About Shafer Services
Shafer Services is a leading HVAC and plumbing provider in Texas, proudly serving local families for decades and known for their customer-first values.
For this success story, we spoke with Adrianne Gosselin, Director of Marketing, to understand their goals, challenges prior to Hatch, and how Voice AI has transformed their operations.
The problem
Before Hatch, Shafer's customer communication was held together by separate systems, and none of them did everything the team needed. Three problems stood out.
Disconnected tools that didn't work together. Shafer ran voice, SMS, and email on separate platforms. That fragmentation meant more manual work for the team and a disjointed experience for customers, with no single view of any conversation.
Limited functionality from the tools they had. Even within those platforms, the capabilities fell short. ServiceTitan integration was shallow, so Shafer couldn't reliably act on membership status, renewals, or recurring service schedules. And because campaigns ran independently of one another, customers got over-messaged: someone enrolled in both an AC maintenance drip and a plumbing drip would hear from Shafer twice, with nothing coordinating the outreach.
"Memberships is a really complicated thing, especially when you're running two AC checks a year and one plumbing check. You don't want to bombard someone with an AC text drip and then bombard them with a plumbing text drip. The campaigns didn't look at each other and talk to each other the way Hatch's can."
No scalable way to cover after-hours and overflow calls. Unanswered calls went to voicemail, a black hole with no qualifying and no job details, where customers often just hung up. Shafer first tried to solve this with people, but the options didn't hold up: outsourcing to an overseas call center wasn't well received by customers, and staffing up locally for nights and overflow was expensive to hire and train, especially for a family-oriented company that doesn't run 24/7 emergency service.
"Who uses voicemail anymore? No one wants to leave a voicemail. Even if they do, there's no qualifying the call or gathering job details. There's just this giant question mark of voicemail."
The solution
The solution was consolidating all customer communication into Hatch, replacing competing tools with one connected system. Their Hatch AI agents to scale personalized communication across SMS, email, and voice, across the customer journey.
Current use cases include:
- Inbound call answering: After-hours and overflow calls handled automatically to increase set rates and reduce call center burden
- Speed to lead: Instant responses for website, Google LSA, and HomeYou inquiries
- Estimate follow-up: Personalized, timely outreach to increase close rates
- Nurture: Re-engagement of canceled appointments and aged estimates
- Memberships & recurring services: Promotions, renewals, and reminders
- Customer care: Reviews, referrals, and cross-selling to drive LTV
Hatch consolidates channels into one system and applies targeting and suppression rules so the right message reaches the right customer at the right time.
The results
By consolidating communication channels into Hatch, Shafer has seen meaningful operational and revenue improvements:
- 200–300 calls per month handled by Voice AI
- 90+ appointments set per month by AI
- 80% more bookings just by switching from standard voicemail to Voice AI. "Denise's appointments will always book at a higher rate than someone leaving a voicemail. It's just factual."
The bookings lift comes down to confidence: callers who reach Denise leave knowing they're taken care of, so they're less likely to call a competitor than someone who hit a voicemail beep. Mornings changed too. Instead of a backlog of voicemails, CSRs start the day with organized transcripts, urgent issues get flagged automatically, and the team can triage who needs help first.
"We've seen the benefits tenfold. More booked work and a smoother morning for our CSRs."
Favorite features
- Sophisticated AI: Shafer's AI agent qualifies leads, books appointments, and provides CSRs with transcripts. Instead of starting each morning with a backlog of voicemails, CSRs review transcript sand step in only when needed. "Voice AI is like a smart voicemail. Conversational, lead-qualifying voicemail. Callers leave feeling confident that they're being taken care of instead of hanging up at a beep."
- Empathy: "No one calls an HVAC company when they're in a good mood. What I like about Hatch's AI is that there is inflection, there is empathy, and Denise knows how to stay on task while also emotionally connecting."
- ROI reporting: "I come to work and I see another 90 conversations that came in after hours — booked, booked, booked. It's nice to be able to see the reporting for how many of those calls turned into actual appointments."
- Over-messaging safeguards: "Memberships are complicated. Hatch campaigns communicate with each other so customers aren't bombarded."
- Hands-on Hatch support: "The support we've had with Hatch is wonderful. Our Account Manager Maggie has gone above and beyond to train me and work with me."
- Deep ServiceTitan integration: "Hatch's deeper ServiceTitan integration was a big selling point. It allows our campaigns to work together instead of collide. It's given us the tools to respond faster, connect smarter, and create a seamless experience for our customers."
The bottom line
Shafer Services has transformed customer communication by adopting an AI-first strategy with Hatch. By turning missed calls into conversations and conversations into bookings, Shafer now delivers faster response times, better customer experiences, and measurable revenue growth.
