Here’s How AI is Revolutionizing the Home Services Industry

Best Practices | 5 min read | September 24, 2024

- Nexstar Network

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) has significantly impacted various industries, and the home service contracting sector is no exception. From HVAC technicians to plumbers to electricians, AI is transforming how these professionals operate, offering numerous benefits that enhance efficiency, customer satisfaction, and overall business performance.

“AI helps contractors do the job quicker, better, and faster,” says Leah Paige, Nexstar Network Customer Experience Coach Manager. “Efficiency is top-of-mind for everybody. Accuracy is important as well. These tools have been available for a while – good or not, they were available. We didn’t use them because they weren’t accurate. Now, the efficiency is there and so is the accuracy. Now, we don’t have any excuse not to use technology, except maybe stubbornness or ignorance.”

One AI company revolutionizing the home services industry is Rilla, which makes software that offers virtual ride-alongs for home service contractors by providing recordings, transcriptions, summaries, and analytics from every sales visit. According to Rilla, sales managers who coach with Rilla’s AI are eight times faster and 20 times more efficient.

Derek Cormier, CEO and founder of Climate Experts Air, Plumbing & Electric in Melbourne, Florida, started his business in 2016 with just one truck. Today, the company has 45 employees with 25 fleet vehicles. Climate Experts expanded into plumbing in 2023 and added electrical this year.

Cormier heard about Strategic Partner Rilla from another Nexstar Network member, Josh Campbell of Rescue Air, who had been using Rilla with incredible results, including tripling its plumbing department.

“With Rilla, we definitely saw an increase in technicians closing jobs. We were actually able to see what was going on and correct any issues much faster because we were seeing it almost live,” Cormier says. “And we were able to have the field operations manager focus on more important tasks because he wasn’t out on ride-alongs. It definitely helped with time management. We saw conversion rates increase and average sales increase.”

The Rilla app can be downloaded and used on any smartphone, iPad, or smartwatch.

“Rilla goes out with the technician on their phone, the meeting gets recorded, sent to the Cloud, and transcribed with speech-to-text that’s 95% plus accurate,” says Sebastian Jimenez, founder and CEO of Rilla. “Every company, when they begin with Rilla, is going to upload their sales script, Service System, or process. And Rilla is going to compare every conversation against that process. It will score the greeting from a one to five. It will score the company story. If the technician forgot to mention special warranties the company offers, it will give that feedback automatically, so when the field supervisor sees the report, they can address it with the technician.”

Buck.ai is another innovative company using AI to help home service contractors increase efficiency. The software helps leverage the company’s data to increase the average ticket. Buck.ai ensures a company is assigning the best technicians to the highest-paying jobs in the shortest time.

Mark Paup, president of Grimes, Iowa-based Golden Rule Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electrical, founded the company with his wife in 1999, and celebrated the company’s 25th anniversary in May. With 140 employees, Paup was looking for a dispatching solution to help the company operate more efficiently. He looked at several possibilities before landing on Buck.ai.

“Before, you didn’t care about miles and the time a technician would take to get from Point A to Point B, but with Buck.ai, it can logistically think a lot faster than we can as human beings,” Paup says. “One dispatcher trying to do all of that logistic equation math for 17 to 25 technicians – it’s literally impossible. Using Buck.ai, we’ve been able to run more calls per technician and still get the right tech to the right job, versus sacrificing one for the other.”

Utku Kaynar, CEO of Buck.ai, explains that the company leverages AI in the areas of dispatch, call center, and web leads to automate parts of these processes.

“Ultimately, the goal is to accelerate profits while keeping inside of the office overhead level,” Kaynar says. “Our DispatchIQ solution incorporates the philosophy of “right tech, right job,” but with a look at live traffic data to create dispatch boards every single day that are optimized for the most daily dollars and least technician time on the road. So, contractors who adopt DispatchIQ can see the benefits of the open capacity to run more service appointments per day, a 30-40% decrease in technician windshield time, and they can really create a fully optimized dispatch board with the click of a button.”

Paup explains that technology is coming fast with more capabilities than ever before.

“Our businesses have to be founded on how to increase efficiency — getting more work done with less people because of the shortage of technicians in our field. Then, quite honestly, a lot of people consider a dispatcher or CSR to be an entry-level job in our industry. Once they get in here, I would argue they’re the most important people at the front line. We don’t do a job unless the CSR books the call and the dispatcher gets the right technician to the call. How do we streamline and make that process-driven and intelligent at the same time? We have to start taking advantage of the resources technology has given us.”

Cormier admits there are pros and cons to everything in this world, including technology.
“It’s great that we have all this technology at our fingertips, literally on our phones and tablets,” he says. “We use technology to the fullest extent. But a lot of construction businesses and trade businesses understaff the office because they’re very focused on profitability, and not customer satisfaction. People want to talk to a human more, they want to hear a real person. They don’t want to hear a chatbot. That’s frustrating. If you automate your entire business and it’s controlled by a robot, people are not going to want to use your company. AI is great because it helps processes and efficiency and it saves time.”

Paige agrees, adding that AI will never replace a human voice.
“We’re going to make it smarter, faster, better, but it will still need a human to be able to survive,” she says. “Look back 30 years, when they told us computers were going to take the job I have right now, and it never happened. I know I’m not smarter than a computer. I don’t want anybody to be afraid of it. If you lean in and get ahead of it, you won’t have any problems. Someone once told me an analogy: The dolly was created for moving companies. We still have moving companies today; we just use the dolly worldwide because it helps. AI is our dolly. It helps us do the exact same job we were doing without the stress, pain, or headaches. We need it.”

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