In the fall of 2024, back-to-back hurricanes tore through Florida. For most businesses, that meant damage and disruption. For GenerX Generators — the largest Generac dealer in Florida and, combined with its parent company Canter Power Systems, the largest in the country — it meant the phones didn't stop.
"Over the course of that month, we took 30,000 calls between the two storms in September and October," said Nick Valenti, ServiceTitan Implementation Manager at GenerX. "We only had seven or eight people who could take calls."
Seven people. 30,000 calls. And nowhere for the overflow to go.
"We probably got to a quarter of those, at best."
The backlog that never stopped growing
At the time, GenerX was running on a legacy CRM with a phone system to match. Desk phones. Simultaneous ring. CSRs had to be in the office to do anything. When call volume spiked, calls that couldn't be answered simply fell away — no queue, no rollover, no backup.
The backlog that built up during those storms wasn't just an operational headache. It was weeks long.
"Every call we missed became the backlog," Valenti said. "Every day, all the calls that were coming in that we didn't get to — it's like we were trying to get to as many people as possible."
To handle the overflow, the company had to bring in a third-party service. It cost a significant amount of money. And it didn't actually solve the problem.
"They didn't even take the calls for our customers," Valenti said. "They took messages for our customers, and essentially just added to our backlog."
The storms forced a hard look at the situation. Valenti, who came to GenerX with a 25-year data center background, framed it simply: the company had two things to figure out. How to serve customers better in their time of need, and how to give their own team a better experience doing it.
The answer, he decided, was ServiceTitan, and Contact Center Pro.
Building something before the next storm
Canter Power Systems launched on ServiceTitan in January 2025. The company had three branches at the time — Florida, North Carolina and Minnesota. Each ran its own call center. Each was an island.
Contact Center Pro changed that. The platform let Valenti pool CSRs across locations into a centralized call flow, with tiered queues that roll calls to the next available team rather than letting them fall through. When one office gets buried, another picks up the slack. When a CSR can't get to the office, they log in from home.
Valenti spent 14 months building out the system. Then a winter storm rolled through the Midwest.
"Me and my team were like, this is our time," he said. "We've spent 14 months building this. Let's see how it works."
It worked.
Within five minutes of the storm hitting North Carolina, Valenti had 25 people taking calls for that branch — the Florida team picking up the overflow from a thousand miles away. When the North Carolina staff couldn't get into the office on Day 2, they logged in from home and kept going.
Over the entire weekend, GenerX missed four calls. Two of those, Valenti said, were their own fault — a preset hadn't been configured correctly at the start.
What the numbers look like now
The difference between 2024 and today isn't subtle. The results across every key metric tell the story clearly:
Abandon Rate: dropped from 52% to 17%
Booking Rate: nearly doubled, from 28% to 54%
Average Wait Time: cut from 20 minutes to under one minute
CSR Flexibility: shifted from in-office only to fully remote-capable and centralized across locations
Post-storm Backlog: eliminated entirely — where recovery once took days, there is now no backlog to recover from
Before Contact Center Pro, GenerX was answering perhaps a quarter of its calls during peak volume. Now, on a typical day, the abandon rate runs around 11.8% — meaning the team is reaching nearly 90% of callers. Average wait time for the primary scheduling queue: about a minute.
The system also solved a problem Valenti hadn't fully anticipated. Because GenerX's service team was the most responsive in the company, customers calling about sales or installation were finding their extensions and routing themselves there by default. Contact Center Pro let Valenti route those calls back where they belonged — removing 20 to 25 misdirected calls from his team's queue every day.
"That has made a huge difference," he said.
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What they're building toward
Canter Power Systems now has nine companies, spanning from Florida to Texas to Minnesota to the East Coast. Four of them sit squarely in hurricane country. Valenti's vision for the next six to 12 months is a fully centralized national call center — any customer, any branch, same experience regardless of who answers.
"Whether they're in Texas, Minnesota, Ohio, New York — it doesn't matter," he said. "They're going to get the same experience when they call in."
He's also looking at ServiceTitan's AI Voice Agent and Live Services options as a next layer of storm prep — not a replacement for his team, but a backstop if volume ever overwhelms even a pooled, nine-company call center.
What he knows for certain is that the old way — desk phones, siloed offices, a third-party service taking messages — isn't coming back.
"We showed up for those customers," he said. "And I'll tell you, in 2024, our Google reviews took a massive hit. But we got nothing but five-star reviews over the last storm."
He paused.
"That's more valuable," he said, "than booking a call."
