AI Call Answering/Chat Services For Home Inspectors

The debate over AI chatbots and phone answering services in the home inspection industry reveals a crucial truth: what seems like technological progress might actually be damaging your business. This eye-opening discussion exposes the hidden costs of automation when it comes to customer communication.

Research paints a sobering picture – 77% of consumers report frustration when unable to reach a human agent, while 52% say a negative AI interaction makes them less likely to do business with a company again. For home inspectors, these statistics translate directly to lost revenue. One company owner shared his experience using an AI phone system, which resulted in closing less than half of incoming leads – potentially costing tens of thousands in lost business.

Beyond the raw numbers, we dive into the psychology behind why AI chat systems fail in our industry. When people are making one of life's biggest investments, they seek reassurance that only human interaction can provide. They want to ask specific questions, gauge your expertise, and feel confident in their choice. Current AI systems simply can't deliver this, often dropping potential clients into frustrating secondary funnels that lead to abandoned inquiries.

The conversation explores practical considerations for balancing technology with human connection. While website chatbots might have limited utility (especially after hours), they still create friction for many users. We examine how different demographic groups respond to AI interactions and why having a real person answer your phones might actually become a powerful marketing advantage in today's increasingly automated world.

What's your experience with AI communication systems? Have you found success with them, or do they create more problems than they solve? Share your thoughts and join the conversation about the future of client communication in the home inspection industry.

Check out our home inspection app at www.inspectortoolbelt.com
Need a home inspection website? See samples of our website at www.inspectortoolbelt.com/home-inspection-websites

*The views and opinions expressed in this podcast, and the guests on it, do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Inspector Toolbelt and its associates.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to AI Chatbots
• 6:01 Research on Consumer AI Frustrations
• 10:56 The Real Cost of Lost Leads
• 16:17 Website Chatbots vs. Phone Systems
• 21:30 How AI Changes Human Language
• 27:03 Testing and Measuring Your Systems

Transcript

Ian Robertson 
If you would like to listen to this podcast, please press one. How you doing, David?

David Nyman 
Good. Was that your AI impression?

Ian Robertson 
That was my AI impression.

David Nyman 
It was terrible.

Ian Robertson 
It was pretty terrible. But I'm like, how else am I going to start out this podcast with David, then a terrible impression of AI?

David Nyman 
Well, I could tell right away that you were a human so..

Ian Robertson 
Oh well, yeah. I can't fake it. Sorry. But it's a decent lead in, well, a terrible lead in to our discussion today. We're going to be talking about AI chatbots and AI callbots. So this has been a big discussion on a lot of the forums, and interestingly enough, I see a lot of micro vendors, I call them micro vendors. It's not like you see like a large vendor offering this big service. You see a lot of smaller companies, or one guy shows, starting their own chatbot, primarily for answering phone calls. And I'm like, I started looking last summer, and I started examining some of the ones that inspectors were using, a couple of smaller vendors in the industry. They're like, oh, hey, you know, have me on the show, or let's do this or that. And I really wanted to just kind of feel things out first. I tried to keep an open mind, but the more I got into it, the more my thoughts narrowed. And I specifically asked you, David, not to tell me your opinion before the podcast. And I think you're probably getting an inkling of what my opinion is. But what are your thoughts on the whole concept of it, first of all, before we get into some nitty gritty?

David Nyman 
I mean, it feels like it's fairly new. Of course, it's not really, but it's really been booming with AI lately. So I do feel like this past year, we have had a lot of people asking our chat support in the app, like, is this AI? And usually it's not a good thing when people think it's AI. We have one of our support people that we call on AI because she always gets mistaken for an AI, and usually users are like, I want to talk to a real person. So yeah, to me, it feels like the impression AI is given so far is probably not a great one.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, and this is a shout out to Kim. Kim, your support is so good that you get mistaken for AI all the time. I forget we turned her name, Kim, into an acronym for some AI chatbot. But it's true. Whenever people ask if she's AI, which she's a real person, it's usually in anger. It's usually upset, like, I don't like, I forget what the one guy did. He just kept typing real person or something weird. And Kim's like, I really don't know how to tell you, I'm a real person here, but it usually doesn't have a great connotation. I can see the appeal, though, first of all, a lot of times we follow convention, so whatever is ubiquitous, we think is also acceptable in our industry. So for instance, if I call Walmart, which I had to do, I think we were ordering sandwiches, I have to go through 15 different AI bots, and by the time I'm done, I didn't order the sandwiches because it's annoying. We had to do a chatbot because our order was missing and the chatbot on the website was annoying to get through, and you couldn't, no matter how many times you type in human agent, it would not give you a human agent. We see it everywhere. So naturally, because it's ubiquitous, I love that word, ubiquitous.

David Nyman 
Yeah, I was gonna mention that.

Ian Robertson 
It makes me feel smart. You know, it's like a $10 word, right? Like anecdotal.

David Nyman 
It's $10 the first time you use it. Every time you use it, it loses value.

Ian Robertson 
It does lose value because it becomes ubiquitous.

David Nyman 
Okay, cut.

Ian Robertson 
It's like somebody told me Occam's razor. And they're like, well, think about Occam's razor. I'm like, whoa. I think Occam's Razor is an oversimplification. Sorry, all right, corny jokes aside, but we think, because everybody else uses it, that we should, because every website, you almost never find anybody that has a chatbot on a website where you actually talk to a human first. We're actually, we went the other direction, for a very specific business reason. It's harder, but we specifically at ITB, do not use any AI. And when you chat with somebody, you're chatting with a real person. When you're emailing us, you're emailing a real person. Because is it a tool? Yeah. Do we use it to say, hey, here's a complex issue. Can you look through our knowledge base and give me a good solution? Yeah, all the time. It's a tool in the belt of the human that doesn't replace them, in my opinion. Yeah, you like my tool belt drop there. It never works with the two of us on a podcast. We're too weird together.

David Nyman 
It's hard to keep it serious. But yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. And yeah, except for the one time when you sent an email to a user and you used AI to get the answer and forgot to cut out..hey, here's the answer.

Ian Robertson 
No. So I wrote out the email and I put it in ChatGPT, because you had just been making fun of me because I leave so many errors in my emails. So I said, ChatGPT, please check my email and make it better. And I did. I left a little bit at the bottom, it said, if you would like us to change this answer or adjust it, just let us know.

David Nyman 
But that really shows one of the points. So I did, you know, I did a bit of research on the subject. And one thing that was brought out a lot is, don't make AI your only tool. Proofreading, you know, you can have AI do it, but you might still want to check what the AI puts out there.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, well, I did some research too, and I want to give my own personal research. But here's some, you know, professional corporate level research, because I love corporate research. When you have like individual organizations, their research is a little wimpy. When you have a lot of money on the line, or corporation is going to do the most thorough research possible, they'll give a whole department and millions of dollars, 10s of millions of dollars, sometimes into figuring something out. So a variance study found that 77% of consumers became frustrated when they can't reach a human agent. This is a both on, you know, a chat and also a phone call. And they're two distinct things, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. Many report that phone menus and AI voices waste their time. A Pew Research Center study showed that more than 60% of respondents dislike interacting with AI over the phone due to a lack of empathy, more importantly, clarity and the inability to handle complex issues. Another point was brand damage. A CGS study reported that 52% of customers said a bad experience with an AI phone bot made them less likely to do business with the company again. So you know what I'm never doing with Walmart ever again?

David Nyman 
Business?

Ian Robertson 
Ordering sandwiches. They have amazing subs. I actually really, I don't know, the local Walmart here just has really great subs. I've been to other Walmarts, and I'm like why is the one at this one really good? So we're trying to order subs, near impossible, because the chatbots just get things wrong, or it's just too annoying. So I'm gonna go to a lesser grade sub for a party because of AI. So the brand damage, in my opinion, is the worst part. We spend a lot of money building up a brand. Those are realistic numbers. So I'm gonna without saying any names, I called at least two of the companies that provide AI services in our industry. The one was very interesting. He was selling me pretty hard on the AI phone service. And I'm like, okay, what about this? Or what about that? He's like, no, it does awesome. We get 200 phone calls in a month in my company, and you know, we're sealing the deal on 80 of them, and he just mixed that in this long sales pitch, and at the end, I go, hang on a second. What's your close rate? And he goes, he's like, well, you know this and that. And I'm like, no, no, no, you said it was like 80 something. It wasn't exactly 80 something out of 200 phone calls. And I'm like, I need some exact numbers here, man. And so he gave me the exact numbers. It was less than half. And these were hot leads, like he has an established company, you know, 20, 30, years of business, people only want him. And so that's what he said. He's like, well, I was able to close that many. I'm like, that's not a lot. That's a terrible close rate. Like, even the worst salesman can close less than half. I've worked my whole career to get into the 90% close rate. And I'm like, okay, well, the average person, that seems like a raw deal, the average lead costs us a ridiculous amount of time and money. So if we spend, we should know our acquisition costs per client. If we spend $50 per client in acquisition costs, that's all the time that we spend pounding the pavement, building relationships with agents, printing cards, spending money on ads, SEO or website and all this stuff. Like, if I lose 100, I'm not saying that I gained 80 clients. I'm gonna say that I lost 120. I mean, what's 50 times 120 there, David?

David Nyman 
Yeah, 6000.

Ian Robertson 
Not only did I lose the value of those inspections, but I also lost $6,000 on top of that. So let's say at the low end, 500 times 120 so all together, $66,000, not to mention the brand damage. How many agents had three of their clients call and they're like, the guy just has an AI chatbot, and an agent stops referring you, and you don't know why. His thing was, he's like, well, those are the clients I don't want. And I'm like, that seems like a broad accusation. Like, you know, we say that about price shoppers like, those are the clients you don't want. In what context do we not want the client that just doesn't want to talk to an AI bot? Like, I don't understand, what market research says that they're a bad client?

David Nyman 
Yeah, usually that would be older people I'd say, I think younger ones probably have more patience for an AI. And older buyers are probably good buyers because young ones don't always have the money.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, exactly, I think the opposite would be true, right? I mean, see there, I don't have any hard numbers on but either way..

David Nyman 
That's just me speculating.

Ian Robertson 
But it makes sense. It made sense, as you said it. But, man, those are some lousy numbers. So now, if you take the study of the average that we talked about 77%, 60%, and 52%, I mean those numbers kind of jive. We lose a lot for a little bit of convenience. Now, when you go from like answering the phones as yourself to a secretary or even a call center, our close rate goes down from like 97% to 92% depending on what you use, sometimes maybe even high 80s. But if it drops below 50% that's a lousy funnel. That's a loss of money. So that's big company stuff. You know, 200 inspections a month is not going to be your average small to mid-range home inspection company. So I don't know why big companies would use it, but even with small companies, say we're doing 200 inspections a year. Can you imagine losing 120 inspections? I mean, that would put that company out of business. So have you ever called one for a home inspector and talked to one of the?

David Nyman 
No, I haven't.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, I did. It's about as bad as I expected. I'm like, hey, there's a crack in my foundation. Will you guys look at that? And then it'll give me some information about foundations. And I'm like, yeah, but does the inspector get into the crawl space? And again, some more generic information. It can't do anything mildly complicated. It can give me pricing. So really, it only takes a lead where somebody was already going to schedule with you. So that's the only time that a chatbot actually works, in my opinion. So there's my overall opinion of the phone one. I think it's probably quite possibly the worst way to schedule. You know what the other reason is, it can't seal the deal. So one of the worst things you can do for a funnel, and a funnel is just a colloquial term we use for how we capture the person at the top and convert them into a client at the bottom, the worst thing you can do for a funnel is drop the person in a new funnel. And technology will get better, but until AI is good enough that we could have just general conversations with it with no pause, and have it be very high end, which we're still a decade or two away from that, it's coming fast, but it's a long ways away. It's going to have to drop you in a new funnel, because I can't say to it. I'm like, hey, can you put me down for the fifth at 2pm for a home inspection, wood-destroying insect, and a radon test? It's going to say, I can't help you with that. What's your phone number? And I'm going to text you a link where you can schedule. Now I have to start a whole new funnel. So you're going to lose clients that way too.

David Nyman 
Yeah, in my opinion, until the AI gets so good at not sounding like an AI that you can't tell the difference, that's probably a point where it will be worth it, because, you know, I've used chatbots quite a bit, and it's pretty amazing, you know, how far they can get in a conversation. But that's not what you experience when you are talking to them and having a very specific conversation about a subject, I think they're better at general ideas than specific items, just because, I think part of the problem lies in that they're trying to cover for every eventuality, and they don't excel at something specific because of that.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, and they're getting better, but you're right. We need to have not AI, but AGI. So for those who don't know what AGI is, AI is artificial intelligence. AGI is artificial general intelligence. It's what they consider the next level up. So AGI is the next step. AGI is where artificial intelligence can react. Right now, it computes, so it says, okay, he said this. And it's still a large language mile, so it starts to create word associations and say, this is what it would want. This is what this person would want to hear. And that's why we still get wrong information from AI and just about general stuff. A lot of people don't realize this, but even ChatGPT doesn't have an internal calendar. Start asking ChatGPT when things happen, and it will give you the wrong dates and times. So I just found this out the other day because I was asking ChatGPT, I'm like, what day is it today? And it kept giving me the wrong day, and I go, no, that's not it. And it just kept guessing until it finally got the day. And I'm like, why are you getting the days wrong? It says, oh, I'm not..I'm not. And then I kept asking the same questions. And it goes well, I technically don't have an internal calendar, so unless you tell me what day it is, I won't know what day it is. And I'm like…

David Nyman 
It's artificial.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, it's artificial. Artificial general intelligence, and there's all sorts of estimates. Some people are like, oh, within five years. In reality, 10 to 20, where it can start to really talk to you and say, let's see, yeah, today is the fifth. Oh, okay, yeah, we can take care of that on the seventh. Seventh is Friday, right? Oh, wait, we see something in the calendar for the inspector, and it can really start to reason on things and do it quickly.

David Nyman 
The problem is that's the point where they start killing us too.

Ian Robertson 
I did see a couple documentaries on it, Terminator one and two, it doesn't really get better for us. So, at that point, it's going to be whole new industry anyways, 10, 15, 20 years from now. I say a whole new industry. It's gonna be whole new world. It's gonna be different, just as different as 2020 was from 1990 you know, 2040 is going to be a whole new world. You know, the internet will be different. How we go about the internet will be different. The internet will just be a back staging area for the front facing AI that will, that will use. I do think there is, and I hate saying this, but not for me, but for some, there is a slight, tiny advantage to AI chatbots on the website, not phone call. Phone call is one big, flat, nasty, poo poo disaster. In my opinion, it would be the ruination of just about anybody, even the best ones out there. Now, the chatbots on your website, I don't know your thoughts on this. Let me ask you first, what are your thoughts on the chatbot on a website, before I give you mine?

David Nyman 
I mean, if it's trained right, the availability is a huge bonus, because no one can sit there, 24/7, watching chats. Even as hard as we try, we can't hit that, a chatbot will always be there, and if it's trained right, it can probably answer a lot of questions without any input from the human.

Ian Robertson 
And that's the thing, a lot of us like to plug and play when it comes to chat bots, like, oh, we got an AI chatbot for our website, and we've given some basic information, and then we get upset at it when it gives wrong information to our clients. I saw one earlier today, and I forget the exact information that it gave that was wrong, but it gave a service that the inspector didn't provide, and blatantly didn't provide. It was for a commercial inspector, and it's like, well, okay, and then it didn't mention services that it did provide. So that inspector didn't have the model trained properly or thoroughly enough. And it's easy to say, oh, just take it from my website. It's not that simple. I mean, we build websites for home inspectors all the time. Do you know how many home inspectors are like, Ian, I don't see sprinkler system inspections on my website, and I'll search every email that they've ever sent us, every transcript, everything. I'm like, we don't see anything where you mentioned that you do sprinkler inspections. Oh, I must have forgotten. Yeah. Can you put that on there? And it's like, if we forget to do that on our website or somewhere, are we really putting everything that we need to into the chatbots? You know, the one advantage is, I think there's less of an expectation to have an actual human when somebody lands on your website. I expect to have a have an AI chatbot when I land at first, and then I'll just start off by saying human agent. So the reason I say it does have its place is like you said, no one can be watching 24/7, and it buys you a bit of time. If I'm in a crawl space looking at a rotted beam and I don't feel my phone buzz right away, and then I climb out of the crawl space, it might be three minutes later. I don't know, that chatbot might have bought me enough time to say, hey, this is Ian. I'm a real human. How can I help you? Or if we have, hopefully a secretary or some sort of answering service, it buys them a minute to be able to do that. So there are some advantages, but there was a couple of facts about that. In fact, Zendesk found that 60% of users say they prefer a human over a chatbot for customer service, especially when issues are complex or emotionally charged. Now, Zendesk is one of the leaders in website chats. They do a whole ticketing system. It's one of the biggest out there, and even they say, listen, only 40% of your clients are going to be okay with this, not satisfied or thrilled, but they'll be okay with it. 60% say they prefer the opposite. A user like survey found that 68% of users feel that chatbots waste time, and that's not what people want when they're hiring a home inspector. You know, if statistically, we've said many times on this podcast that if you missed the phone call, you just cut your chance of getting that inspection down by 80% because people are time pressed and they're pressured, and they're just calling getting a home inspector. So now, if they think it's a waste of time, when they go to your website in the chatbot, it may buy you a minute or two or may just lose you a lead, to be perfectly frank. I don't know, what are your thoughts on that, David?

David Nyman 
No, it's true. I do feel like most home buyers, they will just keep going down the list. You know, one doesn't pick it up, like, okay, I'm moving on to the next one. The only time when that doesn't happen is in markets where there's literally no competition, and it's like, you're the one trick in the town of a few 1000.

Ian Robertson 
Well, and I think that's where the one guy who had the chat service, the AI chat service, he was making the point. He goes, well, you know, I've been in business for 20, 30, years, so people are only going to hire me. I'm like, that's great. But if you've been in business for five years and you're trying to grow your business, you're just losing it. You're losing leads. At this point in the game, I feel like if people call you and they get a human or they chat with you on the website, and it starts out with, hey, my name is Ted, and I'm a real human, how can I help you? I feel like that's a marketing advantage.

David Nyman 
That sounds like something an AI would say, though.

Ian Robertson 
That's true. So did you read how linguists are finding that we as human beings are changing how we talk to match how AI talks and not the other way around? We're actually meeting in the middle. So you know how you can read something and it's like, oh, that sounds AI generated? Over the past couple of years since AI has really taken off, we've gotten used to that way of speaking, because we see it everywhere. See it in news articles and social media posts. And so now we're actually changing our linguistics to sound like ChatGPT, or like Gemini and all them. And then AI is changing itself to meet us in the middle somewhere. That's creepy, dude.

David Nyman 
That's sad.

Ian Robertson 
I don't know if it's sad. I mean, AI has perfect grammar, so...how bad can it be?

David Nyman 
Yeah, yeah, we need to work on that with you. It's not your grammar, it's your inattention to detail.

Ian Robertson 
My inattention to grammar. Grammar has never been my strong point, so I just think that's interesting of how much society has accepted it. I actually kind of think about that, you speak three languages, David?

David Nyman 
I mean, two that I'm comfortable with, one that I dabble in.

Ian Robertson 
I used to speak three. Now I'm like, I speak one in 1.9 languages. But you know that language is deeply rooted in our thinking process, like you just don't learn to say a new word and it just doesn't transliterate. You have to change how we think when we speak because it's a whole different thought process.

David Nyman 
Yeah, with certain languages, it's like, you know, Germanic languages overall, it's a pretty similar thought pattern, but some languages, you have to completely change your thought patterns to be able to speak that way.

Ian Robertson 
Well, yeah, so I was watching a video, and they were transliterating Chinese, and they're a very, I'm guessing, judging by this video I watched, they use a lot of expressions, and we do too. We use a lot of idioms in English that don't make sense. And it's like, whoa, okay, well, it can't transliterate that. It's a whole different thought process. And there's other languages like that. So when ChatGPT or in other AI models, they change the way we think when they change our language. It's not a matter of changing just the words we say or the sentence structure. It's how we think. That's pretty deep. But as that progresses, I think things like chatbots and stuff like will become a little bit more universally accepted. I do think for the next 10 to 20 years, it will give us an advantage, still, if a real person answers the phone, even the fact that, so there's a home inspector that I was helping optimize his funnels and the services. He's like, Ian, I'm dropping people. He's like, what's doing it? And I'm like, it's usually not one thing. It's usually like, 30 small things, and you remove them one at a time, and your numbers eventually go up. One of the things that made his numbers go up dramatically is when you called him, the phone didn't ring. It automatically went to a menu operator and it said, hey, you've reached so and so at such and such inspections. If you'd like to schedule an inspection, press one, if you like to talk to the inspector press two. Any other questions, press three. And I'm like, okay, let's monitor that. Most people never got past when they said, press number and they stopped. I'm like, you created a barrier to that person hiring you. You had a hot lead and you killed it. I'm like, where do those numbers go? He's like, well, they all basically go either to me or my office person. I'm like, why are there three options? I'm like, can it go to your office person, and then if they need you, she can just transfer the call? He goes, oh, and his numbers went up. So the more we can have a live, warm person answer the phones, the better, in my opinion. With the chatbot on the website, I don't know.

David Nyman 
You just reminded me of a job I had down in Georgia. This woman I was working with. Whenever she did phone calls, I was just sitting in my office laughing my head off, because she'd start, like, right, as soon as they pick up, she'd start yelling "operator", like, full volume, top of her lungs. Operator, and it's like, nonstop. I'm like, you know, the way that comes across on the other end, they probably can't understand what you're saying. So she didn't get an operator.

Ian Robertson 
But that just shows we have to put ourselves in our customers positions. There are businesses now that I will never use. Okay, there's a business now that I'm using, but they're the only one that I can use, and they use a chatbot. So I just find myself typing human agent, human agent, human agent, human agent, until finally I get a human agent. I power through the annoyance. But if there was anybody that came on the market that did the same thing, or even something relatively close, but I could talk to a human, I would immediately switch. I love tech, I love AI, you know, but at the same time, I'm like, I just have one question, and AI is not going to understand. And then you'll acquiesce, and you'll be like, okay, let me try. And then it doesn't get it. You're like, ugh. But if you're listening to this episode and you're thinking about using AI, think about those numbers. I like to AB test everything. You know, it does take a little bit of extra effort, but listen, have half your phone calls go right to a real person, and then transfer half your phone calls to AI and compare, you know, how many people? I mean, listen, you need to really do some thick testing, like, how do males respond differently than females to the AI? What about a different tone of voice? What about a different this and that? What if they use this AI model instead of that AI model, what about the time of day, those kind of things, but at the end of the day, you end up losing leads. I will say this. What are your thoughts, David, on maybe just after hours having AI answer your phones. And I'm talking after hours like, not like 5pm to 8pm, I'm talking like late at night, like somebody calls at three in the morning and they're never going to answer, and they get an AI service.

David Nyman 
Yeah, I mean, I could see it working, because I'm pretty sure that that time of day, they probably won't get anyone else, so you might not be losing leads. But then again, some people might still just hang up automatically and they might rather just leave a voicemail than deal with an AI.

Ian Robertson 
Yeah, and some of the most phone calls that we get, anyways, is between the hours of five to 8pm and so we have an answering service for it, so I still wouldn't use it for that time period. I still think even the worst call center is going to be better than AI. So if their hours are 7am to 7pm I would totally take advantage of that. I'm just talking like 10pm stuff like you said, nobody else is going to be answering hypothetically, but something to think about. Any other thoughts on either of those AI uses, either chatbot or phone callbot?

David Nyman 
No, I think the situation could be different if it was a different field, but specifically home inspections, I think too many people are so invested, you know, it's a big investment that they're doing, so they don't want to fool around with trying to explain it to an AI. And, you know, I've had places where I call in and get an AI, and it's not a big deal, but something like that that really matters for you and can affect your life for a long time to come, probably not going to risk it with an AI.

Ian Robertson 
I think that's really insightful from the perspective of a home purchaser calling somebody. You know, I can deal with AI to order a sandwich at Walmart, but if I'm going to be buying a car, let's say, am I buying $100,000 car, which I personally would never do, I'm not going to go through a bunch of prompts and hope that the car comes with all the features that I want. I want to talk to a salesperson. I'm going to want to talk to a human, and then I'm gonna want questions, I'm gonna want his feedback, his thoughts on things.

David Nyman 
And then they rip you off.

Ian Robertson 
And then they rip you off. But no, I think that makes a lot of sense. The expectation in our industry is different. You want to ask questions. You want to get a feel. The average person is trying to get a feel for us when they hire us. We're a critical part of their transaction. Just like you wouldn't hire a real estate agent, you know, by going through prompts, would you like Ken, press five and get Ken. It's like, I don't know Ken. You know, who's Ken? Is he going to be a good agent? I have no idea. So I think that's insightful. Well, there's our opinion. The statistics and our opinions align. I like it when it does that for a change, right, David?

David Nyman 
Yeah, it's nice.

Ian Robertson 
I'm just kidding. So, David, thank you for being on the show and giving us your thoughts on things. But, I think it's a thumbs down for the phone callbots. And I think it's a mostly thumbs down, but kind of a sideways, a little bit thumbs down, for the chatbot, maybe after hours on our website, or, I don't know, whatever different combination of things you want to try. I would definitely test it out and be careful about losing leads. Whatever you do, measure, measure, measure, phone calls come in. Where are those leads coming from? Are you losing them? And if so, how and when. But if you're just like every other corporation out there, you'll just lose leads to AI. So thank you very much, and we will talk to you next time on Inspector Toolbelt Talk.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of Inspector Toolbelt Talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at info@inspectortoolbelt.com.

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