One national home services franchise, a year after its Chat Agent went live. We've left the brand unnamed. The direction is what matters.
Coverage
of bookings come from nights and weekends
- Before
- After 6pm and on weekends, the local phone rang out. The demand still arrived. Nobody was there to answer it.
- After
- Nearly half of all conversations, and nearly half of all bookings, happen outside 8am to 6pm or on a weekend. Sunday is the quietest day for chats and the third best for bookings.
The handoff
median time from first message to a confirmed appointment
- Before
- The agent collected a name and a number and filed a callback lead. Nine to twelve contacts per 100 conversations, every one of them waiting on a return call.
- After
- Live booking replaced the form. Appointments land on the local calendar, half of them for within 48 hours. Fewer contacts per 100 conversations, but each one is a confirmed appointment instead of a name in a queue.
Engagement
chat starts per 1,000 site visits, the month after the agent redesign
- Before
- One chat for every 1,000 site visits. The agent was on the page. Almost nobody opened it.
- After
- 4.4 per 1,000 the following month, with site traffic flat. Same visitors, different front door.
What converts
of bookings come from conversations of nine or more messages
- Overall
- 2.8% of conversations end in a booking. Most visitors ask one or two questions and leave.
- With a project in mind
- Conversations that describe a specific project book at 11%, four times the overall rate. The agent earns the appointment by answering the questions first.
One deployment’s observed results, pulled from live records in September 2026. Booking figures cover June through mid-September, the period since live booking replaced the contact form. They describe what happened on that deployment, not what any brand should expect.