AI CSRs draw adopters — and holdouts

Unlike their human counterparts, AI CSRs don’t get sick, tired, or grumpy. They work around the clock — and don’t demand overtime pay. 

What’s happening: Contractors are tapping artificial intelligence to augment their call centers. 

The big picture: The daily number of customer service conversations led by ‘AI agents’ grew by an average monthly rate of 70 percent between January and June of this year alone, according to a recent Salesforce report.  

What they’re saying: “On the inbound/outbound side, our AI CSR has been handling a significant volume of calls — just over 3,000 recently — and generated about $397,000 in revenue,” Jason Fox, owner of Wisconsin-based Capital Heating, Cooling, Electric, and Plumbing, tells Homepros in an email. 

• “Customer sentiment has also been strong, with 95% satisfaction scores coming back,” he adds. 
• Matt Pozda, owner of North Carolina-based Call Dad AC & Heating, told Homepros in September that his company’s AI CSR — which began answering 100 percent of inbound calls this summer — is booking legitimate customer inquiries at a 78 percent rate. 

Zoom in: A range of call center-focused tech startups occupy the home service industries, including New York-based Avoca and California-based Broccoli, whose websites tout significant booking rate and revenue improvements for contractors using their products. 

• Pricing for Broccoli’s after-hours agent starts at $950 a month, CEO AJ Jain tells Homepros, adding that contractors can onboard in two days and tailor scripts to their liking. 
• Marcelle Flowers, CEO of California-based Armstrong Plumbing, says that before Broccoli, she was paying $5,000 a month for an after-hours booking service. The first weekend she flipped the switch, Broccoli’s agent booked 18 calls. “Up until that point, I maybe had one or two a weekend,” she says. She currently serves as Broccoli’s COO.

Between the lines: Despite concerns that AI may trigger layoffs, some contractors report the contrary. 

• According to Fox, Capital’s AI CSR has absorbed repetitive and transactional calls, which frees up existing CSRs “to handle complex, high-emotion situations, follow up with customers more thoroughly, and ultimately deliver more value in areas where a live person really matters.”
• “Our team spends more time reaching out on open estimates and nurturing those opportunities,” he adds. “That shift has led to a large lift in converting older quotes into new booked work.”

Meanwhile, Call Dad has added five CSRs to its team this year, while raising productivity levels from 20 percent — Pozda estimates that 20 percent of his company’s gross inbound calls are from real customers — to 100 percent. “We’ve enabled them to get more specialized… because they’re not dealing with all the BS,” he said. 

• “AI CSRs are there to complement your best human agents, not replace them,” ServiceTitan exec Vincent Payen tells Homepros in a statement. 

Yes, but: Some contractors are holding off on making the move. 

• State of play: According to a late-2024 study by publicly traded data company Five9, 75 percent of consumers still prefer talking to a real human for customer support. 

“I’m concerned that even though AI will undoubtedly be a vastly superior service to the old phone trees, there could still be a feeling of offense that [customers] ‘weren’t important enough to dedicate an actual person to speak to me,’” Nathan Lindley, CEO of Texas-based Lindley Home Services, tells Homepros in an email. 

• The “quality of voice is fine… it’s actually how they respond to requests that are a little all over the place,” adds Anil Dham, owner of Pennsylvania-based Rapid Air HVAC, referring to when customers start “veering off on a tangent.”

Dave Carson, owner of South Carolina’s Fulmer Heating & Cooling, tells Homepros that while several product demos have sounded “great,” his experience with AI CSRs in other industries — airlines, banking, credit cards — “never goes well.”

• “I think with time, bugs will be worked out,” he writes, “and I would rather introduce a refined product to my customers vs one that is still in testing/learning mode as most seem to be today.”

What we’re watching: Many of the industry’s AI companies are quickly expanding their capabilities beyond inbound call-taking to outbound calling and lead nurturing. 

• Jain says his company has evolved into more of a “lead management platform, and we’ve started to do tons of outbounding for our customers.” 
• “On lead nurturing, [our AI CSR is] booking at a 61.61% rate, which is higher than many human-only benchmarks we’ve seen,” Fox adds. 

Looking ahead: “We envision a future where AI CSRs are handling the majority of front-line customer interactions, but they remain fully under the control of human managers that have full visibility into all conversations,” Payen notes, “with smart escalation paths and alerts for human takeover for the most critical and complex tasks.”