Home services startup Avoca lands investment, officially launches

Avoca, an AI call center platform, recently raised a “multimillion” dollar funding round from Silicon Valley investors, including Y Combinator, and announced its official launch, co-founder Tyson Chen tells Homepros. 

The big picture: “Everyone faces problems with after-hours and overflow because traditional answering services are pretty terrible: They’re inconsistent, have long hold times, and don’t integrate with CRMs,” Chen says. 

• “Most businesses have no idea how to improve their booking rates, so they just pour dollars into marketing and then wonder why bookings aren’t increasing,” he adds.

What’s happening: The company has struck partnerships with ServiceTitan, Nexstar, and Home Service Freedom, and has customers across the U.S., including Golden Rule, Guaranteed Service, and My Plumber Plus.

Details: Avoca’s two main products, Responder and Coach, aim to improve contractors’ booking rates and decrease abandonment rates by utilizing AI to answer calls and coach existing CSRs.  

• When customers call in, its “human-like AI agent” answers immediately, grabs key information like system age and address, handles objections, and books calls directly into several CRMs — while transferring high-touch calls to CSRs if needed.

• Its Coach product, on the other hand, ingests and analyzes CSR scripts, and uses them to grade calls in real-time and identify instances where interested customers didn’t book.

The agent also outbounds and handles speed-to-lead cases, responding to customers across channels like Angi, Yelp, and Google LSA. 

• “We utilize the Avoca virtual agent to complement our human call center, ensuring that every call is answered promptly and our messaging remains consistently on point,” said Jason Price, Marketing Director at My Plumber Plus.

Zoom in: Chen notes that the ROI comes from the value of recouped missed calls. 

• “[If] you’re using ‘voicemail,’ what percentage of after-hours leads are you converting?” he asks. “Let’s say it’s 10-20%”

• “We’re converting 75% from the jump,” he adds, emphasizing that the AI agent is available round-the-clock. 

Of note: Avoca isn’t the only startup building an AI voice solution, but, while other players are focused on general functionality applying to a swath of industries, Avoca’s exclusively focused on the trades. 

• “We have affordances for emergency on-call, know the exact way to optimize objection handling [in HVAC], and can hand off conversations to the right CSR at the right time,” Chen explains. 

What’s next: Avoca plans to use the funds to expand its team, invest in R&D, and continue adding home service-specific functionality to its platform. 

Editor’s note: None of the listed partners or customers are investors in the company.

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