Episode #23
She Put AI on Her Own Phones. Here’s What Happened to Her CSRs.
Every contractor who has looked at AI for their phones has had the same private thought and hasn’t said it out loud. What happens to the person answering them right now? Marcelle Flowers has an answer, because she made that call on her own payroll. She owns and runs Armstrong Plumbing in Sacramento. She is also the COO of Broccoli AI, the company that makes the voice agent she put on her own lines. Customer and vendor at the same time. That is on the table in the first two minutes of this episode rather than buried in a disclaimer at the end, so you can weigh everything she says accordingly. She did not want AI anywhere near her business. Two guys knocked on her door and she assumed they were selling chocolate bars for a soccer team. What we get into: • The five answering services she burned through before any of this, and the $5,000 a month one that turned out to be a bigger mess than the last • What she paid her own CSRs to cover weekends, and why that broke too • The CSR who told her straight out “this is scary,” and who still works there today • Whether anybody got fired, and what actually happened to her headcount • The one I could not stop chewing on: if AI takes the easy calls, your CSR is left with nothing but hard ones all day, with no easy wins in between to catch her breath. What does that do to a person? • Why the owners who want to fire everyone and run on AI are usually the ones nobody wants to work for • What she sees from the vendor side that she could not see when she was only the customer No booking rate stats, no ROI math, no pitch. Just the operator version, including the parts that did not go well. Links in the show notes: • The AI Voice Vendor Scorecard: score up to three AI phone vendors side by side on 27 questions before you sign, including whether they actually book into ServiceTitan, which a lot of them don’t → https://go.st-hacks.com/scorecard • Broccoli → https://go.st-hacks.com/broccoli-pod • The ServiceTitan Hacks community on Facebook → https://go.st-hacks.com/fb-group Broccoli AI is a ServiceTitan Hacks partner. Marcelle Flowers is COO of Broccoli AI and the owner of Armstrong Plumbing, a Broccoli customer
