About Peaden

Peaden Air Conditioning, Plumbing & Electrical is a family-owned and operated company that has been serving Florida's Gulf Coast for over 50 years. Tyler Cassavore, the Director of Marketing and Customer Experience, handles all marketing functions and contact centers.

Peaden has 20 customer service reps responsible for turning leads into appointments, as well as several inside sales reps that follow up on open estimates.

The challenge

Manual lead outreach was too slow
Peaden’s initial challenge was speed to lead, particularly with Google LSA. The company has several Google LSA profiles across six different markets, and they needed a way to respond to those leads faster, including after hours.

“I knew that some of our competitors were starting to use automation because their listings were showing that they were replying within minutes while we were listed as hours.”

The slow response times were impacting Peaden’s Google LSA rank, which caused fluctuations in lead volume, which made it even harder to maintain consistent response speeds. “One month we’d get nine leads and the next month we’d get 50, so that response time was really hurting us.”

Attempted solutions
Peaden tried using their texting platform at the time to text those LSA leads, but it was all manual. “There was no AI or smart feature to qualify leads, or even to set up an auto-reply.”

Peaden also tried outsourcing their leads. “We also tried third-party answering services but those people answer for several different companies, so it’s hard to get them to say the right things.”

Manual estimate follow-up
It was the same case with their sales follow-up process. “Our inside sales team follows up on open proposals and canceled appointments, but it was 100% human. With the platform we were using, we’d have an open estimate email send out, but the platform wasn’t smart enough to actually talk to them. It has to go straight to one of the inside sales reps. I liked that Hatch could send out that outreach and talk to them back and forth and get them ready to go.”

Load balancing
Being able to scale staffing up or back depending on seasonality and demand was also a challenge. “I mean, you could never staff a contact center for 110 degrees in July in Florida because you'd need 200 CSRs that one day. So we definitely have some load balancing issues.”

"I liked that Hatch could send out that outreach and talk to them back and forth and get them ready to go.”

The solution

Since Hatch integrates natively with your lead sources and CRM, Peaden integrated Google LSA and ServiceTitan and set up the following campaigns:

• Speed to lead for LSA leads
• Recent open estimate follow-up
• Aged open estimate follow-up
• Promotional campaigns
• Missed call follow-up

When contacts meet the trigger criteria for these campaigns, Hatch automatically reaches out to them over text and email, over a preset cadence, following up until the contact responds. Then when the contact responds, an AI CSR is there to handle all of the initial interactions before handing off to a human rep. This results in significant time savings for the human CSRs and ISRs on staff.

“Our Speed to Lead bot Josie grabs their name, address, what's going on, makes sure they're the homeowner, advises them of our dispatch fees, and confirms what day they prefer. And then if everything's good, she passes off to a CSR to book the appointment.”

Key features

All in one
“I liked that Hatch had several solutions in one software, which is really nice because I'm not a fan of bolting together several softwares and trying to make them all accomplish different things.”

Streamlined lead management
“Instead of having to monitor six different LSA accounts, the CSRs only have to monitor the Hatch platform now.”

AI CSRs
“I really like the ability to create AI bots that text and actually qualify leads and can book for us. Our AI CSR does better than an outsourced contact center because it really knows all about Peaden and it only does what we want it to. And when we were training it, if it did something weird, you only had to tell it once and it remembered.”

“I really like the ability to create AI bots that text and actually qualify leads and can book for us. Our AI CSR does better than an outsourced contact center because it really knows all about Peaden and it only does what we want it to."

24/7 coverage
“Another great thing is that our bot is live all the time. So if someone sends in a Google LSA message at 1am, they used to have to wait until we were in at 7am to get a response, and if another company responded before us in that time, we’d lose that lead. But now, the customer is getting an answer from the AI bot within 10 minutes, and the customer doesn’t feel the need to continue to shop around. That’s the big key for us.”

Omnichannel outreach
“I like that you can reach out to leads and customers with text, email, and phone all on the same day, and that you can do a drip campaign or preset cadence over time.”

Results

No more missed opportunities
“We were looking for a solution that would allow us to always be the first to get back to that customer, and Hatch was the solution to that, to make sure we don't ever miss a lead.”

Revenue
“Following up on every estimate will for sure increase revenue, but we haven’t looked at those exact numbers just yet. We have noticed increased volume on our Google LSA’s though, and that undoubtedly increases revenue. Personally, I think Google LSA leads are the best leads in our industry. So if you can increase those, then your revenue is definitely going up with it.”

Better ranking
“The quicker you reply and start engaging that customer, the higher Google's going to rank you in the results because you're more likely to book that job. And if you're booking that job and getting more reviews, Google's going to rank you higher. So in a space as competitive as HVAC, plumbing, and electrical on Google, we see it as a must-have.”

More efficient sales team
“We do such a high volume of estimates that I know we leave some on the table that would have closed. With Hatch doing the text and email outreach on unsold estimates, it frees up our ISRs to do the phone call portion and really focus on some of those bigger tickets.”

“We were looking for a solution that would allow us to always be the first to get back to that customer, and Hatch was the solution to that, to make sure we don't ever miss a lead.”

Did you or your team have any skepticism or fears with AI?

“I was definitely a little skeptical at first, knowing that AI can have hallucinations, but once I saw how detailed the setup was, and that we could put the guardrails and bailouts in place, there wasn't a concern anymore. We've even had a couple customers call and ask about Josie, that’s how human-like the AI is.

As far as our CSRs, they were receptive to it. There was no real concern about losing their jobs because we're so busy that they'll take any help they can get. They like that the bot gets all the necessary info they need to actually do the booking part of their job, which is the part that they really like. So they don't see it as competition. If anything, it makes sure we never miss and they get to book more jobs.

My ISRs were also very receptive to it. Not at all concerned about AI replacing them. They immediately saw the value of like, wow, that's great because it can do these things that will free me up to do more important parts of my job.”

"We've even had a couple customers call and ask about Josie, that’s how human-like the AI is."