An HVAC shop lives on the first cold snap, the first heat wave, and the book of maintenance agreements that carries it in between. CTS builds automation for Pittsburgh HVAC contractors that renews agreements before they lapse, gets the right tech to the right call with the right part on the truck, answers the phone at 11 PM, and tells you each month what the agreement book is really worth — inside the field-service software you already pay for.
The four jobs a dispatcher and office manager juggle all day, and how each one gets lighter.
Agreements are the steadiest revenue in the building and the easiest thing to let lapse. Renewal offers go out ahead of expiration with current pricing, reminders follow, payment is collected on acceptance, and the spring and fall tune-ups are booked before the rush starts.
A no-heat call in January outranks a thermostat question, and a heat-pump job needs a tech who has done one. Calls are scored by urgency, matched by skill and zone, and customers get an ETA text instead of calling to ask.
A second trip for a capacitor is a wasted afternoon. Parts used on a ticket decrement truck stock, low stock drafts a supplier order, and before a truck rolls the tech sees the equipment on site, its install date, and what was replaced last time.
An AI answering layer for nights, weekends, and overflow that captures name, address, equipment, and symptom, books non-urgent work for the morning, and pages the on-call tech the moment a call sounds like an emergency. Every call lands in the CRM.
Two months before each agreement expires, the customer gets the renewal offer, a reminder, and a payment link. The office sees one list of who hasn't responded and calls those, rather than everyone.
The caller is answered, the symptom is captured, and the emergency rule pages the on-call tech with the address, the furnace model, and the last two service visits. A non-emergency caller gets the first morning slot and a confirmation text.
A monthly report shows first-time-fix rate by technician, callbacks, agreement revenue booked versus lapsed, and which equipment brands drive the most repeat visits — pulled from the platform you already use, not a spreadsheet someone maintains.
No. That platform is where dispatch, agreements, and job history already live, so we build around it. What it exposes, and so what can be automated around it, varies by platform and plan. The AI Readiness Scan checks that early, before we promise anything. Your dispatchers and techs keep the app they know.
Only where you decide it should, under rules you set. Typically that means after-hours and overflow, with anything that sounds like no heat, no cooling, or a gas smell paged straight to a person. Your office can keep answering during the day, and every call is logged either way.
By cleaning it first: duplicate customers, equipment with no install date, agreements still marked active from years ago. We deduplicate, backfill what can be backfilled, and set rules so new records stay clean — then build the reports. See data cleanup & reporting.
Renewal sequences, dispatch rules, and the after-hours agent are all AI workflow automation work: trigger, steps, approval where money moves, audit trail on every run.
First-time-fix rate and agreement revenue are only as good as the customer and equipment records behind them. Data cleanup & reporting gets those records straight and keeps them that way.
Field-service platform, phone system, supplier portals, QuickBooks: systems integration is the plumbing that lets a part logged on a ticket reach inventory and the invoice without a second entry.
Dispatch screens, tech tablets, the VOIP line the emergency calls ride on, and the backups behind the customer database. Managed IT from the same team that built the automations means one call when anything stops.
The AI Readiness Scan is a fixed-scope, flat-fee review of your shop's systems and data, ending in a graded scorecard and five prioritized moves. Different trade? See roofing contractors or landscaping & lawn care.