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Curious how AI is transforming the way home service businesses handle customer calls and convert leads? In this episode of Owned and Operated, John sits down with Rafi, from Avoca—an innovative voice AI platform purpose-built for the trades. Together, they dive deep into how AI is reshaping call center operations, reducing reliance on human CSRs, and boosting conversion rates across the board.
From 24/7 call answering to real-time customer interaction, Avoca is helping businesses from $2M to $100M scale more efficiently while cutting costs and minimizing lost leads. Rafi shares the strategy behind successful AI implementation, stressing the importance of starting small, refining workflows, and scaling with confidence.
Plus, we explore other high-impact AI tools for home service businesses, like in-field technician coaching and automated dispatching—offering a glimpse into the future of operational excellence in the trades.
🚨 In This Episode, We Cover:
🔹 How voice AI is revolutionizing call center operations
🔹 Reducing lead loss and driving better conversion rates
🔹 Real-world success stories from $20M–$100M businesses using Avoca
🔹 Tactics for starting small and scaling AI across your org
🔹 Other AI innovations in coaching, dispatch, and more
🔹 Why now is the time to adopt AI in the home service industry
🎙️ Episode Host:
🗣️ John Wilson
🎙️ Guest:
🗣️ Rafi from Avoca AI
💡 Shoutout to Avoca AI!
Avoca is helping home service companies level up with 24/7 AI call handling, performance insights, and targeted coaching.
🔗 Book a demo
📢 Enjoyed the episode?
✅ Like, Comment & Subscribe for weekly insights on scaling your service business with cutting-edge operations, marketing, and technology
Episode 194 Transcript
John Wilson: [00:00:00] We were able to reduce, like staffing on nights and weekends.
Rafi Derringer: The data shows that, you know, that lead has literally four times the amount of, of, of a chance to actually be converted. If it's picked up in then 10 seconds, up under 10
John Wilson: seconds. Yeah.
I mean, you would, you would listen to these calls and you'd be like, I spent a hundred dollars.
On you to just totally fuck that up in 10 seconds. A hundred dollars. Yeah,
just gone. You don't
Rafi Derringer: have a program that can catch every single lead that's coming in. You better believe your competitors have that.
John Wilson: Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today on the show, I have Raffi from Avoca. Welcome to the show. Appreciate it, John. Thanks for having me. Yeah, man, this will be fun. Uh, we just, were, we're here we're the day after our breaking five workshop and you guys did a presentation on AI in the call center. You wanna talk a little bit about Avoca for folks that haven't heard of you guys yet?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Rafi Derringer: So we are a [00:01:00] voice ai, uh, platform for the trade specifically. So we work with home service businesses. Um, hvac, plumbing, electrical, and other trades. Yeah. Generally. And one really cool thing about Avoca is we're here to not necessarily displace the human talent in the call center, but kind of aid to that.
Yeah. Augment. Augment. Exactly. Yeah. So we're able to really capture and convert every single lead that's coming in.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: By, you know, having the ability to answer phones twenty four seven. Answering on the first ring for, you know, after hours, weekends, we also have the ability to answer for overflow. Yeah.
Whether it's on the second or third ring, 10 20 seconds in.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: And yeah, it's one really cool piece of the journey is, you know, the, the growth of our team and, you know, the, the development of the product. It's, it's such a fast moving pace, this Oh
John Wilson: yeah.
Rafi Derringer: AI in the industry and a hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah.
And, uh, yeah, lucky to be on the team with, uh, you know, with Tyson and poor of our, our two co-founders. So. You know, I was the, the third employee at oca. We now have about, you know, almost
John Wilson: 40, um, in office.
That's crazy. Yeah. Well, and what's, what's kind of wild, I, I texted [00:02:00] Tyson about this the other day. I'm in this, I'm in like a bunch of peer groups, big advocate of peer groups.
Yeah. And, um, so I'm in this one peer group and everyone in it is like, smallest is 20 and the biggest is like 45, 46. Everyone. I, I, you know, I'm an advocate, like I'm a believer of Avoca. Yeah. Uh, it's been a really big win for us at Wilson, and I had never really talked to this. I was new to the peer group and like we walked into this group and like everyone was already on it.
So like I, I, I think, I feel like I can see the growth in industry. How many people are already on it? So I'm in three peer groups where every single person is already using it. Wow. And these are like 20 to $40 million businesses.
Rafi Derringer: Yeah. That's so like, you guys made a dent. Appreciate that. And it's, it's awesome to see because when I started we, we really, we really had the early adopters, obviously.
Yeah. I was in companies we're like over a year. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. You're one of the OGs. One 15, let's go og. Let's go. I love it. I love it. Um, we, when I first started, we had, you know, less than 50 customers. It was one of those early adopters that, you know, thought AI was [00:03:00] cool, wanted to kind of like, you know, delve into it.
I would say check it out. Yeah. More of like the risk takers. Yeah. Now we've kind of, you know, the, the, the phrase that, you know, we like to use here is crossing the chasm. Yeah. It's now not something that's just cool, but now that you know, you know, a lot of the early adopters have had a lot of success.
It's kind of a necessity now in business. Yeah. Because if you don't have. A program that can catch every single lead that's coming in.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: You better believe your competitors have that
John Wilson: a
hundred percent. You
know, a hundred percent. That, that's
now kind of like where we're shifting. It's, it's the great equalizer.
It's sort of like, um, Hey everyone, people started wearing like booties, like floor saber. Yeah. It's not now you just have to wear. Yeah. So it's sort of like it has become an equalizer. It's the standard. You just gotta do it. Yeah. Um, if you don't do it, you're falling behind. Yeah. You're just non-competitive.
Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. And I think what, you know, what we've seen and what others have seen is there's, um. People have implemented it very varying degrees, right? Sure. Like you've got Josh at rescue, like running it full bore. Um, whereas like, we're still like overflow in [00:04:00] weekends, a hundred percent.
Um, but it's a labor saving. Like for us, when we did it, it was we, we removed our old answering service and that was a really big win. Cost savings. And then even after that we, uh, we were, we were able to reduce, like staffing on nights and weekends 'cause we have to run a 24 7 center because our, our old answering services were just so terrible Uhhuh.
Uh, so that ended up being a really big win for us.
Rafi Derringer: Awesome. Yeah, I'd love to hear that. And. One, one really cool piece too that I know you guys are experiencing here is that, is that human-centric piece of it as well. Mm-hmm. So we we're actually one of the, the only companies out there that has our own, the human and human setting.
Yeah. Human in the loop. So we have our own human call center. Yeah. They go through a very extensive I interview process with us not only representing, you know, our brand, but they're directly on the front lines representing the brands that we're partnered with, like, like the Wilson companies. And so we make sure that they're enabled not only with.
You know, those companies scripting, but also, um, just generally with the ability to, you know, add that kind of warm [00:05:00] transfer through our, through our model that we put them through. Which is Yeah. Which is huge. And I think that's, that's really making a huge difference because, you know, AI is amazing, but there's, there's certain applications where, you know, in a, in a really tough kind of emergency setting, you need that human touch at the end of the day.
And I think that's where our humans can come in and kind of, you know, provide that to customers that might be upset or, you know, just showing heightened emotion.
John Wilson: Yeah. What do you think, uh, who, who out there has implemented I AI the best in their call center? Like, how have they done it? Yeah. Are you talking about like specific companies?
Yeah. Yeah. I, because I think, you know, for people that haven't or are beginning to try to under and everyone, everyone's sort of ai, right? Yeah. And everyone at this point is like, well, how do I use it? And the ways that we're thinking about it is like, level one, we made this up, so this is not official, but like level one is.
Hey, I use AI in my business, and that could be, uh, voca as, uh, like overflow or nights and weekends. Uh, calling. It could be [00:06:00] like chat. GPT writes my emails to my customers. Level two in our mind, which we're not there yet, and we've been using AI in every department for over a year now. Um, level two is like it is now, displacing labor.
Like we are using this as an efficiency. We are custom deving problems with it. And then number three is like that, that basically like we are custom designing solutions to our very hyper-specific problems. Yeah, those are our, like how we think about AI implementation into Wilson. So for who do you think out there is a customer that, of your guys that's really like just doing a great job.
One of
Rafi Derringer: those levels? Yeah, great question. I think one customer that's doing a great job, and actually actually on one of our other products is AAA Solutions, and that's actually in Michigan. They're, they're actually in a, in the Denver metro area. Okay. And they're doing a great job specifically on coach, because what Coach does and what, while our responder product, that AI sales agent can answer all those calls, um, and, you know, give you guys the best opportunity to actually book those incoming calls that are [00:07:00] coming in.
Um, the, the neat thing about Coach is that it's able to actually go in and, you know, provide feedback on every single call, even the calls from your human CSRs.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: By really giving them data driven insights on, you know, what's happening on the phone. Yeah. Um, you know, where are CSRs like messing up the most?
Where are they doing Yeah. Where are they having the most success that way? You know, it's, I, I think that's a really cool tool. Um, really empower, really kind of empowering their team to understand like, which CSRs are strongest in which category and which Yeah, kind of help on specific categories and kind of tailoring it to there.
So yeah, I think that's, that's a company that's doing it really well. Specifically, um, for Coach, for Responder, we actually just started with a, uh, a company out in, in the Memphis area, Schutz, um, HVAC Plumbing Electric. They've been using Avoca quite a bit to catch a ton of overflow during the day. Yeah. I think one thing that's made them very successful is the amount of kind of dedication and drive that they've put into the, into their, their, their process of mm-hmm.
Actually developing Avoca and having it be in their business. This is not really a plug and play solution, John, where, you know. [00:08:00] Someone comes up to us, wants to use Avoca, 48 hours later it's implemented. Yeah. You know, this is gonna be very custom and unique to
John Wilson: this. I think. I feel like it took us 90 days to learn for it.
To learn for sure. Is that still the case?
Rafi Derringer: Yeah, I would say it's gonna perform at a high level from the start, but obviously as it's because we were already custom things. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And, you know, every, every month, every couple weeks, like we're always making iterations to our products, so.
Not only to our direct voice product, but also the ability to have, you know, a simple scheduler that can, you know, go on your website and, you know, a customer, you know, with ease can, can book from there. And it's, it's all the little nuance things that, that, you know, people don't realize where, you know, you can go in there and, you know, once you put your phone number in our, you know, our AI is able to, to capture that.
Yeah. And then even, you know, potentially go and outbound to that customer as well. Yeah,
John Wilson: yeah. Yeah. I know you guys just dropped that, that was pretty interesting. I think, um, I think whatever, you know, I was at this conference and I brought this story up a lot. It's just like really sticking with me. Yeah. I was at a conference a couple weeks ago [00:09:00] and one of the speakers brought up AI arbitrage.
Yeah. As, um, like an important part of their current investment thesis. So it was an acquisitions conference. So, hey, we're gonna go buy these companies and we are going to, uh, like look at their overhead, their sg a expense, and we're going to figure out how we can reduce it by a third. Implementing some version of, uh, of ai.
And I know, so like, what, what that does is it means it's, I just gained back a third of cash flow. Yeah. So huge win. You know, if I didn't like drill that down enough, and I was thinking about that a a lot. You did this presentation at our, at our workshop and one of the things that came up was, Hey, there's this a hundred million dollar company.
And they've gone down to nine CSRs as they've grown from, what was it, 50 to 170 to a hundred or something like that. Yeah. I think it almost doubling in size basically. Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't have to add any headcount and it was like basically we could take on actually reducing a little bit of headcount.
Yeah. Just, well, that, that's been our, that's been ours too.
Yeah.
So like obviously there's a lot to [00:10:00] that. Some of it's, uh, Avoca, some of it's like better practices there. There's a lot to that. But we went from 18 to 10, we believe that 10 is like. Kind of the number now. Yeah. And despite however much more volume we can drive, like we think that it's now frictionless, which is
crazy.
Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: And it's, it's cool too because obviously as you know, the, in, in kinda the CSR world, there can be quite a bit
John Wilson: of turnover.
So, and just people, like, I have friends that run a hundred million dollar companies and it's 70 CSRs. Yeah. Like, it's a lot to manage. That's a lot going on. Yeah. That's, that's crazy.
At Wilson, we've saved a stupid amount of money by having AI help out with our call center, and the best tool out there that's making that happen is Avoca. So look, you've probably heard the buzz about a i, CSRs. They seem to be everywhere, but not all. A i CSRs are created equal and Avoca seems to rise to the top.
Every time they answer every call in the first ring, they sound just like a real person and they don't take breaks. But here's what makes [00:11:00] Avoca really interesting in the real world. If the caller's getting heated, like they're getting frustrated or annoyed. Avoca knows it hears the tone, emotion, and hands the call to a real human so you can still save that call.
And this has been huge for us here at Wilson. There's no more churn or people yelling representative into the phone and the backend is tight. It directly integrates into ServiceTitan at the gold tier level. That means it can handle reschedules, check tech, arrival times, and look up customer info. It even helps with capacity planning.
It's basically a CSR with perfect memory. On top of all that, it consistently makes our team better. We get post call analytics, auto tagging, and coaching tools so that no matter who's on shift, we deliver for our customers. If you're curious, go to avoca.ai av. oc.ai book a demo and tell owned and operated sent you.
And what was the company that was a hundred
million with like,
Rafi Derringer: that's Hhl Bowman. Yeah. Okay. Out of, uh, actually, they, they, they do service Tyson's Hometown York. Okay. It's pretty cool. Alright. It's, it's close to home for him. Yeah. [00:12:00] Yeah. And how many branches they've got, I believe like different like locations?
Yeah. I think about 10. That's a lot. Yeah.
John Wilson: In the Pennsylvania
Rafi Derringer: area.
John Wilson: And I know, um, my friend Luke, he works, uh, he, he's the GM for Dojo. Yeah. In Chicago. But he's a part, he's one of the Heartland companies. I know. They just run, it's gonna be really interesting to watch how like, PE handles something like this.
Totally. Because the, the efficiency to be gained is like. In the millions. It's, it is not like, I think there's a, it's interesting 'cause there's a use case. It's one of the few technologies that there's a use case where like, I'm a dude in a truck and I have 4,000 trucks and there's like a use case for both all Yeah.
And them and everything in between. It's a wild technology. I don't know how many, do you know how many trucks Heartland has?
Harlan Total. Yeah. I mean, I, they have so many
Rafi Derringer: brands. I don't, I can't tell you the amount of trucks they have. Yeah.
John Wilson: In a thousand,
it's a hundred million of ebitda and that's about all I know.
Yeah. But like, you know, dropping AI into it probably added like five of EBITDA to two. [00:13:00] Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That's, that's kind
of wild. The goal
Rafi Derringer: is to fill the board. That's, that, that's the goal each, yeah. Day fill the board. Let's make sure that you know, the leads that are coming in, you know, there's, yeah.
There's expensive dollars behind those leads, right? Yeah. Leads can be a hundred dollars, 200 even more. Yeah. And so, you know, why, why drop leads when, when you can go ahead and book them.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: Um, and I think really what, what kind of we're empowering companies to do is really like reduce that blind spot, right?
Like there could be someone who is calling in. They're waiting on the line for, you know, 20, 30 seconds. Yeah. Just like that. They could abandon that call, call the next company, and not only call the next company and get someone on the line. Yeah. But then actually, you know, have a job performed in their home and then they, you know, become a, become a member of, of that company services and, you know, so that's, that's really the, the revenue that can be lost.
That's, that's not actually, you know, even noticed, uh, yeah. For having, yeah. A solution like Avoca.
John Wilson: Yeah, and I just don't think it's that much money. Like I think, I think that's the reality [00:14:00] too. Yeah. It's just sort of like frictionless way to scale. Um, and I think it's an easy way to introduce, and this is like, I'm not trying to fluff up Avoca here, but I feel like it is an easy way to introduce AI to the business.
Yeah. It's like, hey, this is something that has to happen. Mm-hmm. If someone calls at 9:00 PM what does your team currently do? Your answering service probably is terrible. Letting that call go or Yeah. Taking too much time to answer. Yeah. Or like paying someone like before, you know, before, uh, you guys were a cost savings to us originally, which was the attraction.
Yeah. I'm sure it's a cost savings to a lot of people, but for us, we went from $8,000 a month to our answering service to, I honestly don't actually know what Evoke could cost, but I remember what 8,000 a month was. Yeah, definitely less than half of that. Yeah, sure. And it's around like th 3,500 or so.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, that rings a bell. But yeah, it was, yeah, it, it was such a cost savings and like. It, it, I know for us one of the big priorities we were aiming at, which has been a win, [00:15:00] is how do we get to a seven second pickup?
Yeah.
Like a one ring pickup. Um, and we've been able to drive that. 'cause basically if my team doesn't pick it up in seven seconds, which we do 90% of our calls, it is immediately picked up.
Yep. With, um, with ai. So that was like, that was a big win. I don't know why I got so passionate about that number. I know you have data to support it. Yeah. I got, like you say. I got awkwardly passionate about it prior
to seeing data. I
Rafi Derringer: love, I think this is right. Yeah. The seven number does sound about right.
I mean, we say under 10 seconds. I mean, the data shows that, you know, that lead has literally four times the amount of, of, of a chance to actually be converted if it's picked up and then it's picked up under 10 seconds. Yeah, yeah. Within the first 10 seconds. Exactly.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah. So this, this video, this is a part of, um, we're doing this series right now and it's how to Grow your plumbing company, how to Grow your HVAC company.
And like I'm passionate that it's, it's really three things, right? You have the lead, you have the sale, and you have fulfillment. And if somebody's been listening for a while, they've heard me like harp on that like a million fucking times. But like the lead is the first [00:16:00] section. So we, you know, we've talked, we've talked digital marketing, we had the folks from service Scalers on, um, we had, uh, the, um, James from Modernize on and just like talking about like, Hey, how are we gonna.
Are we gonna handle the first portion? 'cause we can't sell anything until we get the lead. Yeah. And we had, uh, the folks from Wanamaker on to talk about how traditional advertising like ties into all that and like, is steroids for your, for your marketing? And now this is like that next step in the lead where like anything pre-appointment still a lead.
Like the way we're positioning AI in call center is you don't lose the lead. So what happens when you pay all that money? For the $80, a hundred dollars, $200 lead and no one's there to pick it up. Yeah. Or even worse, someone does pick it up and like, the phone calls are so terrible. Fumbles it on the, on the phone fumble, like, are you, yeah.
What was your example yesterday? You guys available today? No. Dead silence. Yeah. Do you wanna call someone else? Yeah. Yeah. We, we used, I mean, everyone's got those horror [00:17:00] stories I remember. Uh, I remember list. It's the worst ever when, when you listen to your own call centers. We're fortunate now. Our call center is amazing.
Yeah. Like five, six years ago, uh, it was a crazy pain point. I mean, you would, you would listen to these calls and you'd be like, I spent a hundred dollars on you to just totally fuck that up in 10 seconds. Like that was a hundred. To lose that, that was a hundred fucking dollars. Yeah. Just gone. Uh, it's painful.
So if someone's AI curious and they're thinking about, uh, call center sounds like Evoke is a potential solution, are you, are you, what are other like applications that you guys have seen that's an interesting way to drive, uh, AI into a home service business? Outside of Call center?
Rafi Derringer: Outside of call center?
John Wilson: Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: I think for home service businesses there's also, there's, there can be a lot of, uh, you know, a lot of people don't know what, what happened in the field as well. Like for like when technicians are actually out. Oh, sure. Yeah. So I don't know if you've heard of Rilla before. Yeah. But they [00:18:00] do. Um, yeah.
Coaching for those infield technicians. Yeah. So we've seen that be, you know, a huge success and, and you know, having technicians. Like having the avail ability to actually like coach them correctly.
John Wilson: Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: Um, and then also our, our friends at, at ProBook, I dunno if you've heard of them, Joe and his team. Yeah.
They, uh, they built a, a product, it's, you know, AI dispatching tool. Yeah. Um, which has been massive as well for just making sure that every single job gets assigned to the, you know, to the right tech. Yeah. So, yeah, they're very, they're, they're pretty deep in service type. Uh, I think they, they services that are specific on service type.
And we've seen those applications be huge too. Yeah. That's kinda like. You know, that kind of encapsulates I'd say, like a pretty large percentage of the sales process right there. So we've seen, yeah, we've seen a lot of success there. Um, specifically with, you know, a lot of committees that use ev oca, they partner with, with, uh, you know, rilla app as well.
Yeah. So we've seen huge success there.
John Wilson: I have friends, uh, we are not trying to do this, but we have friends that are trying to like, figure out how to un [00:19:00] people their. Entire administration team. Uh, I, my quick take probably a bit early, but I think in the next year we could start to see it where they're like, Hey, if I've got an AI call taker that can directly book and I've got a dispatch software that can manage the board, there's no need.
What? Yeah. What do you need at that point? And the answer is, is uh, I mean less. You definitely need less. Much less. Yeah.
Rafi Derringer: I think the big thing there, 'cause what we recommend is, you know. Making sure everything is fine tuned, starting small. Right. So starting with after starting with flow. Yep. Yeah, those, those, there's more difficult, uh, situations.
Yeah. And once kind of companies feel very confident it than kind of, you know, scaling from there. And that's how, that's how the, like the real growth starts, not just the cost savings.
John Wilson: Yeah. Yeah.
Man, this was fascinating. Uh, so this was a good dive and I loved your presentation yesterday. My big takeaways we're like, really, like the a hundred million dollar company with nine CSRs?
Yeah. Blew my freaking mind. And there was that, [00:20:00] uh, you know, again, I have friends in the a hundred million range and like, it's like 50 to 60, sometimes 70 CSRs. Like that's a, that's a wild game changer. That's millions of dollars. Huge oak flood back in the business. Uh, so just really huge win some other great vendors to think about how to introduce, uh, AI into the business.
I, I feel like that was good. Um, if you've got any of the other like quick hits. On if like dropping AI into your call center? Like what, what do you think would be the quick tip?
Rafi Derringer: I think the quick tip for dropping in a call center. Yeah. Start slow and then really, I, I think the biggest thing when kind of implementing a product like Avoca is really going in and diving in understanding your true bookie rate.
I think that's where, oh yeah, that's where a lot of the misconception is. Yes. Yeah. That was a learning curve for us. People think their booking rate is 85, 90%, but they're not factor forwards. Right. Those abandon calls. There's excuse calls, there's, there's C vendors. Exactly. Totally. Sometimes CSRs can make mistakes.
Yeah. You don't know if it's on purpose or on accident, but there are mistakes made. [00:21:00] So, 'cause there to really kind of shed light on that and then, you know, kind of help drive that booking right up.
John Wilson: Yeah, no, that makes total sense. That, and that was a real learning curve for us. Like we call it raw book right now.
Yeah. And like our raw book rate I think is in the thirties, which like. Is actually, that's good. Yeah. That's all calls. Yeah. It doesn't sound good, but like that's good. When we first started tracking it, it was like 27. Um, but like thirties feels like pretty good. Like we're, we're feeling good. Love it.
Awesome. Yeah. Uh, well thanks for coming on, Raffi. Thanks for having me. It's a lot of fun. Uh, if you wanna learn more, it's, what's the website to check out? Avoca?
Rafi Derringer: Yeah, it's www.voca.ai.
John Wilson: Awesome. And that's avocado without the dew. Correct. Avocado without the dew, avocado, without the dew. Uh, if you like what we talked about today, make sure you like and subscribe, and if you have any questions, make sure you comment and we will get to them.
And check out owned and operated.com for more.
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