About Peterman Brothers
Peterman Brothers is a family-owned HVAC powerhouse serving 11+ locations across Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. They have a centralized contact center with 20 CSRs and a contact center manager.
This case study is based on insights from CEO Chad Peterman, shared during a live webinar on scaling contact centers.
How Peterman uses Hatch
Peterman Brothers uses Hatch to automate best practice outreach for:
- Speed to lead — For Angi, Modernize, Thumbtack, PX, Networx, and website leads
- Recent estimate follow-up — Outreach within hours of unsold estimates
- Lead nurture — Recent cancels, closed lost leads, abandoned calls
- Memberships — Renewals, updates, notifications
- Customer service — Appointment confirmations, happy calls
- Promotions and bulk messaging — Text campaigns to the full database
- Recruiting — Reaching out to recent job applicants
When customers respond to the automated outreach, AI agents do the initial qualifying work before handing off to a rep. With audience creation, outreach, follow-up, and qualification handled by automation and AI, their CSRs can focus on the interactions that truly matter.
Thoughts from Chad
Speed to lead
Because Hatch natively integrates with lead sources, it can detect when a new lead submits an inquiry in real time and enroll them in a speed to lead outreach sequence immediately.
"A lot of people think they need more leads, but if you don't know your booking rate, you probably have a lot of leads that you're already paying for that you never run. That relates to our Hatch speed to lead campaigns. We're reaching out to new leads within seconds."
Open estimate follow-up
Because Hatch natively integrates with ServiceTitan, you can create outreach campaigns for any criteria in your database.
"One of the main primary ways that we utilize Hatch is for unsold estimates. We have a campaign set up so that within a few hours of estimate appointments that didn't close in-home, we're reaching out to see how the appointment went and if they have any questions."
"For home services, 25-29% of work is bought same day. Another 22% is bought in day two through seven. Which tells me that if you're not following up with a campaign that stretches out at least six to ten days, you're missing out on a ton of opportunity."
Maintenance campaigns
"Gone are the days of people picking up the phone, which is why Hatch exists — people respond to text message. So we have campaigns where we will text a link to customers to book their maintenance."
"We've had campaigns where we've sent out a text to a thousand people in a day and booked 50% of them. That's a huge time saver and it's a hell of a lot more efficient when it comes to booking calls and giving CSRs time to talk to the customers who want to talk."
Using AI to scale
"You can be against AI but it's here to stay and it's a technology that we need to leverage. In HVAC, I can never staff a call center for when it hits 95 degrees outside. If I did, then I'd have people in March just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. So with AI, with my current team, I can grow but I may not need to double my team to do that."
Using AI to filter out the junk
"50-70% of the calls that come into our contact center are not actual leads. So that's where AI becomes impactful. It scrubs all the junk off of our CSR's plate so they can focus on the customer interactions that they're really good at and that customers really value."
"AI scrubs all the junk off our CSR's plate so they can focus on the customer interactions that our customers really value."
The bottom line
Chad's philosophy is clear: if you want a high-performing call center, treat it like a sales center.
"There is so much money to be gained in that call center, but if it's not right, it's like you've got a bunch of holes in your bucket and leads and money is just leaking out the bottom. If you can shore that up, then you have a stable foundation to start to grow your company."
"I can never staff a call center for when it's 95 degrees outside. If I did, I'd have people twiddling their thumbs in March."
