The situation was becoming too familiar for Julissa Moulder.
After 5 p.m., a homeowner in Colton, Calif., comes home to an air conditioner that isn’t cooling. They call Air One Air Conditioning, Heating, Plumbing & Electric, but the office is closed and the call rolls to an answering service.
The service takes their information but doesn’t have the ability to book the service call. By 8 a.m. the next day, when Air One calls back, the potential customer often has the same message for Moulder, the company's CSR/dispatcher.
"We got it fixed last night. We called someone else."
Today, that situation doesn’t have to play out the same way. Because of Jenny.
A smaller shop, a bigger problem
Air One is a family business with about 12 employees, with Moulder and co-owner Trina Lozano running the office day to day.
Moulder has worked for the company on and off since middle school, when she grew up alongside owners Rocky and Trina Lozano's sons. She took a summer job at Air One in 2013, came back on breaks from college, moved to Oregon, and returned for good in 2020 to work the phones and the dispatch board.
Moulder answers inbound calls, dispatches technicians, debriefs jobs, handles outbound and "happy" calls, and responds to reviews.
None of that was running after 5 p.m. or on weekends, and for years, that gap went to a third-party answering service, and Moulder said the results were inconsistent at best.
"They kept them on hold too long," she said. "They didn't answer the phone until two to three minutes into the phone ringing, and it's like, 'OK, why is this happening?' Sometimes the customer would just hang up."
The answering service also couldn't touch Air One's scheduling software. If a call came in overnight, the most the service could do was relay a message. Genuine emergencies got flagged and handled that night. Everything else waited until morning — even if the wait cost Air One the job.
By Moulder's recollection, that added up. In the summer months, when call volume peaks and competitors are just as reachable, she estimates the old system converted somewhere around 30% of the after-hours calls that came in.
‘It's almost like a no-brainer’
Air One had already built its office around ServiceTitan by the time Moulder came back in 2020 — a shift from the paper invoices she remembered from 2013. But when the Lozanos raised the idea of ServiceTitan's AI Virtual Agent, Moulder's first reaction was caution, not excitement.
"Honestly, first hearing about AI, voice, anything like that, it's always a little bit skeptical," she said. "How good could it actually be? Is it too good to be true?"
What tipped the decision wasn't the technology. It was who was offering it.
"When ServiceTitan came out with it, it's a trusted company that we've been using," Moulder said. "So it was almost like a no-brainer to go with it and just test it out."
Setup was fast. Air One's job types were already built out in ServiceTitan, so most of the configuration was deciding what the agent should be allowed to book and when it needed to hand a call to a person instead.
They named her Jenny, after a project manager's wife the office adores. A second agent, for daytime overflow, has cycled between the names Jodi and Sydney — Air One is still deciding. "We're just having fun with the names," Moulder said.
What the numbers show
Air One went live with Jenny in January. The company's internal call tracking sorts out non-leads first — marketing calls, customers checking in on an appointment already on the books, anything non-priority — before counting what's left as an actual lead. Between March and mid-June, according to that tracking, nearly every one of those leads converted to a booked call.
That figure and Moulder's 30% estimate for the old answering service aren't measuring the same period, the same season, or even quite the same thing — one is Air One's internal tracking of leads converting to bookings this year, the other is Moulder's recollection of summer performance under the previous system. But the two numbers, taken on their own terms, describe a wide gap between what the shop used to lose after hours and what it's booking now.
And some settings adjustments gave Jenny the ability to book even more calls. Early on, the agent was offering next-day appointments for plumbing emergencies — a water leak, say — because the shop hadn't yet told the system to treat those calls differently.
"(Jenny) would give them a time for the next day, which is not the agent’s fault, it's just giving what's available and the customer couldn't wait," Moulder said. "We realized, wait a minute, we can escalate these and allow the agent to book that night if we just set it up right on our end."
They rebuilt the job types around urgency and gave Jenny access to after-hours technician shifts, so a plumbing emergency could get booked immediately instead of waiting for a callback.
The call the service couldn't take
Colton sits in a market with a large Spanish-speaking customer base. The previous answering service had no way to book those calls.
"They’d have to say, ‘Unfortunately, I don't know Spanish,’ and that would be it," Moulder said, describing the old response. "That's something that's very important here."
Jenny handles both languages. Moulder said the switch matters beyond simply getting through a service call.
"(The virtual agent) gives not only us the peace of mind, but our customers a comfortability to be able to know, 'OK, I can talk to them and they're going to understand what I'm saying,'" she said.
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Two people, fewer fires to put out
Moulder still opens the office most mornings expecting to catch up on whatever came in overnight. What's changed is how much of that pile she actually has to work through.
"I don't really have to rush and get to all these people because they've already been handled," she said.
That freed her to spend the first part of the day making sure the technician board is right, rather than juggling inbound calls against the overnight messages that needed callbacks.
It's also changed what she does with her own evenings. Before Jenny, Moulder kept her phone on after leaving the office, aware that a missed call could mean a missed job.
"Now, it's more so that peace of mind of knowing, 'OK, if I do set my phone down, I know Jenny's got it,'" she said.
