if there's anything that you've gota question relating to your business,
you've got it available, top rightcorner, click the button, ask it,
and it'll give you insights intoreally anything when it comes to
revenue generated that day or that week,or how many quotes are outstanding,
(13:57):
how much money's owed. So Iam a big fan of the co-pilot.
The job was introduced.
Yeah, me too. Instead ofhaving to use the reporting,
which can take a little bit extratime, you can just ask it real quick,
how many invoices did we get paidthis month? That kind of thing.
I also like it. I consider myselfa pretty good job or power user.
I pretty much know everythingabout the software,
but every now and then I found myselfbeing like, where is that feature?
(14:18):
I know it's here, Ican just can't find it.
And.
I asked Copilot and told me exactlywhere it was. I was very impressed.
If you don't have an AI assistant likecopilot in your CRM or in your pen and
paper, then you need to use jobber.Go to jobber.com/podcast deal,
get exclusive discount and startusing copilot today. Christian,
one of my favorite AI tools that Iuse is responding to fast reviews.
(14:41):
So going back to Zapier, I just got sotired of responding to fast reviews.
Thankfully, we get a lot of 'em, andsometimes if I didn't keep up with it,
we had 20 or 30 to respondto, and that takes forever.
You want to make it uniqueand fresh. I just hated it.
And so I'd sit down and be like,what am I going to say this time?
And so I set up a AI response every fivestar review. It just happens instantly.
(15:05):
It's new, it's fresh, it'sunique to each one uses keyword.
It's a perfect response. It'sliterally a perfect response,
and I took that off my plate forever.I'm never going to do it again.
And you know what I also don't thinkabout is that I never think about that
anymore. It's out of my mindand I'm onto something else.
It's just there's so many thingslike that that people can implement,
(15:27):
just save time and not just time, likeheadache, frustration, anguish, Right?
Writer's block, it's.
The worst. There's this thing withGoogle where within the algorithm,
it knows how long it takes abusiness to respond to a review,
good or bad. So yeah,
having an automation set up like thatwith AI where as soon as a review comes in
(15:49):
within a couple of minutes,
there's a nice genuine personalizedresponse that goes a long way.
But also, let's say you screwed up.
You got a one or two star review.
You also want to make it sothat it's showing empathy and
showing accountability within what it'swriting and responding to that review,
(16:12):
and then notifying the clientthat someone will follow up.
We're here to look after you.We're here to take care of you.
I think that's equally as important.
I do not have it right responsesto One Stars LA handles those
responses personally.Okay. What are some trends,
because I know you're reallythinking about this kind of stuff.
What are some trends that you're seeingover the next one or two years that are
(16:34):
probably going to play out inthe home service space with ai?
Anything that comes to mind.
There?
One big thing that I've been seeinga lot lately is AI assistance.
So now what they have, there's awebsite, there's an app called ra,
SINT r.ai,
and they've got essentiallyAI employees that you
(16:56):
can train and develop torun your business for you.
I've seen it. Yeah. It's prettywild. They have collectively,
I think there's 12 different employees,
anything from accounting to marketing to
sales, web development, a bunch ofdifferent things. And collectively,
(17:16):
I think you can pay $97 a monthand you get access to all of them,
and you just teach it what youwant it to do in your business.
So it's pretty crazy.
I think there's going to be a big uproarin that over the next couple of years
as the AI really starts to learn more
(17:37):
and grow from there. So it's goingto be pretty interesting to see.
Yeah, I think that's pretty cool.
I think one trend that I see is voice ai,
so whether that's a.
That's another big.
Yeah, it's huge. And so whetherthat's jobbers, like AI receptionist,
or just even Google listens to phone callsfor tonality, body language, posture,
(17:57):
smiles, positivity, that kind of stuff.And so the whole voice recognition,
AI is going to grow tremendously.
I think because I can see today whereeventually you don't have to listen to
every single phone call of your CSR.
You just look at a graph or a spreadsheetand it tells you all the results of
every single phone call. Thisone is green, this one is red.
(18:17):
Go listen to this one. Bad tonality,bad mood, short with a client, cursed,
those kinds of.
Things.
That's all that's coming.
Yeah. Well,
I've seen that already insome applications where you have the sentiment of the
call if it was a good call ora bad call. And then, yeah,
if you're a call center manager,
you don't have to now listenthrough every single call.
(18:38):
You can just see at a glanceon your dashboard, Hey,
these calls in green are fine. Letme analyze the calls that are in red.
Let me see what the issue is, whathappened where we went wrong. So yeah,
there's a lot of cool stuffhappening in the AI space,
and I'm excited to seewhat else they come out.
With the voice. Some of theramifications of that can be,
(18:59):
A lot of our listeners have oneor two CSRs, and let's be real.
They don't really know how to grade them.
They just basically look at booking rateand how much money are we making? Well,
they must be okay, but withthis kind of technology,
it could assign a rating systemand your CSR might be doing an
amazing job. The AI saysthey're doing amazing job,
(19:20):
and now because hey, everycall is green, every call,
you get a 95% or higher score,
and you actually reward them forbeing great instead of just like, Hey,
I think you're doing pretty good.You actually have concrete examples.
And obviously the opposite is true.
You can fire somebody if they'renot doing well, but otherwise,
what going to do? Sit down,listen, 50 calls a day,
it's just not going to happen.
(19:40):
Yeah, it doesn't make sense.
Yeah. Any other trends?
What about texting and respondingto text inbound texts from clients?
That can be an AI driven thing.
Yeah, I mean, that's something thatwe do right now in the business.
That's pretty big.
I've been dabbling with that forthe last several months. Yeah,
I think it's super important,
especially when it comes toafter hours and stuff like that.
(20:02):
I only have staff that's in my officefrom 7:00 AM till about four 30
after that. And on weekends,
it's really up to me orwhatever AI tool I've managed
to implement into that process aswell. So that's a big one for us.
We get a lot of phonecalls, texts, emails,
(20:23):
Google messages, Facebookmessages, website inquiries,
all after 5:00 PM and on weekends.
So having something inplace that can respond right
away, I think that's super important.
You don't want to be that companywhere you get an inquiry and then that
client doesn't hear from you for aday or two, especially when you're,
(20:47):
in my sense, I am in theemergency repair space.
So for us,
it's very important when someone'scalling with an issue that we're able to
resolve it right away or atleast attend to it right away.
That's definitely a big thing too.
I also think that what you said there,
I'm going to elaborate because Ithink that's what you just described,
is the big long bridge betweenwhere we are now and the
(21:11):
long-term future is usingthese tools not to replace our
people, but to use them whenour people aren't around.
At.
Night, weekends, lunch break. Becauseright now, they're not as good as people.
They probably never will be, butfor now, they're definitely not.
And so let's use them when they'rebetter than nothing, essentially.
And.
I think that's the bridge thatwe're on. And I like that bridge.
(21:34):
I like being able to answer the phoneat nighttime with an AI assistant,
and we answer the phone. Googleknows we answer the phone,
especially if it was a paid lead, andthat's a big deal. If it's a paid lead,
we want to answer the phone. If itgoes to voicemail, that's not good.
And so there's all kinds of ramificationsof having AI answer the phone or
respond to a text or even respond to anemail that was never available before.
(21:54):
Yeah. Well thing, if you've gotsomebody working after hours,
you have to pay them for every hour thatthey're available or some sort of for
one call for some sort of setfee or something like that,
that can really add up. Donethat before. Good point.
And I've seen it where you're spendinghundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
dollars each week for someof these calls that come in,
(22:15):
and realistically, they can just gethandled with a few text responses,
or now having an AI assistantor some sort of AI receptionist,
and you just book it andyou put it on the board,
and then it just gets dealt with thenext day versus spending hundreds of
dollars to have somebody work fromhome just to answer that phone call,
(22:36):
open their laptop, and put it on theirschedule and job or whatever, CRM.
So yeah, definitely.
I'm big on that from a costsaving standpoint. AI is,
it's the future for sure.
Yeah,
I think that we've been talking aboutAI from a lead generation funnel
(22:56):
perspective, marketingresponse time, speed to lead,
but I also think that there's a lot ofroom for growth and potential with AI for
just giving a better overallexperience to the client.
A customer experience canbe improved. Obviously,
speed to lead is included in that,especially if somebody's in a hurry.
But I also think there's,along the way, there's,
let's say once they book the call andthey're more of a customer than they're a
(23:20):
lead, I think there's ways that wecan use AI to improve that experience.
Does anything come to mind for that?
Yeah, I mean,
the entire customer journey canbe drawn out with some sort of
AI functionality.
You've got to look at whereyour pain points are. Right?
Before I introduced allthis AI and everything,
(23:43):
it's like a lot of it was done manually.
And especially when you're presentingyourself as a premium company like I am,
customers expect premium service,
and that all starts from that initialphone call or email or whatever,
and they want to know that they'relooked after in the pipeline and they're
being taken care of.
So AI and all these automations canreally help with all that when it comes
(24:07):
to following up andensuring that things aren't
falling through thecracks and all that. So.
Yeah, I have a buddy who has acleaning business in Florida,
and he has a chat systemset up on his website.
I believe that clients can go in thereand ask questions specifically about
their work,
and he's done some work on the backendto really give that AI some content,
(24:30):
but people can find out all kinds ofthings about their service offering,
about when are we coming next,and those kinds of things.
And I think that's also in thefuture where for the last 50 years,
we've always kind of rolled our eyeswhen we call the bank or we call this big
company and we go through labyrinthof prompts, like press one, press two,
press three, just lemmetalk to a representative.
(24:51):
But I think a day is coming wherewe actually, the opposite is true,
where we just need a quick answer andwe'd actually rather talk to an AI who has
a vast.
Library.
Of knowledge versus a person who maybe brand new who doesn't know anything.
It's funny to say, but it'sdefinitely coming. It's true.
Yeah. Yeah.
We're building out right now withinCHIRP on the website chat bubble,
(25:12):
something similar where there's frequentlyasked questions because a lot of the
times we get a call like ourthermostat's showing this
temperature,
but this is the actual temperature and Idon't have any heat or I don't have air
conditioning.
So having some quick generatedresponses on our website
directly can help save a lot oftime. Right. So yeah, I definitely,
(25:37):
I see that working out. Good.
Christian, this is a great conversation.
I'm going to boil it down to threeactual items here for our listeners.
Number one is you need to automateyour reviews process follow up.
So you need to not rely on manual entryfor that. You need to automate it 24 7,
get reviews, get reviews, get reviews,
reviews with the life blood of yourbusiness. You need to automate it.
Jobber does that for you. Number twois the real money is in the follow-up.
(25:59):
Whether it's leads that haven't respondedyet to your calls or quotes that
haven't approved,
you need to automate that with AI tofollow up on all those people because the
money is in the follow-up.And jobber does that too.
And number three is use AIto extend your office hours,
maybe 24 7 weekends at nighttime.Jobbers, AI receptionist does this too.
Make sure that you're answeringthe phone pretty much all the time,
(26:21):
maybe even responding to texts and emailsas well. Christian, that was great.
How do people find out more about you?
Yeah, this is a lot of fun.
You can't find us on any of thesocial media platforms, Facebook,
Instagram, Google, just find 3, 6,5, heating, cooling, and plumbing.
Awesome. Well, thanks for beinghere. I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
And thank you.
I hope that you heard something todaythat will make your business more
(26:42):
automated and more AI strong.I'm your host, Adam Sylvester.
You can find me@adamsylvester.com.
Your team and your clients deserveyour very best, so go give it to 'em.
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