About G.L. Hunt

G.L. Hunt Foundation Repair is a family-owned Texas business specializing in foundation repair and drainage solutions. They've been serving homeowners with trusted expertise since 1987. For this success story, we interviewed their Director of Marketing, Jeff Ciarelli.

What were you looking to solve with Hatch?

“Our CEO Hayden is a big fan of automation and working smarter. We have a lot of touch points with our clients and we saw the opportunity to standardize and automate some of it.”

What campaigns are you running in Hatch?

G.L. Hunt uses Hatch automation to trigger best practice outreach across their customers’ journey. By “best practice outreach,” we mean:

• Multi-channel: SMS, email, and ringless voicemail
• Multi-step: Triggering across several days
• Right messaging: Personalized and short

And by “across their customers’ journey,” we mean:

• Speed to lead: Instantly reaching out to new leads as soon as they fill out a form.
• Missed calls: Instantly reaching out to customers who couldn’t get on the line with someone.
• Recent estimate follow-up: To keep the customer engaged and increase close rates
• Nurture: Aged leads that never booked, aged estimates that never closed
• Canceled appointments: both recent and aged
• Appointment confirmations: to ensure someone will be home

This results in 4x higher response rates without having to do 4x the outreach work. “Hatch lets us spend our time speaking to customers rather than finding them,” says Jeff.

“Hatch lets us spend our time speaking to customers rather than finding them.”

What do your AI agents do?

Managing responses

G.L. Hunt has AI agents attached to each of the campaigns above so that when a contact responds, the bot will engage according to the goal of that campaign.

This allows them to keep up with the higher volume of responses, because the AI agent is fully knowledgeable about the business and can adequately handle a large portion of the conversation – gathering information, answering questions, and even booking appointments – before a human is needed.

“Our AI bots are texting back and forth with customers all day long,” says Jeff. “I see the notifications on my phone.”

Booking appointments

While Hatch AI agents integrate with the ServiceTitan Bookings and Dispatch boards, G.L. Hunt does not currently utilize this integration.

“We have complexity in our scheduling, so we have the bot qualify the lead, gather all of the necessary information, and tentatively book the appointment, and then we jump in to confirm. So it’s not officially on the ServiceTitan board, but for all intents and purposes, the customer knows they’re taken care of and they don’t feel the need to look anywhere else.”

“The bot takes care of the booking and then we call to confirm it.”

Key results

Jeff shares that there are two major impacts: One is on resources—freeing up his team from outbound calling to focus on speaking with real prospects; and the other is a measurable increase in appointments.

Time saved

“Hatch allows us to be on the response side of things rather than the outreach side. So now we can focus on people who are ready to engage. That’s a much more valuable use of our time than chasing down people who aren’t.”

40% higher booking rates

“We’re up about 40% in appointments month over month for the last eight months. We’ve done a lot to get there, so it’s not just Hatch, but Hatch has been a big part of that, especially with the appointments we’ve booked from the missed call campaigns and structured outreach campaigns.”

198 appointments a month from missed call campaigns

In the last 90 days, G.L. Hunt’s missed call campaign has seen 5,711 launches and influenced:

• 594 appointments booked for a 10% set rate
• 279 sales
• $1.8M in revenue

“This is a no-brainer feature. It only took a couple seconds to set up, and the number of booked appointments from missed calls is quite impressive.”

In addition, the missed call campaign filters out spam—whether that’s a butt dial or robocall—so Jeff’s team doesn’t waste time listening to voicemails or returning calls that don’t matter. If it’s a qualified lead, they’ll respond to the campaign. If not, they’ve just saved that time.

“The missed calls campaign is a no-brainer. It only took a couple seconds to set up, and the number of booked appointments from it is impressive.”

Favorite features

Hatch as a central hub for all of their lead sources

“We use Hatch as our central lead collection hub for external partner leads. Some partners have a ServiceTitan API; others don’t and require a Google Sheet; and others have yet a different process. So everybody goes into Hatch first, and then filtered into ServiceTitan. It’s just cleaner that way.”

This also eliminates the cumbersome work of monitoring several lead dashboards throughout the day.

Standing up new lead sources is easier

“My support team members are smart and quick. I’ll come to them with a new lead vendor and it’s all set up two days later. So it’s easier with them, and of course Hatch also has all the drip campaign functionality built in.”

Excellent support

“If every Account Manager I worked with was like my Hatch Account Managers, my life would be amazing. I’d be ahead on everything.”

“Hatch is our central collection hub for leads before they go into ServiceTitan. It’s just cleaner that way.”

Looking ahead

Jeff has been focused on pre-appointment efforts to increase conversation rates, so the post-estimate campaigns and their results are still being built out.

In addition to his new estimate follow-up, nurture, and cancellation campaigns, he’s looking to implement a follow-up campaign for accounts receivable.

“Most of our effort so far has been on the appointment side, but there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit we’re excited to dig into for post-estimate follow-up.”

“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit we’re excited to dig into for post-estimate follow-up.”