How Liberty Home Services turned missed calls into $18K in monthly revenue

Summer 2024 was the busiest season Liberty Home Services had ever seen. Temperatures in Texas were breaking 95°F daily, and AC repair calls were flooding in. For a local HVAC company with a small front desk team, it should have been their best quarter ever.

Instead, owner Ben H. watched opportunity after opportunity slip away.

"We'd see 15 to 20 missed calls every single day," Ben recalls. "And in the HVAC business during a heatwave, customers with broken ACs don't wait around. They call the next company and move on."

The math was painful. With an average service call worth $340, those missed calls were costing Liberty over $23,000 a month in lost revenue. But the real damage went beyond the immediate loss.

When your front desk becomes a bottleneck

Liberty's front desk staff was overwhelmed. Between answering incoming calls, scheduling appointments, handling walk-ins, and managing paperwork, there simply weren't enough hours in the day.

"We couldn't just hire more people," Ben explains. "The volume was so seasonal. We'd need three receptionists in summer and one in winter. It didn't make financial sense."

The missed calls started affecting their reputation. Liberty's Google rating had dropped from a solid 4.2 to 3.8 as frustrated customers left reviews about unreturned calls and voicemails that went unanswered for days.

"I'd be out on a job site, and my phone would buzz with another one-star review saying we never called them back," Ben says. "That was the breaking point. We had to figure something out."

A system that actually picks up the phone

Ben initially looked at hiring a traditional answering service, but the quotes came back at $2,000 to $3,000 per month, and most services couldn't handle the appointment booking or provide the kind of detailed information his customers needed about pricing and services.

Then a friend in the home services industry mentioned Central's AI receptionist.

"Honestly, I was skeptical," Ben admits. "I thought it would sound robotic or wouldn't understand what customers were asking about. But the demo was impressive. It sounded completely human."

Liberty implemented Central in less than a day. Ben uploaded their website, added information about their services and pricing, and connected the system to their calendar. The AI receptionist went live that afternoon.

"The first few calls, I was listening in just to make sure it wasn't a disaster," Ben says. "But it handled everything perfectly. It knew our service areas, our pricing, our hours. It even handled a customer who wanted to schedule an emergency call for the weekend."

The results came immediately

Within the first week, Liberty's call answer rate jumped from 60% to 94%. The AI receptionist was picking up every single call, even during lunch breaks, after hours, and on weekends when the office was closed.

"I actually got to enjoy Labor Day this year," Ben says. "First time in five years I didn't spend the whole weekend glued to my phone, worried about missing emergency calls."

The financial impact was clear within the first month. Liberty's booking rate improved dramatically because potential customers could actually reach someone who could answer their questions and get them scheduled immediately.

"We tracked it carefully," Ben explains. "In July, we had $23,000 in estimated lost revenue from missed calls. In August, after implementing Central, that number dropped to under $5,000. We were capturing an extra $18,400 in monthly revenue just by answering the phone."

But the benefits went beyond just revenue. The AI receptionist automatically captured every caller's name, number, and the nature of their request. It created detailed call summaries that synced directly to Liberty's CRM, so the team always knew exactly who had called and what they needed before calling them back.

"Before Central, our front desk would scribble notes on sticky pads," Ben says. "Half the time, we couldn't read the handwriting or the note would get lost. Now everything's documented and searchable."

Building trust back with customers

As Liberty's call answer rate improved, so did their customer satisfaction. Within three months, their Google rating climbed from 3.8 to 4.8.

"People started mentioning in their reviews how responsive we were," Ben notes. "We went from complaints about never answering the phone to praise about how professional and quick our service was."

The AI receptionist also handles after-hours calls seamlessly, something that was impossible before without paying for 24/7 staffing.

"We get calls at 11 PM from people whose AC just died," Ben says. "Before, those calls went to voicemail and we'd have to call them back in the morning, by which point they'd already booked someone else. Now, the AI books them for an early morning appointment on the spot. We're capturing business we never would have gotten otherwise."

A system that pays for itself

Liberty is on Central's Growth plan at $199 per month for 200 calls, which covers their typical call volume with room to spare during peak season.

"It's a no-brainer financially," Ben says. "We're paying $199 a month and generating an extra $18,000 in revenue. The ROI is ridiculous."

More importantly, the system has freed up Liberty's front desk team to focus on higher-value work like customer follow-up, scheduling optimization, and handling walk-ins without constant phone interruptions.

"Our front desk staff is happier because they're not drowning in phone calls," Ben explains. "They can actually focus on providing great service to the customers who are right in front of them."

For other home service businesses dealing with high call volumes and missed opportunities, Ben's advice is straightforward: "Just try it. We started using Central and it's been a game changer. It picks up every call even after hours and on the weekends. It sends me a documented summary of each call and the best part is how human it sounds because my only concern was this being robotic but it's really not. So worth checking it out."