We recently ran a webinar with Chad Peterman, the CEO of Peterman Brothers, about turning your contact center into a more efficient revenue driver. Chad mentioned several tools and strategies during the webinar, which you can catch in this webinar recap and recording. This page covers his use cases specific to Hatch.

How Peterman uses Hatch 

Peterman Brothers is a family-owned HVAC powerhouse serving 11+ locations across Indiana and Kentucky. They have a centralized contact center with 20 CSRs and a contact center manager.

Currently, 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
• Lead nurture (recent cancels, closed lost leads, abandoned calls)
• Memberships (renewals, updates, notifications)
• Customer service (appointment confirmations, happy calls)
• Promotions and bulk messaging
• Recruiting (reaching out to recent job applicants)

When customers respond to the automated outreach, their 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 

Here are some thoughts and insights from Chad from the webinar as they relate to Hatch.

Speed to lead

Because Hatch natively integrates with your 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 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.”

Chad also mentioned that disclosing to CSRs what they’re paying for leads has helped to convey the importance of optimizing booking rates.

“One hugely impactful piece for us was that we started telling our CSRs what we're paying for leads. They’ll go, “You paid $200 for the phone to ring?” Yes, now you know why it’s so important that you fight like hell to book that job so we can run it.”

Open estimate follow-up

Because Hatch natively integrates with your CRM (in Peterman’s case, ServiceTitan), you can create outreach campaigns for any criteria in your database. In this case, it’s estimate follow-up.

“One of the main primary ways that we utilize Hatch is for unsold estimates. We have a campaign set up in Hatch 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.”

The campaign then continues to reach out over the course of several days if the customer doesn’t respond.

“For home services, 25-29% of work is bought same day. Another 22% of that work 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, seven to ten days, you're missing out on a ton of opportunity.”

“If you're not following up on unsold estimtes across several days, you're missing out on a ton of opportunity.."

Maintenance campaigns

Chad’s input on maintenance campaigns speaks to the importance of utilizing a text-first strategy (which is our template for all campaigns) as well as leveraging the contacts that are already in your database.

“Gone are the days of people picking up the phone, which is why Hatch exists because people respond to text message. So we have campaigns where we will text a link to customers to book their maintenance.”

So when you think about outbounding in a call center, your reps can pick up the phone and call, but how many people can they legitimately call in a day — and book — versus sending out a text message? 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 again, giving CSRs time to talk to the customers who want to talk.”

“That's a huge time saver and a hell of a lot more efficient than giving CSRs a thousand calls to dial."

Equipment age

As a part of the Hatch and ServiceTitan integration, Hatch also pulls in equipment age, allowing you to cater campaigns.

“We do two different maintenance buckets: under 10 years and older, because for maintenance under 10, we're primarily running a technician who's younger and doesn't need as many skills. So we'll send out text messages, but we group them and we're very strategic about how we send those technicians out.”

Memberships

Peterman has automated outreach campaigns for scenarios like memberships expiring soon, membership promotion, updates to the program, and more.

“You know, a big push for us right now is selling more memberships in the call center. I think you can hugely grow your business by creating more memberships.”

Using AI to scale

Hatch AI is not designed to downsize your team. It’s designed to allow you to scale and grow without having to add on additional headcount. And Chad speaks to that in the webinar.

“You can be against AI but it's here to stay and it's a technology that we need to leverage. The way that I think about it is, 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.”

“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."

Using AI to filter out the junk

“I don't think there's ever going to be a day where I don't have CSRs that are humans. There's always calls that AI is going to struggle to handle, and you're going to have people that want to talk to a live person.

But there is a lot of the population that just wants to book that call as fast as humanly possible and get back to their life and know someone's coming out.

So we are leaning hard into AI because it scrubs all the junk off of our CSR’s plate so that they can focus on the customer interactions that they’re really good at and that customers really value. Otherwise, they’re taking 200 calls in a day, and as I mentioned earlier, 50-70% of the calls that come into our contact center are not actual leads.

So that's where AI becomes impactful. It's how do we make our CSRs better and more efficient at doing the things that they're very, very valuable at doing, as opposed to taking umpteen dozen calls.”

“AI scrubs all the junk off our CSR's plate so they can focus on the customer interactions that our customers really value."

Making your contact center a sales center

“If you want to create a high-performing call center, it needs to be thought of as a sales center. Security and moving companies sell over the phone. No, we’re not selling a new water heater over the phone, but we’re selling that appointment. Fighting through objections, booking the job.

So when you can transform that with the right KPIs and tools and training, it can become a sales center and you can start to see growth.

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. So if you can shore that up, then you have a stable foundation to start to grow your company.”