Kathy St. Croix answered the phone for 13 years. Every day. Every weekend.
She's not complaining — that's just what you do when you own a small plumbing company and your reputation lives or dies on whether someone picks up. But she's ready to let a machine take some of those calls.
"I'd really like to not do it anymore," she said, laughing.
Kathy and her husband, Duncan, own Mr. Rooter Plumbing of Greater Syracuse, a Neighborly company they've been building in upstate New York for 16 years. They have 14 employees, a vacuum truck they added last year and a commercial book of business they're working to rebuild.
They're also, by their own description, still figuring things out — which is exactly why they keep coming back to Toolbox Live.
A January event in Glendale, Calif., at ServiceTitan's headquarters was their third.
A franchise and a platform
The St. Croixes run their business on two systems that serve different purposes. Neighborly gives them the brand, the network and the reporting structure. ServiceTitan gives them the tools to manage what happens inside the business every day.
"We have Neighborly for their systems and the branded name," Duncan said, "and we have ServiceTitan for how to manage our business. It's a really nice fit."
That combination, they believe, is a big part of why their revenue grew 21.2% year-over-year. The Pro Products — Marketing Pro, Dispatch Pro, Contact Center Pro, Pricebook Pro — are where they've leaned in hardest. Every visit to Toolbox Live, they said, peels back another layer of what those tools can do.
"There's so many of them and there's so much to learn," Kathy said. "Every time we come here, we learn a little bit more, and it's always changing."
Betting on AI — carefully
The St. Croixes aren't waiting to see where artificial intelligence lands. They've already been experimenting — building their own voice agent through an outside platform, testing what it could handle after hours and on weekends when finding a human to answer the phone is hard.
They may scrap that project now.
ServiceTitan's Contact Center Pro capabilities have moved fast enough in recent months that Kathy said they want to test it again before committing to anything else. The attraction isn't novelty. It's simple math: Free up your CSRs from the phone and they can do more of the work that actually requires a person.
Contact Center Pro is built natively into ServiceTitan and powered by AI. For a shop like Mr. Rooter of Greater Syracuse, the capabilities that matter most are practical ones:
AI Voice Agents handle overflow and after-hours calls around the clock, booking jobs automatically using live ServiceTitan data — recognizing customers, checking availability and confirming appointments without a human on the line.
Manager Assist uses AI-generated call transcripts, summaries and sentiment analysis to help managers spot coachable moments and flag unbooked calls that could still be converted — without having to manually review hours of recordings.
Second Chance Leads, powered by Titan Intelligence, automatically identifies calls handled by live agents that didn't result in a booking, giving the team a faster path to follow up.
"It frees them up to learn more," she said.
She's seen what that kind of growth can look like. Their longtime CSR and dispatcher, Stacy, spent three years getting deep into ServiceTitan.
"There's no telling where you can go with this," Kathy said.
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There’s always more to do
The St. Croixes still have plenty to work through. Pricebook Pro. The commercial rebuild. The staffing math of a call center that too often depends on whoever happens to stay longest.
But they're not standing still. They came back to Toolbox Live for a reason.
"We're very happy that it's still growing," Kathy said. "That it's not just done and stalled out."
Their next move: Hire a manager dedicated to running the platforms — someone who can stay on top of what's changing and push the tools further than two owners stretched across every other part of the business realistically can.
"We'd like to have a manager on to manage these programs and these platforms," Kathy said, "and help us grow them a little bit better."
Sixteen years in, they're still adding to the plan.
