Next Level Pros - AI Isn’t Replacing Human, It’s Losing You Jobs

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

OIN OUR FACEBOOK GROUP:   / 1bmudi9htk  In 2025, two forces are colliding fast: AI and blue-collar trades.In this episode, Chris Lee sits down with the team from Callsource to unpack what’s actually happening when home service companies replace CSRs with AI voice/text bots — and why it can quietly destroy trust, create missed revenue, and damage your brand even when the phones are ringing.They break down real call data (including thousands of inbound calls handled by AI), the hidden “zero outcome” problem, incorrect dispositions inside the CRM, and why most owners don’t realize the damage until conversion drops and the backlog tightens. Then they get practical: what a hybrid AI + human model looks like, how to build a manual process first (even if it starts in a spreadsheet), and how fast follow-up and human empathy can recover deals your competitors would’ve taken.If you run a plumbing, HVAC, electrical, or other home service business and you’re considering AI for inbound calls, this is the episode you need before you flip that switch.CONNECT WITH ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA!TEXT ME: 509-905-4109INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/chrisleeqb/...FACEBOOK:   / chrisleeqb  TIKTOK:   / uc6m5_nuhcx-jdtyb4ge8giq   Partner Spotlight: 1SEO Digital Agency: At Next Level Pros, we teach you the best ways HOW to market your business. If you want additional hands-on help executing, we trust 1SEO, our marketing partner. They implement SEO, PPC, Google Local Services Ads, and high-performance websites that turn stronger operations into booked jobs. Learn more or book a consult: https://1seo.com/next-level-pros/

In 2025, there are two things that are dominating the space. We got AI on one hand and blue collar on the other side. Larry Fink recently said that there's going to be a shortage of 500,000 electricians here in the new future just inside their portfolio alone. And so today I've got a few guys with me over from CallSource that are a little counter AI. right now, you know, in a world where we're literally trying to automate the human out of everything in 2025. Today we're going to talk a little bit about what is the alternative.

What does that actually look like? And so give me an update. What do you guys have been in the trade space for a long time? Absolutely. We've been working with trades businesses for 20 plus years. We've worked with either through manufacturers or direct with retailers. I'd say about 25,000 great businesses. So you guys know what you're talking about? Yeah, we know a thing or two. Yes.

We followed the evolution of technology. Today we are talking AI. Ten years ago, we were talking SaaS. But ultimately, we believe that there are certain foundational principles that build great businesses, whether it's AI, whether it's SaaS, whether it's people power, and we need to be mindful of the mix of what we are using.

I mean, it's interesting. Obviously, there are all different types of AI solutions in the marketplace, right? Like basic for replacing Google with chatGBT to go and search or see what's going on to all the way up until where, like, people are building full-blown apps and development and everything. You've got agent work that's taken place. I think pretty prevalent right now in the trades is we got the voice AI bots, right?

Like these guys are coming in. I mean, we see it all over the place. In fact, we have a couple partners in the space that provide those type of services. And so. So do we, by the way.

Okay. So do we? So, I mean, the question is got to be like, okay, is that the right move, right?

Like should we be replacing all humans with voice AI bots, with text bots? Or, like, What do you guys see happening in the marketplace right now? Hey guys, it's Chris. If you're finding value in what you're hearing, go ahead and like and subscribe. That way people just like you can find this content for free here on YouTube.

Now, let's stop back in the show. Well, I think the interesting thing is, right, AI bots are scalable, right? And that's the first thing that people go into is how can I scale back my call center? You have agents that go on vacation. They get sick. AI bots don't. They handle all of those inbound calls or whatever you have set. up in that process. I think the interesting part to that, though, AI is only good as you program

and the data that you put into it, right? If you're not programming it correctly, you're not going to have the right conversations over the phone. And your customers who call in are actually going to get upset. Transfer me to a live agent. Some of those calls don't even close. We listen to thousands of calls where the customer literally just hangs up and they're pissed. So it's like, how do you bridge that gap, right, from that AI agent on the inbound side, leveraging humans to either follow up with those missed opportunities or ultimately transfer that to someone in your call center. So quickly, if I may add to this, and J.S. fantastic, right?

So the application of AI we have to be mindful of. So in the background, if you are taking a brochure, are making it prettier, AI bots, AI does a fantastic job. But when we are talking directly with a customer or a prospect, that's where our position is that a hybrid solution works better than a pure AI solution. So do you think there's a world where AI is better than like 50% of the CSRs out there? It will get there for sure. Right? That is an eventuality.

But the question is, are we there today? And as a business owner, are you willing to risk that today by implementing a pure AI solution? Well, I'll tell you, I mean, that's my number one fear. I mean, that's what keeps us going from all in on like AI sales agents. Because the reality is, I mean, our experience just in, in like, even selling information. or whatnot is like, man, we don't get those appointments booked because these guys are like, no, I don't want to deal with AI. So one of the interesting things our company does is we are engaged to audit the efficacy

of a third-party AI bot. And we have some interesting statistics around that that we would love to share. I'll just share them right now. Yeah, I love it. Let's do it. Let's do it. Last month alone, we had one of our largest clients. They added 33,000 inbound phone calls.

33,000? Yeah. What kind of volume is this client doing on like a revenue standpoint? They're about 75 million on there, right? And so you're going to have some small to medium-sized businesses. Obviously, this is large. But of those 33,000 calls, 11,000 of them were handled by an AI agent. All right.

So 33% of those inbound calls handled by this AI bot. So a question for you, if they have 11, so it's a third of them. Yeah. Are they exercising like after-hours AI or is it just they're implementing it alongside their current agents? So it's alongside their current agents, right? So they have their call center, roughly 15 people. Anything else beyond that, overflow all goes to the AI. Got it.

From there then, what are those results, right? So as we mentioned, 11,000 calls last month alone in November. 1,200 of them had zero outcome. Take a lot. You would think that it's AI, right? Yeah. So 1,200 calls, zero outcome. So when you say zero outcome, you're saying there was nothing at like dispositions.

Nothing disposition, nothing in the CRM at all, right? So you got over 10% of your calls that you don't even know what to do with. So the remaining calls that were there, 3,300 of them had the wrong disposition. What does that mean? Wow. Over 40% of the calls handled by the AI. agent, you had no idea if it was correct or not. I as a business owner, I don't know which 40% that is, right? So I'm going to have to go back in and either reclassify all of them or have a

team of individuals because there's no possible way I can go through 11,000 phone calls and reclassify them in any situation. But I think that's one of the key problems, right, is a lot of these CSR managers and business owners are hiring AI bots or enabling this because they don't have the capacity to do that. Right. But we just created the same problem with AI, and now we have to go back and unravel what it did to identify where the problems are. You know, it's interesting.

I would say this is very much akin to just outsourcing your marketing and not having any idea from a strategy standpoint. Because one thing we talk about in our community is like, you need to own your marketing strategy. I don't care if you hire an agency to do the work or whatnot. you need to know exactly what work that they are doing and give them be able to guidance. I think a lot of these business owners

are just like turning it over to this AI bot and saying, please solve my problem. Over is not a strategy. And it's unfortunate, right? Because as a business owner, chances are you're not the marketing expert. Right? So default is you're thinking,

wait, I'm hiring an expert. Right. And then staying hands off, assuming it's all going to work out. So that's probably happening a ton with these AI agents. With the AI agents, the exact same issue, which is, wait, I have a problem. Most people know their problem, that my conversion rate is off, or I'm not generating enough leads, whatever that may be.

But is it simply enough to hire the expert and assume my problems are gone? Right. So let me go back to those 1,200 phone calls that had no outcome. 130 of them actually were a booked call when we listened to it went through yes here's a date in time that the customer said or the AI agent said issue that never got put to the dispatch board so now you have 130 people expecting an appointment for someone to show up that's even worse yeah that's it not only did you miss out on deals but you damage your brand right right right so if you're not going through those calls right that's all it is your brand how do you know if

you actually got that booking. You don't, right? So. What kind of service was this? Well, what do you mean? HVAC. This is HVAC. Yep, got it. Yep, yep, yep. Got it. And so, and then what's their close rate typically on those appointments? Typically on close rate, 70%, right? 70%. So on 130, you're probably going to have about 100 or so.

Well, that's 90, 130, that would be 91. Yeah. And 91 at their average ticket. What's their average ticket? A bled average is about 700. 700 yeah so i mean just on the those that they didn't know what they did with correct they missed 65 000 that's crazy doing some calculations over here no so keep going this is nuts oh well so again it goes back to um all of the calls that it handled there was a bunch of unbooked uh opportunities as well right at the end of the day as i mentioned before you're going to have uh the customer who's trying to get a booking with AI, one of the biggest issues besides the programming and the data and how many

different types of jobs does an HVAC contractor do, right? You look at all of those job types that are listed in your CRM. There's a plethora of things. Out of that, then, you're going to go through and latency is an issue, right? When you're talking to a human, I know when to respond to your inquiry. Or I can say, hey, you know, give me a second. Let me take a look in my CRM and give me a moment. What you find, though, is with that latency, people don't have a perfect call. Right. I'm a customer. Oh, let me think about that. I got to talk to my wife. I got to, uh, uh, and in this process, that AI bot tries to respond if there is just a small little silence gap in there. And then all a sudden, the AI bot repeats itself. And the customer's like, wait a minute, what's happening here?

Wait, now I have to repeat myself. And all of a sudden at the end of the day, that customer is like, right, it's always frustrating. And so at the end of the end of the, today, they ended up hanging up the call, right? So again, out of the 1,200 opportunities that never got flagged, 240 them just hung up. Okay. So that was 40% of the other 60% that were done by AI. Do you know the results on those? Like, and you guys were analyzing these as from call source, right? Correct. That's correct. Correct. Yeah. On the rest of them, they did have correct dispositions, right? So again, going back to knowing out of the 100% of calls that were handled by that AI bot, which 40% were wrong, which 60% were right.

I, as a business owner, don't know. I expect everything, as Indra mentioned, like, hey, I'm going to offload this over to AI. It's going to take care of all my problems. What they don't see, and what Tiffany alluded to earlier, it's just creating new problems inside their ecosystem inside that CRM. And so if you're not addressing or understanding where the gaps are in that process, how do you know which data is right?

How do you know which data is wrong? Who then do you need to, you know, focus? is time and energy on. Yeah, it's so interesting, you know, in 2025, we are AI, automation, everything. And so we are so unconscious around a lot of things that are actually taking place inside our business. And this applies outside of CSR phone calls, right? Like, for example, when we're tracking our metrics and maybe those metrics are

being reported on some dashboards somewhere, and those are automatically being created and put into a dashboard that nobody looks at or nobody actually owns like I see this in business all the time where like we automate ourselves out to the point where no good strategy or decisions being made inside the in the business and so then we're not identifying issues nobody has ownership or accountability across the board so like one of the things just like that I that I see is like for example total sales if there's a sales manager that owns total sales and it's only being reported in an automation to maybe the CEO or whatever else. And that owner of that metric doesn't actually input like in a manual process.

They're not actually aware of how many sales were made. So there's no ownership of it. And so because there's no ownership, there's no accountability. And it's just like, man, we're we're automating ourselves into a hole in 2025. And Chris, amazing point, right? where ultimately if you are servicing a local market, in good times when your order backlogs are two months, it's not as big an issue, right?

But what happens when that are either for rough times, generally in the market or the drop-in conversions and the backlog drops to a month, right? You're still competing with the business owner across the street. Right. Right. So in that sense, those who are very cognizant about the balance of automation versus people power, we believe we'll end up doing better. But in good times, it's difficult to uncover that.

One mishandled call, we don't lose sleep. over that, right? Right. It's only when it starts showing up in the results. Right. Right. And the other thing is like you could even be on budget. Yeah. Like you could be making money. Yeah. You could be having all these things, but you don't see the bad part associated with the brand damage that's taken place in the back end. Correct. Right. Like, I mean, I can imagine as a CEO, if I have all these AI bots in place, right? And I'm getting 20,000 calls that, you know, fielded by my real people and 10,000 fielded by my AI. And AI is damaging 130 people. Correct. A month that we're expecting appointments. That's not going to show up in the P&L for a while. Yes. But I think it's important

because you're not just damaging new customers, right? So you are damaging your relationship with a new customer. You're preventing them from ever doing business with you. But we see it all the time. they're also damaging relationships with your existing customers. I was talking to a business owner the other day, and a CSR had fumbled a call where they had 25 years working with their family, and she completely butchered the call. Tells them that his parents had just died. She shows no empathy for him, and he's like, I can't deal with you. I'm done doing business.

25 years. What do you do with that? And I empathize with them as support leaders, right? They have a shortage of being able to hire CSRs, keep someone in that. seat so they've accelerated this AI timeline but there's got to be a balance and if you don't learn from the mistakes that your people are making how do you improve your business but the AI is learning from that call right now think about the problem yeah for the AI then there is no if no need to show empathy that's what they're thinking right behind the scenes because yeah they got trained by that call

yeah interesting interesting so what's what's the solution like like that's I'm That's the hard thing about all this. Did we scare everyone enough? Okay, let's get to the solution. I mean, but legitimately, right, like, because people that don't show empathy isn't the solution. No. AI fully ownership and automation isn't, you know, the right solution. So, like, how do we create balance across the board?

What do you guys see in the market? Before we address the question, I want to also address one more thing, which is the AI, AI solution someone builds, and JJ, you had touched on it before, is only as good as the depth of data that you have fed them. Right. So if you hire an AI company provide them calls last two months, that's not enough. Right. Right. So if you are going to go the AI route, which in some form, every business should. I'm not saying, don't use AI. Right.

But be careful, are you selecting that company because they have the prettiest looking reports? Are you selecting that company because they have 10 years of call recordings? Are you selecting that company because they have Nvidia chips and are tapped into Amazon Web Services? Like, what is the reason? Or is it the least cost provider? A lot of times it comes down to that.

You know, it's so interesting. And this applies, so in a different adjacent, so right now what's pretty popular in the AI space and the trades is you got these ride-along sales coaches, right? I mean, you guys are aware of what's going on there. And your exact point is like so prevalent. Like I see these 25-year-old boys that are making these sales coaches that legitimately have never been in a ride-along, been involved in. blue color space and whatnot.

And so it's only as good as those guys, these, you know, these nerds that are that are in the back trying to guess what the best sales coaching is. And maybe they're just pulling from random YouTube, like hoping to get like some sales trainings. But the reality is like, yeah, it has to be done by those. It's got to be trained the right way. Absolutely. One of the things we pride at call source is we are a mix of technology.

local business owners, and expert contact center managers like Tiffany. So we bring that breadth of experience in the AI tools that we develop, right? Plus the framework we have at call source, we are not private equity backed. We really don't care about our valuation. What's critical to us. I mean, you guys have been around how long? 30 plus years. Wow.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, and in the trades for 15 to 20 years. Got it, got it, cool. And so for us, what's more important than anything is to provide the right solution with the right mix of people and technology, and by technology, whether we are talking SaaS software,

whether we're talking AI, what's the most critical data points, that breadth of experience is important And like you said, you can't just have technology nerds building things for trades. They've never picked up a hammer in their life. Right. It doesn't work. Right.

So anyhow, sorry to if I'm just passionate about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah, whenever you're involving AI, it's not just the way it looks. It's, yeah, what's being built in the background. Exactly. the cost of 100 incorrectly tagged calls or not improperly handled calls far exceeds your in some cases your entire marketing budget right right now that's yeah

that's fair point and so what i guess yeah what is what is the solution like how to because obviously a i has got to be part of the solution yes absolutely in some some way or an example right like in the future you know Alexa is going to be making a phone call for me finding the the best plumber or the best HVAC spot right and so and if my bot is reaching out to humans you know it might ignore that it might only reach out to where there is another bot on the other end that can communicate with it so like like what what is the what is the line what's the solution? Well, the good news is we have a solution. Oh, dude, give me the solution. And we have the subject matter expert to talk about the solution. So we firmly believe, right,

we use AI ourselves, right? We score our calls with AI, but then there's a human aspect and a human element. So when these calls slip through the cracks, what happens? We have a live agent who's listening to this call observing exactly what's happening. What did they fumble on the first call? Were they just rushed because they're answering call after call after call and they just didn't give them the time that they needed, whether that's a human or an AI bot. So we hear it both ways. The AI bot just doesn't understand that they want something next month and it keeps giving them scheduling for next week, right? We hear that all the time with things like maintenance is. We review the call to overcome the objections. And I think the key importance for what we're doing is not rushing this call.

It has to happen quickly, but we have to overcome what happened the first time in order to build that trust and regain the trust of the customer because that's I think oftentimes when I'm talking to business owners about this process they forget that these calls are destroying trust with a customer right and then they'll give it to their CSR who already mishandled a call and then they're calling back and not correcting anything and so now you've really lost this potential lead versus if you're really listening to the call and understanding why they didn't book with you or what happened and just taking that time to build the relationship that's the key. part of what my agents do. It's all about building a relationship. That's an extension of your

brand. So how do I look like I'm coming from your company? It's unique to every company we're working with in saying, hey, I'm an extension of your company, Chris, and I'm going to make sure that they have a good image of your business. I'm not going to say, hey, my CSR totally screwed up this call. I'm going to say, hey, I hear you. I understand that you need us to get out there. How can we take care of you today and make sure that you're addressed without casting blame on someone else, right? Could you also speak to some of the metrics that we looked at, what kind of returns and how the program is going? Yeah, absolutely. So in looking at five of our new customers last month, for instance, we dealt with a little over 1,200 calls that were mishandled by these companies directly.

In giving them a call back, we were able to recover 20,000. percent of those leads for these companies of those 39 percent i think was the number we landed on actually turned into revenue three hundred and thirty six thousand dollars was recaptured by us just making a second attempt and rehandling these calls for them and fixing their brand and their image with their customers within their marketplace it's crazy yeah i mean in 336 thousand you said how many clients was this for five new clients so i mean you're you're you're You're talking about an average of like 60 to 70,000 in revenue, which for most business owners, right, like especially small business owners, I mean, that could be the difference between break even and losing money. A month.

A month, right. This is one month. And on an average, how many times do we do the follow-up? Three to four. Three to four, right? It's not set it and forget it, right? So we're making a human attempt within 20 minutes of that phone call. Right? We're trying to correct that action before they get to your competitor down in the street.

So you guys are reaching out directly to the customer after the ball has been fumbled? On behalf of the business, right? We're not saying we're calling from call source. We're calling from Chris's HVAC and trying to correct that call. So I know we're not making this like a big pitch about call source, but like, but helping me, but I'm just trying to understand, okay, if I had like, what does that cost me to, to like have that? Because that support sounds fantastic, right? Like, I don't know if it's from call source or from somebody else.

or an employee, what it would cost me to have an employee to do that, right? Like, what kind of cost is the business owner looking at to get that $65,000 in additional revenue? Less than one person's cost. Less than 1% or one person? Okay. So, for example, in this case study we did, five clients, was it $336,000 or $368,000? Roughly, that was on the revenue generated. and the call source cost to the clients combined was $13,000.

$28,000 on the return. Wow. Yeah, I mean, so I mean, 13,000 divided by five. I mean, you're at $2,600. So basically, $2,600 gets me $65,000 to $70,000 in revenue. Correct. On average. Amazing, right?

And tying it back, Chris, to the AI situation, The key thing that TIF mentioned, three to four follow-ups, your AI bot is not doing three to four follow-ups. It will, at best, do one follow-up, two follow-ups, and that's it. That's where it ends. Right. Right. So on a human-based, because we inherently understand whether a call needs a further follow-up or not. right it does take three to four follow-ups like that effort is required right and it has to be

people-powered but i think there's a lot of times where this isn't just something that call source is offering right we worked with customers i've personally worked with customers on this process for the last 13 years one-to-one with business owners CSR managers and helping them build this process just like you talked about earlier we can give you dashboards we can give you all of this stuff but if you don't have a solution in place and a process surrounding it it's not going to matter So give me a little more depth. Like what do you mean by the process? So it has to be something first and foremost,

the most important thing is it has to be consistent, right? You get these CSR managers who will tell you, oh, I follow up with them. I have an employee who does this. They're going to do it. My team is already taking care of that. But how consistently are they doing it? And how quickly are they riding off these leads?

Because if it were up to my team, sometimes I'd write them off after one call. Oh, I don't need to call them back. They said they weren't interested. They have an appointment next week with Joe down the street. And so they're going to go with him instead. so if I was building this process from like scratch yeah what would this look like absolutely so from this from scratch you would take your funnel of hey what was unbooked so even if they're mistagged like jace

talked about earlier what happens with these and just blanket I need to know how many I missed and why did I miss them start with an Excel sheet start with an Excel sheet right start old school don't start with AI start with old school right because at the end of the day if they're unbooked calls You've got that Excel sheet, and this is old school, old school on there. And how many missed opportunities are there, right? You're going to have some key metrics that are in place. Number of missed opportunities, daily, weekly, whatever that process is. How many outbound attempts are being made by your callback team?

From there, how many jobs have been created? Ultimately, what was that total new revenue gained? Lastly, then, out of the ones that weren't booked, why weren't they booked? Is there something else that you need to do internally, make some more changes? Availability is always a big one. Do I need to hire more technicians to do more maintenance calls and service calls because the largest gap that I have in my process and why I'm missing an inbound opportunity is my own internal capacity.

That's a huge issue, right? So if I can hire two or three more technicians and I can fill that capacity, well, I'm going to get an exponential return on that inbound side because my, inbound call center can actually book more appointments, right? So it's understanding what those key metrics are. And if you don't write it down on a piece of paper, if you don't input it into an Excel sheet, if you don't work with a company that can create these dashboards with you, you have to start somewhere. And once you start understanding where those gaps in that process, only then can you fix the issue at hand and focus time and energy, potentially resources and money

on the number one problem that you have within your business. I love it. So one thing I just want to point out for any of the viewers or listeners on this is just the importance of creating a manual process to begin with anything inside of your business. Too often we turn to a tool, an automation, and we apply it to a broken process

that doesn't exist in the first place. And we hope that this is going to be our savior. But at the end of the day, if you do not have like a paper or spreadsheet type of process like whiteboard and show like how does how does someone progress when should we call them what should we say what is the script what is the checklist what is the things that we have to go through in this part of the customer interaction like at the end of the day if you haven't built that out I don't care how good your tool or your system or your automation or AI bot that you go and apply to it. the thing is going to be absolutely broken. And so take the time, build the system, and then you're going to be able to go and do stuff like this. But I think that there's a key thing that we see that happens all the time, right?

You're always well-intentioned. You build the plan. You put it in place. You build the scripts. And then you don't communicate it effectively to the people who actually have to deliver that job. Yes. Right? So the training aspect.

The training aspect is huge because if you, great, I spend hours creating this. I use chat GPT to create all this scripting and told my team exactly how to follow up. One, we have to communicate that effectively, but we also have to remember that because we don't want to be too relying on AI, we've taught this for years when we're working with customers. You can't sound like you're reading from a script. You can't sit here and go, okay, I'm supposed to tell you exactly what we're going to do now and not have an actual conversation with you, right? That's the difference that's setting this apart is we're calling every consumer and having a conversation, understanding that they're stressed out because their toilets overflowing and they've got kids home or their mom is,

and doesn't have heat and she's in southeast Michigan, right? So how do we correct that and rebuild that human element that they're not getting from AI right now? And that's why it's so important to have this human touch after the AI. And I just want to point out like the importance of the human touch coming up in 2026 and beyond. The, you know, we live in a world where people are so disconnected from humans, right? We scroll through our phone. We like post and share. You know, We legitimately sit behind, we work from home, we do these Zoom calls, and people yearn to have human interaction. And so the yearning that we have is not being fulfilled by these AI bots. And we see it happening like literally in big cities where people like rent a hugger or a cuddler, right?

Like because there's just like all this need, right? And so one thing I see it in in my space is like people are excited to come to live events because a lot of their work is being done remotely. And so like all they're training and everything. So when they come and they participate in a live event, it fulfills a completely different need. The same thing applies in this type of thing where customers like you know, you may not be the one person that does full AI voice. but if you can be the differentiator with human being interaction

that preserves the brand or whatnot, people in the future are going to pay a premium for that. Absolutely. Couldn't I agree more, 100%. You're also trusting them to come into your home, right? And if you're at work and it's your wife and kids at home and you've never made a human connection with someone else

after you've been rude. Right. Or someone was rude, something, right? I don't know that I would want that for my parents. Right? Right. Like I, but I guess I'm, I'm on the other end of that spectrum because running a support organization, I'm full,

give me a live person. I don't want to talk to you, I think this is the AI dilemma, right? We need AI to automate and reduce costs. The cost of labor is going up or whatnot, but we need the human touch to be able to preserve brand and be able to preserve value. Like, what the freak? There are elements to save time, right? There are things that can be done to help you optimize the use of the technology.

But I think it's still, especially for this industry, I think it's still, especially for this industry, I think it's still going to be extremely important to have that human element to it. And you got that on both sides, right? For the customer, you know, there's calls that I've listened to where the customer has zero idea that it's an AI bot, right? It's like the perfect call. You're going back and forth. Customer at the end of the day says, you know, thank you, Sam.

I appreciate it for helping me out. We'll look forward to seeing you on Tuesday. And Sam's like, okay, thank you. Right? It is what it is. But then on the other side, you know, because everything, it doesn't matter if you're calling your credit card, open to your bank, whatever and whoever that is, you're going to get some sort of IVR AI response

up front. And nine times out of 10, when they do say live agent, a real agent answers the phone. And they say, are you a real person? And the person's like, yeah, I work for, you know, chuck and truck here in the call center. She's like, oh, my God. Thank gosh. I finally got to someone who's live, right? So it's just really interesting to see both sides of that AI bot question, which is can they handle that customer in the inbound set? Is your brand being affected, as you mentioned earlier? And then ultimately when they do make that human connection, the relief that customer has when they finally talk to a lot of humans.

You know, which begs the question, is this going to be different based on the generation? Because, like, my parents for sure want to talk to people. And yeah, I do as well. But then there's a generation that's younger. that literally has never talked to somebody on the phone in their lives. They've only text message. And so, like, will that change, right?

Like, will, I don't know. Is this something you guys have thought about? For sure. I mean, and possibly, right? However, I'm not betting on it. The reason being, Chris, there are fundamental problems to be solved. right if I have a issue with a flight booking or something right I like texting I prefer texting or phone calls right but I don't mind getting on a call for that right so again depending on

what area of the problem you you still have the need for the human connection yeah no right whichever generation for sure and the reality is is humans are they tend to be more emotionally connected and able to help you better than say a bot like i mean i was coming home on a flight on saturday and i got to the gate a minute late and the gate was still open but they told me it's closed it's closed right like i'm like i see it i see it that's not true yeah so so i was able to go find a supervisor and plead with her yeah to to be able to be like had it been an a i bot there there's no way right like this is the system this is the process you the gate is closed.

Instead, she calls up to, you know, air traffic control, says, hey, can you open it back up? You know, here all of a sudden, I'm able to get on. And the airline that makes that extra effort is going to win your future business. Absolutely, absolutely. Applies to trades. Yeah. It makes, no, it makes a lot of sense.

So, like, if somebody were wanting to, like, I mean, obviously it sounds like call source has an incredible solution regarding these type of things like what does a solution like look like from a so you guys kind of already went over a little bit of cost but like what does it actually look like as far as what kind of support am i getting why would i use call source that type of thing sure so everything is hands on right so it's obviously still a fundamental belief of call source is having a relationship with all of our customers right understanding their needs how they want us to represent their business so everything that I do when we onboard a customer is really understanding their playbook. How do they want us to sound when we're calling out? What is their brand need to look like when we're engaging with them? What are things that we can offer to correct behavior from the first call? Sometimes that's just a simple coupon or discounting your trip charge or is it units that are over 10 years old? I don't care, wave the fee, just get me into the home, right? And we have a full gamut. Everybody has something different that they want us to offer. So we understand and build out a playbook. From there, I work with my

team and they have dedicated reps who will call specifically for their account and for their region to book on their calendar directly. We'll book directly within their CRM. So put it directly on your calendar, get you out to the job. My goal is to make it so that the client doesn't have to touch it after I've contacted them. I've reached out. We've rebooked this. We've put it on your calendar and you shouldn't have to deal with them again, other than going out to the home, right, and really building that relationship. From there, it's just a matter of consistent outreach of here's the progress. Here's how many new installs we booked for you today. Here's exactly how full your job board is because of what we've been able to see on your calendar and what was

available and get rebooked for you. I firmly believe in highlighting key things, right? We talked about process earlier and building out process. But to Jace's point when he was talking earlier, are we spending too much on marketing? Are we booked out four weeks? You'd be surprised how many of the customers we work with who have no idea how far out they're booked. Hey, did you know that we can't book on your calendar for three weeks and we've got people calling in with no heat. It's crazy. I'm like, how did you not know that you were booking for three weeks and you've got people calling for no heat? So we're able to work hands on with customers to get them. We had one client the other days. Thank you so much for giving us this feedback. We're hiring four more technicians going into

January. Wow. You do one of two things. Higher technicians expand your capacity or drop a little ad spend. You don't need to spend that much. Right. Right. Right. So. Yeah, quit. putting sales in that can't be filled on. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So it's really just building this customized interaction to really be an extension of our customers' businesses and understanding what needs do they have. What's changing? Are there different priorities that are changing? Things that they want us to focus on to really fill their electrical side because they know they're backed up for HVAC. What exactly does that look like and how do we better engage with their customers? Give them training opportunities, right? That's one of my primary things.

is giving them escalations of, hey, I think you need to hear this call, whether it's an AI bot and how they're handling it and where you need to retrain or your live CSRs and how rude they're being when they tell them that their parents just died and you just lost a customer, right? And really truly building that relationship to help them grow their business at the end of the day. I think the hot button here is automation, right? Like you hear AI can do automation. At the end of the day, when it comes down to that business owner, I just want to automate everything. The interesting part is when you're on the flip side of that where, you know, call source is solution in place, right? If you don't have the time, the wherewithal, or the resources to put your whiteboard on the table or on the wall to actually manually write all these things out, yeah, call source can handle that.

The interesting part, though, is it's still automation on behalf of the business owner. It just so happens we're doing it with humans and not with the AI bots, right? The interesting part, you know, and you're coming through that is we will rebook these. on the calendar, it's on the dispatch board. You find gaps in the system, a lot of agents on the end-on side, all of a sudden we find we have canceled jobs. Why do we have canceled jobs?

Our clients, their agents, see how well that we're doing on the recapture side of things. They're canceling our jobs, manually creating their own jobs in their own name, and now the business owner is paying them commissions for something that they never even did in the first place. And so these are metrics that we're providing back

to the client to saying, hey, by the way, I know you're paying us to do this, right? We're working on your behalf. As Andrew mentioned, you have a 28x return on your investment. But unfortunately, these are some of the issues that are happening within your call center right now. You need to address that. You need to have the right coaching in place. You need to make sure that people stay in their lanes and doing the things that they need to get done

versus taking from over here like hungry, hungry hippo and just all of a sudden, we're going to put this all on my plate. They're not doing a good job because at the end of the month then, call source didn't do it. Good job. Business owner is going to cancel. Next thing you know, they're going to start in the same exact place that they started before call source because they don't have a process. Their inbound team isn't doing what they need to get done. So when you have a third-party solution with humans that has that engagement and that support directly with that owner, now you can understand in that process

where to focus time and energy. So my understanding, I mean, a lot of business owners, they're out there to spend a lot of money on marketing, getting the phone to ring, right? And so, and most people, they continue to increase that spend so the phone rings more, right? And call source isn't necessarily going to get the phone to ring more, but it's just going to make sure that when the phone rings, you're going to get, you're going to capture as much of that as possible. We have that side of the services as well. We are the inventors of call tracking, by the way. Okay.

So we, but what we are focusing on for today's session is. is the optimizing your process using people power. But we do help the phones to ring more as well. But nine out of ten times, Chris, it's not that business owners are underspending on marketing. They're spending enough. I mean, look at the market. They don't need more leads.

They just need to take care of better care of their leads. Just in a fun way. Look at the market cap of Google or Facebook. right it's there for a reason right all this overspent in marketing advertising right now i mean and it makes it makes so much sense i mean just create more efficiency with the the amount of traffic that's already coming in and uh and you guys are doing it through the human element not not the a i or actually a combination of a i and human element right i love it i love it yeah well 2026 is going to be an exciting year I mean, a lot of things that we're going to see happening in the blue collar space, in the AI space.

What are your guys' predictions for a few years from now what we're going to see just with AI in the trades? Wow. That's a great question. Who wants to go first? Yeah, different aspects to it, right? The inbound handling side. What about robots? Are robots going to be showing up in my door, fixing my stuff?

They say it, right? They say in five years, if you got the right amount of cash, you can have your own robot in the A lot of people are going to do it. You're going to look at those mundane tasks for sure. At the end of the day, let your robot handle it. Same thing happens on the call center side of things. There's a lot of good things that AI can handle. You're looking at follow-up attempts.

Can I make some happy calls? Can I do appointment confirmations? Can I do membership renewals? All of that is kind of the standard process that goes through the board, right? But on that inbound side, you're going to have a lot of different influences that are going to shape that call. Is there going to be empathy? Is there not? Everyone's day is going to be different.

Are they having a good day, a bad day? Who knows? And can you respond in a way that connects with that caller to ensure that your brand is being represented in the market as the owner built that process? As the call center manager trained on that process, right? So at the end of it, I think, you know, AI is always going to be there. Right? We're going in that direction.

Large language models. It's going to improve. Great. But if you don't understand where those gaps are, is AI helping you? Is it hindering you or not, right? We're making it worse. Right, that's what I'm saying. Absolutely, absolutely.

So just very similar to that, but put differently, a lot of the digital side of things, I believe the software or AI will get to the point where a lot of inbound does get automated, right? But the tricky part is the outbound. There's regulations for a reason. You don't want your phone bombarded with bots calling you, right, every hour. So on the outbound jury is out there. The other part, Chris, to your question about robotics, right? Now we are translating the software into physical stuff, right?

handling picking a hammer right so i think the software gets there um but isn't it strange that larry fink is saying we are going to need another 500,000 uh technicians electricians right right and not i'm not saying that we're going to replace them we are going to automate it no So, Larry Fink knows a thing or two more than we do. It's my firm belief, right? And if he's saying that, my belief in the physical world, going out of the software digital side coming to the physical world, no, we're fine doing those jobs.

AI will help us do our jobs better. So I'm not of the belief. Let's say there is a robot that's going to do all my household chores. I really don't care. I don't want... I care, Andrew. I care. I don't want robot to make my cup off.

No, I'll do it myself. I don't need that. And same with the trades. No, the demand for tradespeople is going to go up, not lower, because of some theoretical robot. I love it. What about you? I think I'm in the same boat with both of them. I don't think it's going to take over completely.

I think there's always going to be a need for that human and interaction, especially in places like our homes, right? I think that that's not going to go anywhere. Do I think I'm scared for what that means for my kids and all this technology? Absolutely. I'm a little afraid and probably a little overbearing when it comes to human interaction with my kids for that reason. But I think there's going to have to be a balance, right? Because at the end of the day, people are also going to need jobs. And as an economy, we're going to need to employ people to keep our country running and keep things functioning. And so I think we'll find ways to meet in the middle, just like they thought with the internet, right?

I thought the internet was going to replace everything, and it's enhanced our jobs. This is what, Industrial Revolution number four, right? We went through three before. The concept is that the scale of the economy grows. It's not a zero-sum game. Right. So I don't believe the concept of, oh, we won't have anything to do. No, we will always have something to build.

That's new, right? I love it. I think the verdict is in. The trades and blue-collar work is here to stay. Absolutely. And human interaction is ultimately going to win out regardless of the automation or AI that comes in.