AI for a plumbing and HVAC shop: Claude CSR onboarding plan, QuickBooks analysis and AI after-hours calls
BWS Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning
What they did with AI
Kevin Strandberg, owner of BWS Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, describes on the Plumbing & HVAC Hustle Podcast how he uses Claude. He says he had it write a two-week, day-by-day onboarding plan for a new CSR with no HVAC or plumbing background, with supporting documents and daily tests, in about 30 minutes. He connected Claude to QuickBooks Online and asked for an in-depth analysis of first-quarter financials, getting an executive summary he could take into an accounting meeting, and had it draft a month-end close process for their ServiceTitan, ADP and QuickBooks setup. He also uses it for HTML email blasts and reports that BWS runs an AI phone agent from Avoca for after-hours calls, which he says works well on the second try after a vendor switch and fine-tuning, but that customers still want humans in business hours. His cautions: it still hallucinates, so he checks the output, works in batches of three to five tasks, and fixed a pricing error that Claude now remembers. No numbers beyond the 30-minute onboarding plan are given; this is the owner's own account on a podcast hosted by a marketing agency.
Related use cases
Answer every call 24/7 and score every CSR call with AI
Rescue Air & Plumbing
Rescue Air & Plumbing in Dallas-Fort Worth estimated that each missed call cost it about $250. It put an AI CSR on all inbound calls (pulling caller info, checking tech schedules and booking into the CRM) and uses an AI coaching tool that scores every call so CSRs get feedback on each one instead of a sample. The case study credits the coaching program with two agents being promoted.
AI technician coaching for HVAC: score every service call and turn the best moments into team training
Esser Air Conditioning
Esser Air Conditioning, a family-owned HVAC company in Palm Desert, CA founded in 1980, uses Field Pro, an AI feature inside ServiceTitan, to coach its technicians. On the way to a job, techs can listen to a summary of the job history. During the visit, Field Pro records the conversation and scores the tech against preset best practices such as building rapport, handling objections, finding a compelling need, closing, speaker share and pacing. Afterward it shares a scorecard with the tech, suggests improvements, and recommends clips for managers to use in training; standout clips go into a scrollable team feed where techs can review, comment and like them. Service manager Chris Holland says the manager dashboard shows him who is working to improve and who needs more training. Comfort adviser and field supervisor Skip Wintter says Esser has seen improvement in average ticket, close rate and revenue per hour since adding Field Pro; ServiceTitan's story gives no specific numbers.
AI for plumbing and HVAC back office: Claude-built pricing calculators, payroll workbooks and automatic install jobs
Blanton & Sons (Adam Grubb, GM; Charleston, SC area)
Blanton & Sons, a family-owned plumbing and HVAC company in the Charleston, South Carolina area, runs on ServiceTitan, and general manager Adam Grubb (a former plumber) automates every back-office process he can. He used Claude and ChatGPT to build his own tools: a mobile pricing calculator where a tech enters equipment cost, material cost, target margin and commission and gets a price plus a range of acceptable prices, a reverse version that shows management the margin and commission a quoted price implies, and payroll workbooks that handle South Carolina's overtime-on-commission math. With an outside AI shop he built a workflow that takes a job a tech marks "perform later," builds the install job in ServiceTitan and sends the purchase order, which replaced the install coordinator's paperwork; that employee now spot-checks the automation and spends her time with customers. Techs use ServiceTitan's Atlas assistant and ChatGPT for troubleshooting and manuals, and a vendor tool called Buck AI assigns calls on the dispatch board by tech skills, area and schedule. Grubb says dispatch "used to be an all-day job" and is now weekly capacity management. He outsources anything with legal exposure, such as payroll automation. No figures beyond his own descriptions.