About Apex

Apex Service Partners is a national leader in home services, known for empowering local brands with the resources and support they need to scale without losing their identity. With a strong focus on people, performance, and long-term partnerships, Apex has built a reputation for operational excellence across HVAC, plumbing, and electrical trades.

Using Hatch automation

Apex brands have been using traditional Hatch to automate best practice outreach for:

• Speed to lead
• Estimate follow-up
• Canceled appointment follow-up
• Aged lead nurture
• Cross selling
• Memberships
• Referrals
• Promotions

This automation is made possible through Hatch’s native integration with Apex’s lead sources and CRM; and the best practice refers to reaching out to every opportunity, using multiple channels (text, email, voicemail), over a multiple-day sequence.

As a result, Apex brands see the 4x higher response rates typical of Hatch customers, without doing any of the work.

Using Hatch AI

With traditional Hatch, as soon as a contact responds to the automated outreach, a human rep will jump in and conduct the conversation. With Hatch AI, a conversational AI agent jumps in and handles the “stage I” responsibilities like answering their questions and asking questions to qualify them.

From there, the AI agent will part ways with the unqualified leads and hand the qualified leads off to humans to either finalize the booking or handle more nuanced conversations. This way, humans are interfacing only with the highest intent contacts and saving time by not having to do the perfunctory, but essential, stage of the conversation.

Apex brands are using Hatch AI CSRs to handle conversations for a variety of their campaign types, including speed to lead, estimate follow-up, recurring services, and more.

Results

Faster in-conversation reply times

When customers respond to outreach messages, Apex's AI CSRs are replying back within seconds, bringing their average first reply time down to under a minute. The AI CSRs continue to respond quickly throughout the rest of the conversation. This enhances the customer experience, prevents the conversation from stalling out, and increases booking rates.

From 70 minutes to 5 seconds is 840x faster.

Higher set rates

The below chart shows set rates for three Apex brands, comparing their set rates using Hatch automation only vs using Hatch automation plus AI.

• Whipple: 8.5x increase (2% to 17%)
• Gene Johnson: 3.5x increase (4% to 14%)
  
  

20% more revenue each month

Zac Sinclair, VP of Sales for Apex’s southeast region, explains that with the AI taking care of those stage I interactions, his reps have time to sell more.

“The bot is getting rid of all the unqualified contacts for us, so we don't have to sit there and put in our canned responses. That frees up about 20 hours a month per rep, which equates to making about $50,000 more in revenue each month, even in shoulder season."

That’s 20% more each month because we're able to take that time and actually sell jobs rather than dealing with people who aren’t interested or qualified.”

"We're now bringing in 20% more revenue per month, even during shoulder season, because we have more time to sell."

Time and money saved

In addition to helping generate more revenue, Hatch AI is helping Apex brands to save money. In the last 30 days, their Speed to Lead bots alone have:

• Handled 1,277 conversations
• Disqualified 135 leads
• Saved 380 hours (which is 95 hours a week)

This is time that, with a paid employee or third-party service, would cost $8,000 - 10,000 per month, or $96,000 - $120,000 per year.

Favorite features

Alleviating administrative burdens

In addition to handling basic interactions, the bot also saves time with the backend administrative work within Hatch.

“The bot clears out the smaller, menial tasks that my agents were having to do. It’s very smart. It knows to push things into the sales category so the agent knows to hit those next. So again, it’s freeing up time so my agents can do more money calls and close deals.”

Rapid learning and improvement

The bot isn’t just handling tasks — it’s also learning and evolving to better support the team.

“The coolest thing has been to see just how quickly it's learning and how much better it keeps getting.  Like the bot mimics my agent, saying things that she would have said herself, coming from a place of empathy to help get these jobs on the line. It’s been fascinating.”

Innovative training tool

Finally, their AI agent has become a resource for improving human sales scripts and processes.

“The other fascinating thing is that as the bot’s learning, it's giving some really good responses that we've actually taken and started using ourselves.”

Responsive support

Zac’s team has also appreciated the dedicated support and responsiveness of Hatch’s team.

“The support team has been fantastic and very fast with dealing with anything that ends up popping up. Because there are little things that do happen. But Nish and his team have been on it and on it very quickly.”

Looking ahead

Apex sees Hatch AI as more than just a tool for automating conversations—it’s an evolving partner that’s transforming the way their team connects with customers. As the AI continues to learn and adapt, it’s not only freeing up time for their reps but also raising the bar for how they engage with leads and improve sales processes.

"Just to see our AI CSR grow and what it's done in the last ten months, I'm really curious to see what it's going to be able to do in the future.”

Zac and his team are confident that the power of AI is only getting started. With every interaction, Hatch AI is refining its approach, helping Apex brands deliver an even more human, empathetic experience—one that’s backed by data, speed, and a deep understanding of customer intent. It’s an exciting new chapter for Apex’s sales operations, and the team can’t wait to see what’s next.