7 Ways to Use AI to Increase Set Rates for Home Service Businesses

AI is everywhere and has so many uses, it’s hard to know where to start. So to help you out, we’re going to narrow things down a bit and show you how you can use AI to solve for one of the most common objectives in the industry: setting more appointments.

Read on to learn seven different ways contracting businesses and their call centers are using AI to turn more leads into appointments and estimates—and the specific tools that make it possible.

Table of contents

1. Hatch Assistant
2. Salesforce Einstein
3. Titan Intelligence
4. ChatGPT
5. Google AI
6. Copy.AI
7. Lavender

7 ways to use AI to increase your set rates

The seven AI tools below offer different approaches contracting call centers can take in using AI to increase your set rates.

Use Hatch AI bots to text your inbound leads

One approach is to use a generative AI bot that actually converses with your leads. Let’s look at Hatch as an example.

The Hatch communication platform enables you to respond to new lead inquiries instantly through automated messaging sequences and direct integration with your lead sources. This increases response rates, but reps can only handle so many conversations at once.

With Hatch Assistant, AI agents can have infinitely many conversations with your leads at once, without skipping a beat in response times or customer communication best practices. Through natural conversation, they will collect the necessary information, and then based on the outcome, book the appointment, route to a rep, or disqualify the lead. They can also answer questions about your business.

Unlike traditional chatbots, these AI bots are built using generative AI, so you don’t need to pre-program responses or build out complex branch flows. Just tell your bot what information to collect, how to handle unqualified leads, and what personality it should have. The bot will come up with its own questions and answers.

Hatch AI bots help you set more appointments by:

• Reducing reply times to 5 seconds or less
• Being able to handle infinitely many conversations at once
• Adhering to customer communication best practices 
• Taking care of the admin work on the back end

This also frees up time for your humans to focus on more gratifying work and strategic growth. If we don’t say so ourselves, this is one powerful generative AI tool for call centers.

Empower your reps with Einstein

Another approach is to supplement your CRM with AI to empower your appointment-setting reps. The example we’ll use here is Salesforce’s Einstein.

This tool has a number of use cases, as it uses all three types of AI: generative (it can come up with content for you), prescriptive (recommend actions to take), and predictive (it can make forecasts).

In terms of setting more appointments, here are some specific Einstein features that come in handy:

• Einstein GPT generates call summaries from conversations that include takeaways, action items, and customer sentiment. It can also generate emails using CRM data and even external data from Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, or LinkedIn. This can be helpful in following up with leads that have yet to schedule an appointment.
• Einstein lead scoring combines AI scoring with your marketing data to surface the leads most likely to convert.
• With Buyer Assistant, Einstein lives in a chat widget on your website to qualify leads and pass them to reps or schedule meetings.

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Even without AI, CRMs are powerful tools that, when used right, can increase returns on several of your investments. For more tips on this topic, head over to our post on five ways to use AI for sales.

Use Titan Intelligence to optimize operations

Field service management (FSM) platforms are designed to help you streamline processes across your entire contracting business—like marketing and sales, which fuel your set rates. For this post, the example we’re going to use is ServiceTitan, the most popular FSM on the market.

Note that if you’re not familiar with this platform and would like to learn more, our guide to ServiceTitan will help you out.

Like Salesforce, ServiceTitan’s AI offerings (referred to as Titan Intelligence) have multiple uses across the platform (we cover 14 of them here), but these are the features that can help with appointment setting specifically.

• Ad Optimizer: Available within Marketing Pro, this feature will feed audience and revenue data from ServiceTitan into your Google Ads account to train google to optimize for sales, not just calls or form fills. In other words, it will help you get better quality leads that are more likely to set appointments.
• Second Chance Leads: This AI feature comes with Phones Pro, and it automatically flags unbooked calls that AI determines can be saved with a quick follow up call.

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• TI Chat Assistant: This up-and-coming feature (as of writing this post) provides virtual agents that can help you surface customer insights, collect customer contact information, answer customer questions, and even book appointments.

Perfect your messaging with ChatGPT

If you don’t have a CRM, FSM, or communication platform, you can still use AI to set more appointments. There are plenty of free AI tools out there that can help you to create content that attracts and converts leads.

Take ChatGPT, for example:

Prompt:

I'm an hvac sales representative. generate a 50-word outreach text message to a new lead to try and get them to book an appointment

Output:

"Hi [Lead's Name], it's [Your Name] from [Your Company]. Noticed you're in the market for HVAC solutions. We specialize in optimizing comfort and efficiency for homes like yours. Ready to discuss your needs? Let's schedule a convenient time to explore options. Reply 'YES' to book! 🏡❄️"

We have plenty more prompts to try out in our guide to ChatGPT for contractors. Note that you can also use our collection of text and email templates we’ve created specifically for contractors based on actual conversation data!

Let Google AI optimize your Google Ads

As stated earlier, one way to get more appointments is to ensure you’re generating the right leads in the first place—the ones most likely to convert. So let’s take a look at how to use AI for the top lead generation strategy among home improvement businesses: Google Ads.

Getting the right leads comes down to wording your ad effectively and targeting it for the right audience. With Google Ads’ Google Ads’ new AI chat function, an AI bot will assist you with suggested keywords, copy, and images—everything you need for a great ad. You’ll need to  finesse the output, but with this integration, Google AI will tap into source material already written in your brand voice, giving you a head start.

Use Copy.ai to write better ad copy

Here’s another tool for generating more qualified leads through better copy. With Copy.ai, you can ask it to generate copy for ads, social media, SEO, and more. It even gives you templated prompts.

For example, here’s a prompt for generating Google Ads copy:

Prompt: 

Create 10 google ads (a headline and a description) for [product description] targeting the keyword [keyword.] The headline of the ad needs to be under 30 characters and the description needs to be under 90 characters. Format the output as a table.

Use Lavender’s AI email assistant

If you have an outbound component to your sales strategy, your outreach emails need to be top notch. Lavender AI is a Chrome extension that provides real-time coaching right inside your email. You provide bullet points and it will start drafting the email for you, then as you’re developing it, you’ll get suggestions to give your email the best shot at being read and responded to.

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You might also consider these 7 Tips for Communicating with New Business Leads.

Note that this tool is helpful for coming up with what to say to help book more appointments, but if you’re still using a regular email client to communicate with leads, that might be part of the problem. One email is not going to get a homeowner to respond. It takes multiple outreach attempts across multiple channels across multiple days. And the most important channel is text.

This is why Hatch is so effective in increasing response rates. You can build multi-channel outreach sequences that keep following up until the lead responds. For help finding the right tool for you, head to our post on what to look for in a texting platform.

Start using AI to get more appointments

You invest time and money into generating leads for your business—don’t waste it! With the help of these AI tools, you can turn more of those leads into appointments and increase your returns on these investments.