Accelerated HVAC Success Podcast
00:10:31 · AJ Jain, Ben Middleton
[00:10:31] S2: What does Broccoli do? Yeah. So Broccoli is democratizing access to great customer service. Just like, I'm just building upon what we just discussed. Right now, as a contractor, you need to invest so much in into your call center to make sure your CSRs are trained, they have knowledge about your services, your brand. You need to coach them on empathy as well. So it's hard. You need time, resources and money to do that. Broccoli's goal is to democratize that and offer the best customer service out of the box through AI. So this was a very philosophical answer, but the simple answer is we build AI voice agents for HVAC plumbing and electrical contractors. [00:11:20] S1: It's interesting you talk about that. The other day, I was calling a hotel because I needed to change a reservation for some travel I was doing for work. And I think it took a good three minutes before I figured out I was actually talking to an AI voice agent. It was that good that I had no idea that I was not talking to a human being until I finally stumped it on a question that I had. But that voice... AI voice agents have come a long ways in just a year.
00:11:20 · Ben Middleton, AJ Jain
[00:11:20] S1: It's interesting you talk about that. The other day, I was calling a hotel because I needed to change a reservation for some travel I was doing for work. And I think it took a good three minutes before I figured out I was actually talking to an AI voice agent. It was that good that I had no idea that I was not talking to a human being until I finally stumped it on a question that I had. But that voice... AI voice agents have come a long ways in just a year. [00:11:48] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, even I'm shocked at the way voice as a technology has evolved. It has kind of crossed the uncanny valley. Mhmm. Where it's a much more human like experience. The AI also has empathy. And honestly, it's it's it feels magical where you can offer the best customer service even if somebody calls you on a Sunday evening at 9PM. You you don't, like humans have emotions and even I, like my mood changes throughout the day, but see AI won't won't throw tantrums and would just be smiling and offering, trying to help a customer. So from a customer point of view, I think that's gonna be a much better experience for sure. Yeah. So what [00:12:38] S1: objections do you hear from contractors or hesitations do you hear from contractors of saying, yeah, I wanna use this technology or I think maybe it's a good idea, but I'm not ready for it. Where where do you get the pushback on it?
00:12:38 · Ben Middleton, AJ Jain
[00:12:38] S1: objections do you hear from contractors or hesitations do you hear from contractors of saying, yeah, I wanna use this technology or I think maybe it's a good idea, but I'm not ready for it. Where where do you get the pushback on it? [00:12:50] S2: Yeah. And to answer this question, I don't think AI is for everyone today. Mhmm. It again depends on what systems you have in place. If you have an amazing call center that you're really happy with, you should use them. You should hire more folks if you can. But the bigger problem is people are not able to hire great CSRs. Even if you have a CSR, once they go back home, you rely on an answering service. Mhmm. Everybody loves their answering service. So we're trying to solve those problems. We don't go in and say that fire your call center. That's not our pitch. Our pitch is that today's AI is 10 x better than an outsourced answering service and a great backup to your team. So if you don't want any customer to wait on hold as your CSRs are on the phone helping other customers, use AI. It's a great backup. And if you feel the AI is doing a good enough job, you'll you'll allow the AI to answer more calls. But as of today, we just treat the AI as a backup to your existing, an augmentation to your existing call center. So... [00:13:57] S1: Yeah. So does AI tie into your dispatch tools, into your scheduling tools? Where do you have integrations today?
00:13:57 · Ben Middleton, AJ Jain
[00:13:57] S1: Yeah. So does AI tie into your dispatch tools, into your scheduling tools? Where do you have integrations today? [00:14:05] S2: Yeah. Broccoli is a very focused company. We are purpose built for contractors. So we don't do this for healthcare companies or insurance. So we understand their systems. We integrate with their CRMs like ServiceTitan. We know what is on their dispatch board, the AI can prioritize job. So if somebody says my AC is not working, the AI is smart enough to ask them, what's the issue? How old is the how old is the equipment? If it's greater than ten years old, most likely it's a replacement. So it's a higher priority job. Then we'll book the job on the dispatch board in their CRM and Broccoli can also double down as a dispatcher where we'll also, if it's an emergency, Broccoli can call the on call technician and say that, hi Jonathan, a new emergency service was just booked. So we close the loop and it's more like a lead management platform. Broccoli can do outbounding as well to schedule reoccurring services for members. We do SMS. So every channel you get a lead from Google, LSA, Yelp, Broccoli can make an outbound phone call within seconds. So we we help them not miss on a single lead across every every channel. [00:15:18] S1: Can AI do any prioritizing by by looking at the quality of the lead and saying, okay. This lead is gonna be a a much more high quality vetted lead, if you will, versus this lead over here and help... Does it do... Go that far in the dispatching?
00:15:18 · Ben Middleton, AJ Jain
[00:15:18] S1: Can AI do any prioritizing by by looking at the quality of the lead and saying, okay. This lead is gonna be a a much more high quality vetted lead, if you will, versus this lead over here and help... Does it do... Go that far in the dispatching? [00:15:37] S2: Yeah. Broccoli's AI can, and we do this because this is what a great CSR does. They don't simply... They're not a note taker. They understand the issue. They understand how big this opportunity will be. And then even if the board is full, they'll still prioritize this appointment and then reschedule a lower priority service like a tune up. So Broccoli understands what is your prioritization logic. And based on that, it'll make those decisions before offering availability. [00:16:08] S1: So what if they don't have ServiceTitan? What other platforms or how how would you integrate with maybe a a smaller platform that's out there or even a custom solution that a dealer has? Because a lot of dealers have just customized and cobbled together different things that they Yeah. Use to run their
00:16:08 · Ben Middleton, AJ Jain
[00:16:08] S1: So what if they don't have ServiceTitan? What other platforms or how how would you integrate with maybe a a smaller platform that's out there or even a custom solution that a dealer has? Because a lot of dealers have just customized and cobbled together different things that they Yeah. Use to run their [00:16:24] S2: Broccoli does not need a dedicated CRM to work with. We can work out of the box. We do integrate with other CRMs like Housecall Pro, Zap... And through Zapier we can also connect to their systems. So we can always send them an email saying that this was a lead that came in, Broccoli offered an availability. Even if you don't put it on the dispatch board, they still were able to save the lead, and then somebody from the office can always reschedule the customer if they don't have capacity. So the AI can work out of the box irrespective of what your systems are, but to close the loop, we do focus on building out more integrations with more CRM so that it's an end to end experience. [00:17:04] S1: Can you do pre qualifications for like financing if a... Or can you ask the home owner, are you interested in financing? And then can you tie into any of the financing tools that are available today? [00:17:18] S2: That's a great feedback. Right now, we we don't do that. Right. Yeah. But, yeah, we we will expand and get into more deeper workflows. But right now, it's it's not like... It is not something we've we've built out, but we've already started to upsell memberships and take payments. So this is a very natural next step for us.