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Pest control contact centers are no stranger to the CX pressures facing the consumer services industry.
Customer expectations continue to rise, call volumes are increasing steadily, and seasonal demand makes it difficult to staff for busy months where extermination requests skyrocket.
That’s why AI has become a boon for pest control providers looking to lower contact center costs while providing a more modern experience for home and business owners.
One of the biggest reasons why is that GenAI has made it possible for automation to resolve calls just as effectively as your best agents do. In other words, automation solutions like IVRs, which have traditionally been measured by deflection or routing success, are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
Instead, AI is giving callers a new way to self-serve and enabling CX leaders to drive contact center efficiency like never before.
Gartner predicts that AI will result in over $80 billion in contact center savings by 2026 and consumer service verticals like pest control are poised to be some of the biggest beneficiaries.
Pest control call types where AI has the greatest impact
Call types that are prime candidates for AI are those that are repetitive, high in volume, and representative of where agents currently spend most of their time. Based on data from millions of calls, the flows that most commonly fit this criteria are:
1. Appointment scheduling: Scheduling an at-home or in-store service appointment should be a seamless experience for callers. But these calls can be highly manual for agents and lead to long hold times when volumes spike. With AI, they can be automated naturally, allowing customers to call to schedule the next available appointment 24/7, or choose their preferred time with a multi-channel experience.
2. FAQs: Pest control companies receive an outsize amount of common questions related to services, availability, rates and more. With AI, every common and uncommon question can be resolved without an agent via solutions that connect directly to your knowledge base to leverage the latest accurate information from your systems.
3. New Customer Screening: Because pest control companies rely on unique offers to gain new business, they receive a high volume of calls from prospective customers who must be qualified on their eligibility. These intake flows can all be automated with AI, freeing agents from collecting tedious information like email, phone number, address, homeowner status and much more.
4. Outbound Reminders: With AI, outbound calls and texts are not just limited to appointment reminders, but proactive scheduling nudges that help build your pipeline ahead of time. These interactions can have a significant impact on revenue and be completed with zero agent involvement.
5. Account Management: Thousands of agent minutes are wasted every month by calls related to account management, such as existing customers calling to make one-time payments, enroll in autopay, or change their subscription. With AI, customers can resolve these requests 24/7 with zero wait times.
A high resolution rate in even a single one of these call types decreases average handle time, increases CSAT, reduces agent call volumes, and increases net savings.
How AI transforms pest control contact centers
In 2023, one of the nations largest pest control providers adopted AI to address their rising call volumes and widespread agent staffing challenges. As a family-owned business, it was crucial they found a solution that didn’t aim to deflect callers, but complete their request with a modern experience.
“We couldn’t hire, so we need to either turn to a BPO or automate,” said their contact center leader. “For us, the answer was to automate. We lost more BPOs last summer than agents and we experienced hold times with BPOs.”
The impact of more efficient agent usage and higher resolution rates with AI were immediately felt across their industry’s biggest challenge areas:
🚀 A vastly improved customer experience:
Callers of this pest control provider live in nearly 30 of the largest metro areas in the U.S., making it difficult to staff for the various peaks in demand throughout the day, week and year. With AI, they experienced a 75% resolution rate for account management calls, reflecting a seamless caller experience for one of their most common requests.
“We decided on Replicant’s Thinking Machine because it was so much more lifelike than anything I’ve seen before which is huge with highly emotional customers,” said their contact center leader. “The second reason was how attentive and helpful their team was.”
🧑💻 An reimagined agent experience:
As a result of a soaring AI resolution rate, this contact center’s net labor costs were reduced by 49% as agents turned over less often, and hiring and training became less expensive. At a time where the agent talent pool is shrinking, moving toward an AI-enabled agent model has allowed their CX leaders to improve the agent experience and eliminate the need for outsourcing.
🐜 Mitigated seasonality-driven challenges:
Whether it’s the busy spring, unpredictable weather events that increase pest activity, or week-to-week surges, every pest control contact center experiences seasonality. With AI acting as a first line of defense, service leaders don’t have to guess how much staff they’ll need to account for volume increases. AI can scale up or down instantly depending on agent capacity and call volume, giving contact centers the agility needed to be ready for the unpredictable challenges inherent to pest control.
Taking action: How to get started
While the above call types represent the most common AI-ready use cases across the pest control and consumer services industry, your AI roadmap should start with an analysis of your contact center’s unique data.
By identifying high-volume use cases, leaders can clearly communicate the value of AI to stakeholders by tying impact directly to their respective goals. ROI and net hiring savings, for example, are always top of mind for finance and operations, whereas CSAT and SLAs may matter most to CX leaders.
A Call Assessment accomplishes this with a visually impactful custom report that uses a sample of your calls to identify the use cases agents spend the most time on, as well as the short-and long-term cost savings you’d see by resolving them with automation.
