Randi Thompson received a panicked message from one of her dispatchers with an urgent request.
"You're needed on the phone."
Thompson, the service operations manager at Bill Joplin's Air Conditioning and Heating, knew why.
The company had just sent out its A/C preventative maintenance SMS text to roughly 400 of their Dallas-Fort Worth area customers. Now, droves were calling at once, tying up Bill Joplin's four CSRs and creating a customer queue that stretched to 15 callers and counting.
Thompson rushed to her desk to help — but her phone wasn't ringing. It took her a moment to figure out why.
"My phone wasn't ringing because (our) voice agent, Karen, was on the phone (with those customers),” Thompson said. “Nobody was on hold. Nobody was in the queue. She was just knocking them out."
Karen is the name Bill Joplin’s chose for their ServiceTitan AI Voice Agent, available as a standalone product or as part of Contact Center Pro. She can book and reschedule an unlimited amount of maintenance calls, escalating to a CSR if necessary.
Over 90% of the calls Karen has answered end in a booked job, with 72% booked by Karen with zero human intervention.
Just in time for the craziest part of the year.
“Summer,” Thompson said. “It’s coming.”
Not an Easy Job
Being a CSR at an HVAC company in North Texas is not a calm existence.
When the temperature hits 80 degrees, the phones start to pick up. At 90, it gets louder. At 100, Thompson said, it becomes something else entirely. Among the swarm, the CSRs at Bill Joplin’s get about 30 seconds to breathe between calls.
“It's very stressful,” Thompson said. “(Customers) don’t like to wait. Hot people are mad people… And the longer they're on hold, the more irritated they get.”
Hold times can sometimes reach three minutes during summer months. But hiring part-timers to ease the burden and eliminate hold times is not a simple solution.
“It takes so long to get somebody trained up, because every person here that answers the phone books the job,” Thompson said. “Why am I going to pay somebody for a few months of training to get them ready, (only) to have them work for a few months and then say, ‘Okay, I don't need you anymore.’”
That’s why Thompson was intrigued by the prospect of an AI voice agent.
Blame It on Karen
Bill Joplin’s evaluated multiple AI voice agents, but they chose ServiceTitan’s for one, main reason.
“It’s going to have instantaneous access to all of our information,” Thompson said. “It’s going to book directly within ServiceTitan. There’s less room for error.”
As for the name? Someone floated the idea of Karen, and the logic followed.
"You just blame it on Karen," Thompson said.
Customers calling Bill Joplin’s can press one if they want to speak with Karen instead of a human CSR. So far, Karen has handled more than 1,300 calls in three and a half months.
Quick setup: “It took about 20 minutes tops to implement the voice agent,” Thompson said. “Click, click, click, and it’s done.”
Mom-approved: After Thompson's 70-year-old mother called and tested Karen, she said it felt like talking to a real person.
Cost savings: A CSR recently left Bill Joplin’s, bringing their total from five to four. But they haven’t missed a beat.
Talk time: She averages around three minutes per call. Human CSRs at Bill Joplin’s average three to four.
“I don't have to pay (Karen) PTO or overtime or any of those things,” Thompson said. “She's the lowest paid employee I've got and she never complains about it.”
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Ready for the Rush
Thompson said her CSRs are a little nervous for summer — especially since they're technically down a CSR.
She's not.
“(Karen) has proved herself,” Thompson said.
As call volume peaks, she expects her CSRs to have far more breathing room than their usual 30-second window between calls — enough to focus on other tasks.
"(As more customers) press one, they can breathe,” Thompson said. “They can talk to that technician that's calling in. They can actually get their invoices reviewed for payroll.
“I think they'll feel it when the summer gets here.”
