EP: 195 Tyson Chen w/ Avoca AI - AI: Your Ticket To The Top Of The Trades

We're thrilled to bring you an insightful conversation on the interplay between technology and customer service in the trades. Tyson, co-founder of Avoca AI, shares his pioneering journey integrating AI in HVAC operations to redefine customer service.

Key Takeaways:

• Enhanced by AI - Discover how Avoca AI's tools are revolutionizing call centers with real-time coaching and a significant boost in efficiency.
• The Future of Customer Interaction - Get insights on the upcoming trends of AI-driven customer profiling to personalize every call, paving the way for better engagement and sales.
• Boost Your Metrics - Learn about the crucial performance metrics for call centers and strategies to keep your representatives engaged, transforming the customer experience from the first call.

📲 Dive into the full conversation to uncover the role that AI will play in the future of call center management and customer relations. For those looking to harness the power of AI in your HVAC business, check out our detailed discussion about Avoca AI's offerings.

Find Tyson :

Avoca Demo Link: https://calendly.com/d/z8x-9zk-6wn/avoca
On The Web: https://www.avoca.ai/
E-mail: tyson@avoca.ai
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/avoca-ai/
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tysonchen17/

Join Our Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed
Presented By On Purpose Media: https://www.onpurposemedia.ca/
For HVAC Internet Marketing reach out to us at info@onpurposemedia.ca or 888-428-0662



Sponsored By:

Chiirp: https://chiirp.com/hssr
Elite Call: https://elitecall.net
Coach2Close: https://coach-2-close.com/

Transcript

Tyson Chen: 0:01

So if you just eliminate all instances of this occurrence. Boom. You might just get a 5 percent spike on booking rates right then and there.

Evan Hoffman: 0:09

Welcome back to another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. We have a very special guest joining us today, Tyson Chen. He is a tech and AI wizard who's shaking things up in the trades as a co founder of Avoca AI, Tyson is bringing artificial intelligence right into the heart of your call center management. We'll be talking about how Tyson's innovative AI is helping customer service representatives become more efficient, avoid mistakes, and achieve an impressive 10 to 15 percent improvement in call handling within just the first three months plus we'll get into the nuts and bolts of how AI is changing the game instantly providing CSRs with information, tips, tailoring customer engagements, and even detecting emotions in real time and we'll explore a high tech intersection of AI in the trades with Tyson Chen as we reveal the future of HVAC call center management right here on HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Don't forget to check out our fantastic sponsors that make this episode possible, Elite Call, Coach 2 Close, Chiirp, and On Purpose Media.

Thaddeus Tondu: 1:12

Let's go ahead and read out the. EliteCall one first so EliteCall is a U. S. based call center champion for the home service industry 20 years EliteCall has been outbounding client databases, filling dispatch boards with lucrative service and sales appointments, and boosting memberships like no others. They're basically an extension of your CRM and don't, so don't let your competitors get ahead. Let EliteCall connect with your customers. Visit elitecall.net to learn more.

Evan Hoffman: 1:37

Sweet and if you've got more opportunities on the board, you're going to make sure you want to close those opportunities and your technicians, they have those daily opportunities, but they're there to fix things. They're not the greatest salespeople, nor do you necessarily want them to be and that's where coach to close really comes in because they help out and fix that gap and bridge that gap, allowing your technicians to focus on the repairs and giving you that call by call management that is so difficult to implement in a seamless way, but don't just take our word for it. One of their clients took their average ticket from 600 to 1, 000 in just three weeks. And then they went ahead and added it up to another 1, 500 five weeks after that. Tremendous opportunity visit coach2close.com to book your demo today.

Thaddeus Tondu: 2:24

Cool and certainly last but not least would be Chiirp and this is where I really like it. It's the ultimate automation toolbox that helps you capture more leads, connect instantly, and skyrocket your sales. It integrates seamlessly like a lot of other places, a lot of other things with the ServiceTitan Housecall Pro does automated text messages, emails, ringless voicemails. It can boost your Google reviews and your customer loyalty with their proven rehash programs. Schedule your demo today and get an exclusive 25 percent off. The first three months visit chiirp.com/hssr to boost your sales today. So enhance your online presence with On Purpose Media, your go to home service marketing experts stunning user friendly websites? Checkmark. Increased visibility on search engines? Big ol checkmark. Targeted traffic through effective pay per click ads? Yep, you got it. So let's turn your online presence into a lead at generating powerhouse. Visit onpurposemedia.ca to start your digital transformation and watch your home service company thrive in the digital world. Without further ado, we'll be back in a flash.

INTRO: 3:29

Welcome to HVAC Success Secrets Revealed, a show where we interview industry leaders and disruptors, revealing the success secrets to create and unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Now your hosts, Thaddeus and Evan.

Tyson Chen: 3:44

Hey guys. Great to be here. It's great to see you guys again.

Evan Hoffman: 3:47

Yeah. Thanks for joining us, Tyson. Appreciate it. It was a pleasure meeting you in person. Briefly there down in, Oh gosh, where were we? Chicago, right at HR, hanging out at the after party with our friends from Service Business Mastery podcast. Yeah, welcome Tyson.

Tyson Chen: 4:02

Thanks for having me yeah been a huge fan of your guys podcast for quite a while now and it's a pleasure to be on the show.

Evan Hoffman: 4:09

Tyson, while you walk us through how you got your journey into the trades, what was it about the trades that really attracted you to it? And cause I know you have that technology background, but why was, why were the home services such an attractive space for you?

Tyson Chen: 4:20

Yeah, absolutely. So quick TLDR on myself and my journey into the trades was basically my whole career was pretty concentrated in the world of tech and AI. That's how I initially met my co founder. We met in a voice AI lab back at MIT, did a lot of more foundational research and then, yeah, we started the company a bit over two years ago, primarily because my co founders family is in the HVAC space in Michigan and as we learned more about it, we realized, Hey, this is an area where it's extremely underserved by technology and AI can actually make a huge difference and my earliest kind of exposure was actually doing a ton of cold calls. I would cold call a lot of actually a lot of handyman. It was initially a lot of the folks we talked to handyman cleaners and yeah, it was fun. I was just pitching and telling them about, having a, how would you like to have a AI system that can take calls 24 sevens? At some points, some, a funny story was that I was on a cold call and they actually. The person I was talking to thought that I was an AI for the longest time and so they're like, they're asking me all these questions about Oh yeah, prove to me that you're not an AI and I was like would an AI be able to tell you, cause AI isn't able to tell you about current events at that point, at least and so I was like, how did you know that the Warriors won yesterday by this much? And so the, okay, yeah you're a real person.

Evan Hoffman: 5:44

It's funny. I was having a conversation just this week with a friend of mine and we were talking about AI answering services and what that's going to mean for just business in general and there is going to be ways that you're going to be able to tell whether it's an AI or a person such as that and even just the nuances of human speech and how people respond, I feel like it's still going to be a big part of it but when we talk about CSRs and answering services because that's really where you fill the gap here in, the industry. Why is it that you feel like they get pushed to the back burner and something that just doesn't get enough attention in the office?

Tyson Chen: 6:18

Yeah, absolutely it's a great question. I think there's a few different reasons, right? I think one is when you immediately think about any business the part that's not just HVAC plumbing any business, the part that generally gets the most glory are the folks at the forefront actually producing the revenue and the sales and, HVAC my background's in tech. You look at SAS companies, anyone it's always the sales guys are the most get the glory and get the attention and yeah, similar to HVAC, you think about who's the one that's ultimately. Bringing back the bread for the company who's out there, making the money and it's obviously the sales folks, obviously the technicians are actually doing the jobs, the folks that are, closing the deals but I think that at the end of the day, I think as Thaddeus mentioned a part that is often neglected, but is extremely important is actually the CSRs because, almost every job starts from a phone call and so that's, initial impression and you can't possibly make the sale unless you book the customer for initial appointment, right? And think about it from that funnel perspective having a really strong operation and thinking about it from a very kind of data driven perspective is very important to actually succeeding in this business.

Thaddeus Tondu: 7:34

You mentioned a strong operation, and I think this is important piece of the puzzle here. To know okay you're strong operation matching the CSR matching that customer experience in looking at, some of the common pitfalls that somebody should shore up from an operational perspective to be able to help the CSR team. What would you tell somebody?

Tyson Chen: 7:53

Yeah I think there's a few things one is, a very important thing to maybe, I always like to think about things as what is the end goal and what does excellence look like and then work backwards from there in this industry one of the biggest problems is that CSR role in itself is not a super desirable role a lot of people don't necessarily view being a CSR as their long term plan and so what that leads to is that the position itself is a bit of a revolving door where, people come go, the average 10 years is usually under a year and that obviously poses a lot of problems but taking the end goal perspective, I think some of the most important metrics that you got to be thinking about are probably the ones that most people already know, but booking rates abandonment rates. Those are two of the main ones and I think really your booking rate for a good call center operation should be in the mid to upper eighties, if not better and so what I mean by that in particular is out of all the leads that are interested in, getting service. How many are you actually booking into appointments and jobs and then abandonment rate refers to more, of all the people that call, how many are actually connected. So you're, so you need to, connect them and then you need to book them, right? And so the abandonment rates should be less than 4%, generally and then, your booking rates should be in the mid to upper 80s, if not higher and to do that, I think there's there's a variety of different, things that need to happen. You need to have your staffing correct you have to have a good, after hours call center and then you also need and that's more for abandoned rights so that you're able to field every call. You need to be able to staff correctly in your busiest seasons and have some flexibility there and then on top of that, so those are all the abandonment things so that you're actually taking the call and then the things that you need to have a successful operation beyond that or there, obviously there's a lot of different coaching frameworks, but. I think some of the key things are you need to have a process in place for handling objections the right way and price objections, all these things and then the other thing is that you really need to establish the brand early on in the call.

Thaddeus Tondu: 10:02

I think there's a lot of great things that were said just now, and it's worthwhile to go back and obviously highlight a couple of those booking rate, mid to upper eighties, super, super important. It's the app bats that Evan alluded to at the very beginning of the show. If you have more bats and you can book more, let me think about if you have a hundred calls, this the difference between a 40 percent booking rate and 80 percent booking rate 40 to 80 calls, right? That's a huge difference just by increasing the booking rate but one thing that I liked is that you said is the abandon rate, right? I think a lot of people, and that's one of the first times that I've, I think heard it phrased that way and it's essentially what from what I understood, less than 4 percent is the amount of calls that aren't answered by a person, right? Is that, am I understanding that correctly? So if you get a hundred calls, yeah, that don't go to voicemail and that's also a key metric. I love that one because here's what the thing is a lot of guys and some people might be listening to this and they might be by themselves and they can't get every single call. Okay, great. There's ways that you can rent that service out, right? There's a part time options for somebody to answer your phone for you, but making sure that's an powerful. I want to go on the objection side of things, the process for objections, walk us through. So somebody is hearing this for the first time in like process for objections. What I just say, whatever comes to mind walk us through creating this process for objections in how would you put that in place into a business?

Tyson Chen: 11:16

Yeah, absolutely. There's definitely a variety of folks that really specialize in this and I can generally give some guidance. But there are, more professional folks to look at. There's also a lot of content online. Generally for objections there's a few key things to keep in mind. One is that, you never want to say anything that is at all negative, right? Any even generally negative phrases like, Hey, unfortunately, we don't have anyone today. Unfortunately, we're booked out till later. Even things like, Oh, I'm sorry, we don't have any spots you want to avoid all of these things. You want to avoid anything that has a negative connotation oh, yeah, unfortunately, we have a 159 dispatch fee. So those things are just, level one things to avoid and then beyond that a lot of objection handling is painting the positive, right? So I'll give you, I'll just give you a canonical example is when folks ask about Hey, just I just, I don't want your technician to come out. I don't want to spend 159 just for someone to come out. Just give me the price right now, that's probably the most common objection and you really want to have a good manual on how to, it differs by business, but I think a general strategy in handling this objection is explaining that there's wide variants that you, you don't want to risk mispriced them on something that can be very different have use opportunity to explain your brand and why you're different than your competitors and then also talk about how you need to actually come out in order to, give the right diagnostics so that they get the right. Service so that they're not actually losing money. So basically being able to, I think a large theme in all of this is that even this, the role of the CSR has a lot of sales elements. So you really want to treat this in a very analytical and proper way.

Evan Hoffman: 13:05

No and I think the important thing is that you've got a script, right? You're providing your CSRs with the right tools to be able to handle those objections and then are you rehearsing them? Are you role playing them? Are you practicing them? Daily to make sure that they're sharp on those skills.

Tyson Chen: 13:18

It's like a sport as well, right? It's you get the practice, but then you get the coaching, but you need to implement that on a day to day basis. So it becomes a habit and it's basically second nature to them.

Evan Hoffman: 13:28

Absolutely. Sports is the only real, football, specifically baseball to the, there are two great examples of practicing three times as much as you play. Every single day that a player is playing, even baseball, they take batting practice. They take on field practice, right? Pitchers throw in between sessions. They're throwing constantly football. They're practicing for four or five days plus watching film before every single game, right? You're practicing so much more than you're actually on the field playing the game. You get three at bats and baseball game three to five, right? You get 15 minutes on the field for if you're on either side of the ball.

Tyson Chen: 14:05

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah, I think there's all that itself is also a good point. Before any CSR, you actually go live with them. I would recommend at least one month of training to make sure that they have all the protocols, because again, this is actually very important is the first impression you're making on a potential new customer and that customer, if you get them for life is, has an enormous lifetime value, right? And, thinking, potentially in the six digits, right? You want to make sure that initial impression you make well, and that you're closing at a high rate another point on the closing rate is and this gets to another level which is probably even a little bit beyond just booking rates but one thing to really keep in mind is are you actually calculating your booking rate in the right way and specifically what i'm talking about is that denominator, right? You can obviously classify leads is there's obviously it's, but then a lot of times when you are letting the CSR classify the lead themselves, there's mistakes and so I think a very, another point to keep in mind is that, there, there are actually a lot of leads that may not initially seem like leads, but they're actually, that can be turned into leads, right? So someone's calling for a question, but their past customer you can actually just redirect that conversation right into essentially a sales conversation. So there's a lot of things there where. I think there yeah, there can be a lot of kind of opportunities to, improve just general handling processes and operations and from my experience, the companies that really have a tight script and a tight process for this are the ones that are able to really excel.

Evan Hoffman: 15:38

And I'm glad you, you took it in this direction cause that was a question that I wrote down was what is a qualified lead? So in your opinion, what determines someone to be a qualified lead?

Tyson Chen: 15:48

Yeah, so in my opinion, a qualified lead is anyone who you may be able to provide service to whether they know it or not there's obviously the obvious qualified leads for the ones that are directly asking, Hey, my heater is broken. I need someone to fix it. But there are a lot of people that actually need service. They just don't know it yet and those are also leads.

Evan Hoffman: 16:09

Absolutely. At the end of the day, I have always told our clients it's two things. Service you provide in the area you provide it. That's it, right? And when we do give CSRs this ability to mark it as a qualified lead or not, or disqualify those calls, simply because they couldn't book it. Because, for example, like you said earlier, if our dispatch board is full, we've got no openings in the next three days that's still a good lead to the business and you need to qualify it as such, right? We just weren't able to book it potentially because of a lack of training, a lack of coaching. Maybe they said one of those negative connotation words, right? Unfortunately, we can't get you in until Friday, right? Simple tweaks and training can then end up turning those into. Booked opportunities for your staff and of course there's also the process of dispatching for dollars and making sure that you do have those openings in your schedule and Ryan Chute talked about last week over staffing your company so that you've got that availability and then you fill it with the outbounding services like from Elite Call where and even chirp through text messaging and emails, being able to fill your dispatch board with the outbounding when you've got the availability and there's the lack of demand.

Tyson Chen: 17:20

Yeah, absolutely. I think the CSR role is, I think, quite a misunderstood role because normally, when you first think of CSR you think about it primarily in the context of customer service and customer service generally, broadly speaking, is a role that customer has an issue If it's a tech company, it's Oh it's like you already have the customer and you're providing them service because they have an issue, but really, if you think about it more deeply, like the CSR role in the world of home services is a bit of a sales role too, because you're actually needing to, a lot of times it's a customer you don't, it's a potential customer and you need. To sell them on booking something and you're essentially, selling them on, at least you're, they're going to be a potential customer and they're also paying obviously whatever diagnostic that you have. Yeah, I think that's something that, think is a mentality shift that really, view viewing the CSR role itself as a bit more sales oriented. Which may not be, initially intuitive.

Thaddeus Tondu: 18:21

But it's a key distinguishing factor when you look at just about having them because you are right they do have to have an element to sales within there. Now, the other part too is there's a difference too, between the inbound versus outbound sales aspect of things, right and so CSR is more of an inbound sort of a thing. Now, the outbound part of it what legal does in, chirp and I think coach close has some elements of it too in different areas they're outbounding, that's a different mindset, that's a different breed of a person as well versus the inbound person because of the rejection, et cetera, et cetera and so you nailed it, ran on the head one thing that I wanted to touch on is you'd mentioned LTV lifetime value and this goes back to that third point that you mentioned was establish the brand early on in the call. and this is the, this is right after Dan Antonelli's heart is that the brand is an important piece, right? Now you think about this whole continuity, this whole process, right? If you have a great van rap and a great logo, a great experience on the website, and then you shit the bed when they answer the call. There's a disconnect, right? And making sure that there's a, there's this continuity through the brand, the whole process and the whole way through. How would you go? And I know some of it's already been answered in terms of the way that you do it with the objections and the process and in all those sorts of things. How do you go about making sure that you establish that brand early on in a call?

Tyson Chen: 19:39

Absolutely. So I think there's a few things on this note that I'll touch upon. One is you want to establish a brand identity, right? What is the brand mean? And how do you want to position it? In the mindset of the consumers in your market, right? You're in a market. A lot of our customers are very competitive markets like a Dallas or Chicago. There's, tens, perhaps hundreds of alternatives that your customers could be going to. What do you want them to remember you by? And so it's, again, it's what I said earlier, starting with that end goal and then working backwards, right? So what do you want? Your brand to be known for one of our customers down in Florida her brand is all about she, she kind of hinges on a very on two things. One is red carpet service and two is white glove and those are words that she wants everyone to mention, from the initial call to the technician to the after thing and then, that's the theme that, is as the spouse throughout the entire customer action and when you think about what you want that brand to represent and then work backwards and okay, so in order for us to provide red carpet service. What does that mean for the calling experience? What does that mean for, the actual service experience, the follow up experience? And when you're really able to establish that, I think what that allows you to do is the next time that caller has an issue they're not looking to shop around, five, six different places. They had a good experience with you they're like, Oh, I don't want to take any chances. I'm just going to go with these guys again and that is how you get a customer for life.

Thaddeus Tondu: 21:06

All great points and again it's working that backwards, right? From the shit, we just went through this with EOS and the entrepreneur's operating system and looking at your ideal customer avatar in working that backwards from there and saying, okay, everything that you want of your ideal customer and then working that backwards to helps that.

Evan Hoffman: 21:21

If you really want some good tips on differentiating your brand in the marketplace, go back and listen to last week's episode with Ryan Chute. He gives some great pointers, some great questions that you can ask and ways to transform and turn those traditional features of the Bennett of the business, superior customer service and all of that jazz, we provide 30 years of experience. What does that mean to a customer? And then how do you transform that into something that's unique for your business? So go back and listen to that episode for that.

Thaddeus Tondu: 21:46

I might have to, I wasn't on that show. I was on an airplane. All right random question generator. One of the favorite parts of the show and the random question generator is brought to you by On Purpose Media, where our content is so engaging it's been accused of charming the socks off the internet, that is a good one. All right, we get a, you actually, while you're familiar with how the process goes you get to choose if you want question one, two or three, you don't get to know what the questions are until you choose. So which question do you want us to read out one, two or three?

Tyson Chen: 22:12

I'll go with three.

Thaddeus Tondu: 22:13

All right. What is the biggest conspiracy theory that you believe in?

Evan Hoffman: 22:18

That's not going to get you kicked off the internet.

Thaddeus Tondu: 22:20

This could be a Pandora's box here. Let's be real.

Tyson Chen: 22:23

Let's see here. Biggest conspiracy theory is

Thaddeus Tondu: 22:27

Hoover Dam actually houses Transformers.

Tyson Chen: 22:30

I think that there were I'll go with the aliens one. Yeah, I think that there was actually a UFO and yeah, they've been hiding it from us. There's an intelligent species away from Earth.

Evan Hoffman: 22:42

There you go. Do you think they built the pyramids too?

Tyson Chen: 22:47

I don't want to go that far. But yeah, I do believe in Intelligent life outside of Earth and yeah, maybe they're trying to send us a signal. I think it's that point where, once we get advanced enough we're gonna discover them.

Thaddeus Tondu: 23:01

I think they, that we already have. I think that they've already been here in my opinion. So I'm right with you on this conspiracy theory. Like, you look at, just look up at the night sky away from city lights and see everything out there. How could it not be possible? It's just vast like it, just because we haven't discovered or we know what we've been told.

Tyson Chen: 23:21

Oh, you just probabilistically too. If there's infinite worlds, you must imagine that one world has to be significantly more advanced than us and have been around, around long enough. So even probabilistically it's probably true.

Thaddeus Tondu: 23:34

Ancient. I used to watch Ancient Aliens on the history channel a long time ago. I should have put that in our, on our random team trivia facts from last week on Friday. I was, I used to watch ancient aliens, that guy with the crazy hair. It's the aliens, man.

Tyson Chen: 23:47

I remember one of my favorite movies, aliens versus predators. Have you seen that?

Evan Hoffman: 23:51

Great movie. Yeah. I just love that comedian that comes on. I don't know if you guys have seen him on the reel that went around for a while, but he just comes out and he says, so you're telling me that you're not going to believe in any conspiracy theories. You're just going to tell me that the government's batting a thousand and that they're telling you the truth about everything.

Tyson Chen: 24:09

Yeah. what's your guys what's your guys conspiracy that you believe in?

Thaddeus Tondu: 24:13

I would probably have to go with you on that one about the whole alien side of things. The other one might be that the other part is that the whole moon landing one you landed on the moon back in whatever the sixties and seventies, then you haven't went back in how long, and now you're having troubles landing on the moon again. But you're able to do it back 40, 50 years ago with old technology. So I think they actually did and they have went back numerous times. They just haven't publicized it because there's something on there that they just don't want the world to know.

Evan Hoffman: 24:39

My favorite though, is that the, there's the camera angle of the rocket taking off and then leaving. It's like, how did you get the footage back from the. Camera that's still on the moon. If you left,

Thaddeus Tondu: 24:51

And how did you get a camera on the moon to record the first step? Somebody else had to have been on there first.

Evan Hoffman: 24:56

Exactly. Yeah,

Tyson Chen: 24:58

That just reminds me of I don't know if you guys watched the Simpsons, but they had an episode about the, I think about conspiracy theories and there's one about the moon landing and he's it's like they show the clip and then the guy is The actual astronaut is walking out of a green screen room and they're like, you're supposed to be on the moon.

Thaddeus Tondu: 25:19

Sounds more right for the Simpsons to make fun of it.

Evan Hoffman: 25:21

And I think my favorite though, and we're probably going to get canceled in Canada for this is that Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's father.

Tyson Chen: 25:31

Oh, I'll give you, I'll give you one that okay. I'll give you one actually that just popped in mind. I'm a big basketball nut. I love the NBA. I love basketball growing up and my favorite NBA conspiracy theory is that Michael Jordan is Jimmy Butler's illegitimate father. And you guys know about that one? First of all, they they're similar sizes and they look similar as well. They have similar facial structure but then the biggest thing is that any time Jimmy Butler plays in the playoffs or yeah, gets in the playoffs, the team is not a great team. They're usually the seven, six, seven or eight seed, he just goes off, like absolutely off super clutch incredible defense. And so yeah, that that's probably the one that I, a more like realistic one.

Evan Hoffman: 26:20

If he had the tongue hanging out every time he drove to the rack, then I would say, yeah, maybe, but he doesn't have the tongue. I don't know.

Thaddeus Tondu: 26:28

I'm sure we could keep going down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole for probably a good hour and a half. But I do want to, I do want to log back cause I I do have the hard stop and I guess this kind of goes in line with aliens and futuristic technology, AI it's here and yeah, I know I'm, it's a pretty far stretch for bridging those two together. But I went there but you think what AI, right? And AI has been everywhere as of late in the last year and a half really making strides and especially on the CSR front. What are you seeing in the marketplace for, obviously you guys have Avoca and your guys AI software. But there's a lot out there. How can one blend and we'll get you to talk about Avoca here too how can one blend AI technology with their CSRs to help, be better? Augment it in together in one, blend it to enhance the customer experience.

Tyson Chen: 27:16

Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a few ways. So one, I think there's different levels to it, right? First thing that you mentioned earlier in the show that I just want to quickly point out as it relates to CSRs is again, yeah, I think if, especially in this industry, you want to make sure that you're not losing calls, so you should have some type of whether it's an after hours answering service or a virtual assistant that you could hire or someone else, some team members family someone should be handling all your calls because a very important statistics point out is that 80 percent of calls that go to voicemail. They're not going to call you back they're not going to even think about you. They're calling a competitor. So that's just a lot of opportunity that you are leaving on the table if you're not doing this and for us, when we talked to a lot of folks early on, a lot of those cold calls I was making we realized that people didn't really care about that much because they were man in the van, they're more like family, like small businesses. But if you're trying to, I guess this is more for people that are trying to really grow their business and they want to become, let's say you're doing one or 2 million you're trying to get to five or 6 million. So if you're doing 500 K, you're trying to get to two, two, 3 million, you're trying to grow your business. You should definitely be having a someone handle all your calls and then yeah, to your point on AI and CSR is I think there's really two stages, right? First stage is how do you use AI to enhance your existing call center operations? So in this first stage, I think there's a few elements. I think one is you can use AI training tools. So if you're a pilot you take a bunch of simulation training before you actually fly the plane similar, having AI help to train your folks. And then while they're actually on the job, I think AI can be an extremely powerful tool to make sure that the CSRs are doing a good job. Give you one, one very basic example. There's a statistic where anytime your CSR places a customer on hold for more than seven seconds, there is a 20 percent chance that customer just ends the call and so if you just eliminate all instances of this occurrence. Boom, you might just get a 5 percent spike on booking rates right then and there and so yeah, that's just one particular example to highlight this, but using an AI to monitor your calls and then to make sure that your CSRs are doing their job properly. Having, the right annunciations cutting down on filler words, being compassionate, speaking with confidence, all these general tips that allow you to have a good booking rate and allow the CSR to be effective, you can now monitor every call with AI that's stage one, stage two, as you alluded to is the hybrid, right? You have a lot of calls every day where a they're not revenue sensitive, so it's there may be people looking for jobs, spam calls customer just leaving a message those you can just directly allow AI to handle and then only allow your, use your precious resources of actual CSRs to handle revenue sensitive cases. So that's more first stage have AI enhance your call center. Second stage have a hybrid model where a percentage of your calls that are not revenue sensitive get handled by AI and then the other portion get handled by your CSRs.

Evan Hoffman: 30:29

How would you filter that out? Sorry to cut you off, but I just, I want to make sure we address this. How would you filter whether or not it's going to be a revenue sensitive call or not?

Thaddeus Tondu: 30:37

I was going to circle back to that. So good thing you asked it.

Tyson Chen: 30:40

Yeah. Yeah. So the way I think about it is not, you don't necessarily think about it as filtering out right in the beginning, but you can filter out through the call. So you can allow the AI system to handle the call up until the point that you realize that there it's revenue sensitive and you're, they're trying to book a job and then you switch over to a real person.

Evan Hoffman: 30:58

Got it. Okay.

Tyson Chen: 30:59

And then stage three

Evan Hoffman: 31:01

and as long as you're not putting them on hold for more than seven seconds.

Tyson Chen: 31:04

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The seven seconds is more like a, if you're just, if they just pause for seven seconds, if you're putting them on hold, they at least expect to be on hold for a bit, but a lot of times what we find in, at Avoca is that a ton of our customers they don't really know this, but especially with newer CSRs, they're like, customer asks a question, they need to ruffle through papers or figure out how to respond. They don't even say anything. They give no warning and boom, there's like a seven, eight. Sometimes there's like a 20 second delay and they're not even saying anything. The customer's like, wait, did I just get disconnected? Just hang up the call.

Evan Hoffman: 31:39

Wow. Okay. And then the third option before I cut you off there.

Tyson Chen: 31:42

Third part about incorporating AI is this is more in the future but basically having AI run all your entire call center operation.

Evan Hoffman: 31:50

And so they're answering the calls, they're booking it into your software onto the dispatch board, all of it.

Thaddeus Tondu: 31:56

How far away do you think stage three is from becoming a reality?

Tyson Chen: 31:59

Stage three, I think is, for yeah, I think it's really dependent on how complex your operations are, but I think if I were to give a rough timeline with the rate at things are which things are improving I would estimate around one to two years.

Evan Hoffman: 32:15

And even that I feel like is long. I feel like it likely will come sooner than that.

Tyson Chen: 32:20

I think for some people, yeah.

Evan Hoffman: 32:22

Yeah. It really, it comes down to the business owner being able to implement it if they wanted to.

Tyson Chen: 32:26

Exactly. There's definitely some people that may just never want that and then there's also some customers where if you think about this way I think a good analogy is self driving cars, because I actually worked in a self driving car industry for three and a half years, statistically. A self driving car, by all metrics, may actually be in certain geographies, is actually safer. There's a metric in the self driving industry called MPCD, miles per critical disengagement, which is like, how many miles, on average, does a self driving car get can drive before they get into an accident, versus how many miles a regular person can drive normally for regular people, it's around 10, 000 miles usually there's an accident effort every 10, 000 miles just, across the country on average, the high level, that's what it is. For certain self driving cars, we got to the point where we were more like 12, 13, 000 but at the same time you're fighting against the natural inclination of people to not to have a distrust and automated systems where anytime a self driving car makes a mistake, it's over. I'm never going to trust this again. So there is a bit of that uphill battle that we face and so that's why, it's almost not only does it have before there's widespread adoption right?

Thaddeus Tondu: 33:39

And in the other part, too, is go back to self driving car thing. Is that decision fatigue or human fatigue right is real and this is where you start to see a lot of errors come up. In fact, has listened to an audio book this morning on what when I was walking the dog, they're talking about the TSA and going through security. These have one person one role 78 out 9 10 hours a day looking at The little fucking x ray screen as your bags go through. They start to miss shit, right? So what did the TSA do every 20 minutes? They start swapping people, right? And to keep it fresh. And so I think that's where we're leveraging even a stage two model when somebody is not having their best day on the phones, cause we're all human right now, you can help enhance that experience and that's where I see it.

Evan Hoffman: 34:18

Yeah, in the one thing they talk about what time of day are you most likely to get a not guilty conviction in a trial situation and you are most likely to get a guilty conviction, the percentages go up significantly right before the coffee break, right before lunch and right before the end of the day, those are your worst times to get a not guilty rating because the judge doesn't care. He's not listening and he just says guilty done. Bye I'm out and it's true your willpower throughout the day goes down, and so your ability to follow a script as a CSR, your ability to fight through with the objection, depending on the time of day, is going to change. That is a reality.

Tyson Chen: 35:01

Yes, absolutely and that's just a broader thing. Exactly. A human nature there's, especially for after hours, I think there's a certain degree of I think there's a certain degree of standardization and consistency you can have with your full time employees, but especially for after hours answering services, it's really tough to have any type of consistency. A lot of these folks are a lot of these folks are taking, calls for not just your company. But hundreds of other companies and so to have the degree of the charisma, the confidence, the compassion consistency it's very tough and yeah, that's one of the biggest things that Avoca solves really quick background on us, we've been servicing, we service three primary industries HVAC, plumbing and electrical and yeah we have two primary product lines. First is called vocal responder and that solves this issue exactly. We have an AI call center that is able to consistently handle your calls and maintain a very high booking rates. Usually folks start with after hours and then move during the daytime as they see how good it is and then we also handled some basically text and web chat. So all of the different areas that you're able to engage customers and book them right into your CRM and then the second is evoke a coach, which is a coach for your CSRs and it is able to monitor every single call and exactly. A lot of the stuff I mentioned before, cutting down on these long wait times, peddling objections the right way. Being able to promote your brand value in the right way. It's able to listen to every single call and give feedback and give a score to your CSRs so that they're able to consistently perform at a high level.

Thaddeus Tondu: 36:41

And I'm glad that you talked about Avoca. I think you probably read the private chat of Avoca and through that and so you're essentially, what you guys are doing is stage one and stage two.

Tyson Chen: 36:48

Yeah, exactly. We're exactly stage one, stage two and then ultimately we'll we have a product that is more stage three which is the AI handles everything and yeah, I would say folks usually start with our stage one, stage two, but then eventually gets it. Get to stage three.

Thaddeus Tondu: 37:06

Let's get in there, toe in the water, right? It's checking the pulse to see, Hey, do I want to I guess the check, checking the temperature of the water, do I want to jump all the way in or do I want to wait in slowly to get my feet wet? And it really, you look at something like this, people probably start at stage one, but quite often, that's just my assumption, right? Is working through that.

Evan Hoffman: 37:24

I'm curious if it can handle overflows too. So if it's, rang three times, nobody picked it up because, it went from one CSR to the next CSR to the next CSR all of them were busy. They weren't able to pick it up. Can the AI then pick it up on the fourth ring?

Tyson Chen: 37:39

Yes, exactly. That's a very popular so our most popular product within responder is exactly a pro that product, which 24 seven coverage and we're able to handle overflow and after hours. So after hours being evenings, weekends, holidays, and the overflow, exactly as you described three rings or five rings everyone's busy. Everyone's on a lunch break. Some people in the bathroom, maybe it's just a busy season. Storm comes, way too many calls. We're able to handle those additional calls at a very high rates and yeah, for us we can handle it with our AI we have a full AI agent and then we also have a hybrid model as well. But both the hybrid, it's a completely us based call center that we have yeah,

Evan Hoffman: 38:19

I love it. One of the things that, that you and I had chatted about in Chicago and I think even on the phone before that as well was the coaching aspect of when you're working with a real life CSR and they make a mistake and we have this in our business as well. In fact, we have a rule of seven. If we haven't repeated something seven times, it's on us as teachers, as trainers, as leaders. To make sure that they understand what this concept is and what it is that we're trying to teach them, and it's not on them if they continue to make mistakes because we haven't taught it well enough. When it comes to the AI component of things, it does make mistakes sometimes. It says the wrong thing. It didn't book them in the right way. It didn't get them scheduled the right way. The speed of implementation to never make that mistake again is what?

Tyson Chen: 39:03

Yeah, it's once. So it makes the mistake one time, and you're able to correct that. You'll never make the same mistake again.

Evan Hoffman: 39:10

It's brilliant. It's the greatest learning model that exists. Yeah I can't believe I didn't think about it even before we had the conversation, but you brought it up and I just found it, as a leader, so relieving because how many times do you teach someone the same thing over and over again, and they're still making the same mistake.

Tyson Chen: 39:27

And sometimes they'll make new mistakes too, because, they're new, there's a lot to learn. You might. it right this time, but now, oh, you taught them three more things. Maybe they forgot the first thing. So it's and especially, the thing is, especially with questions how many things can you really keep top of mind? At a time, not that many. So you have to refer to other things the beauty with AI is instead of taking 10 seconds to flip through some screens or pages to find that nugget of information about what the customer asks AI is able to do that in, point, 0. 01 seconds.

Evan Hoffman: 39:59

And that's the other part that I really love is that first step, the coaching aspect, and being able to walk the CSR through, Hey, here's the objection and you don't have to be flipping through pages. You don't have to be looking at scripts. It's just there. This is what they said here's how to respond.

Tyson Chen: 40:15

Exactly, and really just to mention a bit more on the coaching side yeah, that, that's definitely a lot of place where a lot of our customers start. Generally speaking in the first three months, they're able to see booking improvements around 10 to 15% and really, it's, I like to bring the sports analogy back. It's all about the little things, right? Like not having those pause times, just that alone. Boom, instantly, a few percentage points, booking rates increased by, being able to monitor that and be able to eliminate those and just yeah other things, being able to avoid negative words being able to always respond to objections the right way mentioning being able to mention membership plans if you have membership plans and all those little things add up and really it's all those little things that separate. A really good CSR from an average CSR.

Evan Hoffman: 41:03

A hundred percent. It's always about the little things. With the coaching component, I'm, and I'm just curious, is it able to give any tips or feedback to the CSR on the temperament or the characteristics of the customer? When they're on the phone.

Tyson Chen: 41:19

Yeah, no, this is a, I'm actually so glad you mentioned this. This is actually a new thing that we just implemented three months ago, so as I mentioned both cover and I AI researchers, our background a lot of the, most of the actual technology is based on the research that we did, and it's quite proprietary. So we have just incorporated and emotion detection platform into our coaching product line. What that allows now is two things. One, we're able to keep track of the CSRs own voice and understand is the CSR speaking with empathy, are they speaking with confidence, but then two, exactly as you are alluding to, we're actually able to identify the emotion. All of the end user of the actual customer. So we're able to real time identify, okay, what type of emotions are they? And one of the key metrics that we are able to have in our coaching module is the Delta between the temperament of the customer at the end of the call versus the beginning of the call and so the reason that this is so valuable is right. If you think about it from the perspective of if the customer came in really upset. Even if they're still upset, but they're a little bit less upset. Then the CSR actually did a pretty good job. So a lot of our customers are now using this as an indicator of how the CSRs are doing. So again, as again, as I mentioned before, like a very kind of statistical data driven way to improve your call center operations.

Evan Hoffman: 42:47

Right? It gives a metric now to customer satisfaction in the CSR department.

Tyson Chen: 42:52

Yes, exactly exactly and in the future, we don't have this right now. We're still working on this part, but what we're hoping to be able to accomplish in Q2 or Q3 of this year is the ability to essentially identify a buying persona. So the AI is actually able to hear and, extremely skilled sales people are able to do this like very well. Obviously that's probably not your average CSR, but being able to analyze. The temperament, the customer, what they're saying and be able to provide a profile. So be able to say, okay, this is a type of customer who loves all the extras. You got to sell to them in this particular way. This is a customer that all they care about is getting what works and the cheapest product. This is how you need to approach and engage this customer. So having this kind of be busy, be able to provide a customer profile with AI to tailor the way that you engage with your customer.

Evan Hoffman: 43:45

It's brilliant it's, and I know we use this analogy all the time in sales is talking about rapport building and trying to do the traditional format of rapport building, seeing a fish up on the wall and asking them if they like to fish, even though you hate fishing and know nothing about it, but you're trying to create conversations. So you start asking questions about it. Meanwhile, they are not a rapport builder and they just want to get to the point. You lose trust with this customer. You don't gain any, you put yourself further away for making a sale than you do moving towards it. It's the equivalent of trying to give someone a hug. Who's a non hugger. They don't want it. They will negatively view you from every movement moving forward, every moment moving forward because of that. So you need to make sure that you get on the same page as the customer and this allows you to do that both with your CSRs on the phone and your salespeople after the fact.

Thaddeus Tondu: 44:36

Just a sidebar. It's fun, hugging, non huggers.'cause it makes them feel awkward. Oh, okay. Caveat if you know them. Tyson, thank you so much for taking the time on today's show. We do of course, want to promote you and if anybody wants to in touch with Avoca, you can reach some avoca.ai, a v o c a.ai and if you wanna get in touch with Tyson, and avoca.ai. There's a few more links, but we didn't run those by you at the very beginning of the show. I think the LinkedIn one, you said you're pretty big on linkedin.com/company/avoca-ai/. So a couple of ways that you can get in touch with them. I know that on the website, there's a get started button. It pops up a calendar link as well. So you can book directly in.

Evan Hoffman: 45:18

I was just going to say for the people who for the people who heard this and they're just like, take my money. I really want it. Do you want to put up your Venmo too?

Tyson Chen: 45:24

Wish I wish, but yeah, we just yeah. Visit our website, www.avoca.ai exactly there's Calendly that books right into the found my, me and my co founder and we will we will have a conversation and we'll see if our product is the right fit for your business.

Thaddeus Tondu: 45:40

Sounds good. But before we go, we do have one last question.

Tyson Chen: 45:43

Oh, yes.

Evan Hoffman: 45:44

Tyson, what is one question that you wished people would ask you more, but they don't?

Tyson Chen: 45:49

Oh, one question. I wish people asked me more. It's about just general or yeah, I think I wish people would ask me more about I'd say about my my hobbies. I'd say is probably the biggest thing cause I have a lot of random, interesting hobbies that I've collected over the years. But yeah, I feel like no, no one really talks much about them. I used to be a really into magic tricks. Used to be a magician. I actually had a stint where I was a stand up comedian for around a year. When I first graduated and moved to New York yeah, I like to do I I'm a certified sailing guy. So just yeah, I'd say I feel like. Yeah, people always just want to talk about AI and ask about the business. But yeah, I feel like I really like to talk about random hobbies and I feel like I have a lot of random interests in in random aspects. So that's probably the thing that I ask. I wish people asked me more about.

Thaddeus Tondu: 46:45

I want to ask you to do a magic trick right now on the show, but

Evan Hoffman: 46:48

I don't know if you have a deck of cards beside you.

Thaddeus Tondu: 46:52

Cause he pulls one out, yeah. He's like, I actually, I do

Tyson Chen: 46:58

Look behind you right now. Look in your pocket right now.

Evan Hoffman: 47:01

Oh my gosh. It's the evoke of business card. No I will ask you this and it won't be the typical thing that comedians get asked, which is tell me a joke. It will be, what was the greatest lesson you learned while being a standup comedian?

Tyson Chen: 47:13

Yeah, I think honestly, the biggest because everyone thinks that stand up comedy is all about being funny in the moment and obviously, there's an element to that. But I think the biggest lesson is actually the importance of preparation. Because I think, I would say 90 percent of of stand up is actually all the work that you put in behind the scenes to prep a joke, you have initial concept, you have to tweak it, you have to tweak it 100 times, 500 times get the timing right, and all those little things to really deliver a funny joke, and and think about the audience too, I would say, yeah, the biggest lesson is actually the importance of strong preparation.

Evan Hoffman: 47:55

Love that and that's I had listened to a success magazine audio with Jerry Seinfeld back in the day, and he talked about never break the chain was a concept that he talked about. Cause he put up a calendar on his wall

Tyson Chen: 48:08

oh,

Evan Hoffman: 48:09

yeah, every single day he had to write and he would just write jokes whether they made sense or not Whether they ever made it into an act or not he had to write something and then he would mark an x on the calendar and it makes what looks like a chain when you Look at a calendar and he never broke the chain. He wrote every single day being able to tell that story and to have that preparation and To be an amazing storyteller, I think, is really what stand up comedy is all about. Crowd work is fun, and being quick and witty and all of that, but the story is so vital.

Tyson Chen: 48:43

Absolutely. I think that's a great way and yeah, I think even as one of our so we were in the startup program called Y Combinator, and the president is this guy, Gary Tan, who's also somewhat popular YouTuber, and he said the same thing, which is that his first 200 videos had 10 views, and then one day, but he just kept making, every week, he just forced himself to make a video, and eventually, one of them popped off and then yeah, and then it's but then when you look at him, it's oh, but you already have 200. So it, it took a while for him to hone the craft but yeah, that, that consistency is really what got them there.

Thaddeus Tondu: 49:21

You look at there's histories riddled with those examples. You can look the most famous one is Thomas Edison thousand ways to make a light bulb only knows 999 or maybe it's 10, 000, whatever the number is like 10, 000. there's just so many different ways. Insert any almost successful person. Some people, the one and dones, but most successful individuals in that regard that have put a lot of work and they've had a lot of failures too.

Tyson Chen: 49:43

Absolutely. Yeah. You have to be prolific. You have to be prolific.

Evan Hoffman: 49:47

To be the 10 year overnight success.

Thaddeus Tondu: 49:51

There you go out there. There you go. Perfect. Thank you, Tyson for taking the time to chat with us. conversation, great insight can't wait to look into your software and even demo it for ourselves as well. So super exciting stuff and of course, and until next time.

Evan Hoffman: 50:02

Cheers.

Thaddeus Tondu: 50:02

Cheers. Well, That's a wrap on another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Before you go, two quick things. First off, join our Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed. The other thing, if you took one tiny bit of information out of this show, no matter how big, no matter how small, all we ask is for you to introduce this to one person in your contacts list. That's it. That's all one person. So they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Until next time. Cheers.