Born For The Trades: A Home Service Podcast
00:14:15 · Mandeep Bhalla, AJ Jain
[00:14:15] S0: I wanna give a special shout out to Grow Reviews, one of our sponsors, America's first platform to capture instant text and video reviews. If a picture is thousand words, a video is worth 1,000,000. Book a demo with Grow Reviews by visiting website www.growreviews.com, and you can get in touch with their sales reps to book a demo. So some people hear AI and think it's not for them or too complicated. What do you say to the home service pros who feel that way? [00:14:47] S2: Yeah, it's a great question. And nobody has an answer to that. It's again, what are you trying to optimize for in your business? Why people like Marcel are using AI is to not find a cheaper alternative to humans. That's wrong. That is not what we propose and Broccoli is not a I don't consider Broccoli as a cheap service. It's like $100 per month and just use [00:15:14] S0: It's a premium service.
00:15:14 · Mandeep Bhalla, AJ Jain
[00:15:14] S0: It's a premium service. [00:15:16] S2: Yeah, it's more like Broccoli is replacing bad experiences for a customer. The bad experience can be long wait times. Can It be talking to somebody that does not understand what they're trying to tell. It can be a bad experience from like I booked a service, but the technician never showed up because the answering service never booked a job, never dispatched a technician. So that is what Broccoli is trying to solve. If you can hire more humans, you should do that because if a human can provide a better service than an AI, you should do that. But if you can't do that, and you're trying to hack together solutions, the AI in its current form today itself is so much better than all the other solutions that existed before AI. And this is the worst AI can be today. It's just going up. So we feel very confident on how AI is going to evolve. It's not a cheaper alternative or just, okay, I can't hire enough people. I'm going to throw AI at it. It's more like I'm trying to optimize and I'm trying to give the best experience to my customers. Therefore, I'm choosing AI because it's much better than deploying or working with an answering service that does not know anything about my businesses. Yeah.
00:16:31 · Mandeep Bhalla
[00:16:31] S0: That's amazing. And I think recently, there are, like, know, our clients, they they want to know more about, like, you know, AI, CSRs, like, you know, available in the market, and we we send it your way. And tell us, like, you know, more about, like, the integrations. 90% of our clients, are using ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro. Yeah. I don't see, like... You know, there are other CRMs available, like, you know, for the startups, Jobber, and I think they're serve centric. But majorly is... ServiceTitan has dominated. Right? So is that like, is Broccoli AI integrated to major CRMs like ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and how does that work?
00:17:14 · AJ Jain
[00:17:14] S2: Yeah, again, like this question is also very important for any client or any contractor that's hearing this. It's like the AI is an employee. And the AI is only because the AI needs to work on the systems, work on top of the systems, which are their FSMs like service titan, housecar, and there's a long tail of other software companies. Broccoli is an official technology partner with service Titan, we natively integrate with them. And we do basically everything that a human would do in service Titan. So it means clicking the green bubble so that the attribution is there and you disposition the call the right way. If it's a reoccurring service, Broccoli marks that as a reoccurring service in service titan. Information that we fetch data from service titan, but we also put the data back in service titan, we booked the job on the dispatch board, understand their scheduling logic, whether it's ACP or the new ATP rules. So we understand all of that. What we've seen is that there are some other software companies that we do integrate with which is like Housecall Pro. But what we've seen is we want to create the best experience for our customers. And if the systems underneath don't expose the most important data, which is the dispatch board, we don't do justice for what we charge, because we know our ROI is the most important thing. If we charge $1,000 per month, our ROI should be over, like right now it's over 1100%. So we want to cater to that segment of customers where we can just wow them and Broccoli is growing. And as we evolve, we want to cater to more companies and more clients. But for now, that is where we are in terms of our integrations.
00:19:08 · Mandeep Bhalla, AJ Jain
[00:19:08] S0: That's amazing. That's amazing. Proud of you all. Because without that integration, I think it's very, very like, you know, challenging to show if it's working or not because there has to be a connection with your product, with the ServiceTitan or any CRM or home service industry is using. And 1,100 person ROI. That's amazing. Yeah. What a great number. [00:19:34] S2: It's the core thesis. Whenever we release a new module or feature, we don't charge for it because we want to see the ROI first. If there's not enough ROI, that product is not worth using for anyone. So we're very confident on the value we'll provide. And like it's not just the inbound agents. Now our outbound agents have added more ROI because it's much easier to use your existing customer base rather than spending more money on just ads where you know, it's hard and competitive nowadays. So that is one of the good channels to utilize. And yeah, that's why the ROI has just increased because of that.
00:19:34 · AJ Jain, Mandeep Bhalla, Marcel
[00:19:34] S2: It's the core thesis. Whenever we release a new module or feature, we don't charge for it because we want to see the ROI first. If there's not enough ROI, that product is not worth using for anyone. So we're very confident on the value we'll provide. And like it's not just the inbound agents. Now our outbound agents have added more ROI because it's much easier to use your existing customer base rather than spending more money on just ads where you know, it's hard and competitive nowadays. So that is one of the good channels to utilize. And yeah, that's why the ROI has just increased because of that. [00:20:13] S0: Yeah. You made a you made a very good point here because we run digital marketing agency where Google Ads, Google Maps, and then local service ads, SEO. Now what we have seen that with AI shift, we have totally evolved and we are focusing on AEO. Zero click traffic is coming. Google Maps rankings, SEO rankings, we see a lot of less calls, right, because because of AI overview. So that shift is like, you know, it was very, very important. Now I wanna ask you this question is for both of you from operations and tech side. So Marcel and AJ, what were the... What were some of the biggest mistakes or lessons you learned in building for the trades, especially coming from tech and operations background? Maybe we'll start with Marcel. Marcel, you want to answer first? [00:21:10] S1: Well, I'm not quite sure I fully understand the question. Biggest mistakes of...