Artificial intelligence (AI) is seemingly everywhere. Across industry events, conferences, expos and meetings, AI is the topic that everyone wants to hear more about.
The pest control industry is no different. Pest business owners are hungry to know how AI can be embedded into daily workflows to make operations leaner, faster and more efficient.
We sat down with WorkWave’s Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence Strategy, Dr. Robert Coop, to discuss how AI is changing the pest control industry and offer insights into what pest control AI will look like in your soon-to-be day-to-day.
Q: How will AI simplify and automate service appointments in the pest control industry?
Coop: For many pest control companies, managing service appointments can be challenging. Especially if a company is not using a technology solution to help manage, appointments can often suffer from double booking and time management errors, miscommunications and inaccurate record keeping. Combining AI with automation capabilities can ensure a company is running an accurate and maintainable schedule, automate communications with customers, and even predict future services.
- Smart Scheduling: AI can create optimal routes and schedules for technicians based on factors like location, equipment availability and job complexity. This reduces travel time and allows for more efficient service delivery.
- Automated Customer Communication: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can handle basic customer inquiries, appointment scheduling and updates. This allows pest control professionals to focus on more complex issues and personalized customer service.
- Predicting Service Needs: By analyzing past data, pest activity patterns and seasonal trends, AI can forecast future service demand. This helps pest control companies prepare resources in advance, avoiding overbooking or understaffing.
Q: What are the main benefits pest control companies might see after implementing AI in their business?
Coop: This early in development, the benefits of AI are really endless. As a starting point, though, pest control companies can expect three initial benefits after implementation.
- Improved Efficiency: AI automates repetitive tasks and optimizes resource allocation, saving time and reducing costs. As it reduces manual processes and human error behind the scenes, AI will also be able to start improving efficiency in the field. For example, a pest control AI program might be able to determine efficient treatment patterns for different property types and infestations, enabling crews to take on more jobs in less time.
- Better Customer Experience: Some of the resistance to AI comes with a fear that these people-centered services will begin to lose human connection. However, AI is a tool that can help support personalized services, ultimately improving customer experiences and leading to greater rates of customer retention. An AI system, for instance, can help suggest proactive treatments and support your customers even in your off hours through 24/7 chatbots fed from your own learning bases. This can help solve customer issues faster, keep customers engaged between service appointments and build long-term loyalty.
- Data-Based Decision Making: One of the biggest benefits of AI is its ability to analyze large amounts of data. This information can then be used to identify patterns, predict trends and provide data-driven steps for your company to strategize around and take action on. Especially as AI becomes an in-built element of pest control software like PestPac, this type of information will be built around your own unique customers and prospects, offering in-platform insights for even greater value.
Q: You mentioned how human connection is still an important pillar of AI. How can pest control companies use AI to support their technicians?
Coop: Yes, AI is a really useful tool to support and enhance the work of pest control technicians. In any business, employee productivity and quality of work improve when they can work independently with their company’s support. AI can help give your employees a hub of information that helps them better serve customers and make informed decisions from the field.
- Enhanced Customer Communication: AI can provide agents with customer insights, summarize past interactions and suggest problem solutions in real time, enabling them to build rapport, explain issues clearly and provide exceptional service.
- Expert Knowledge at Your Fingertips: AI-powered knowledge management systems make it easy for technicians to access expert advice, guidance and training materials in the field, allowing them to tackle complex issues confidently and expand their skills.
- Augmented Decision-Making: AI provides technicians with real-time insights, recommendations and contextual information, empowering them to make better-informed decisions and solve problems more effectively on the job.
If you’re a larger pest company, this helps reduce the demands of your office team, as you’ll see questions from jobs decrease over time as crews become more self-sufficient. This holds true for smaller teams, too — even owner/operator teams — where having information ready in the field can reduce the demands on a single person.
Q: How does AI in field service contribute to efficiency and customer satisfaction in pest control?
Coop: By harnessing AI, pest companies will be able to streamline processes and build stronger relationships through more responsive and tailored service delivery. Here’s a look at four key elements to think about as contributors to this effort:
- Intelligent Scheduling: AI will plan routes and optimize technician schedules, reducing travel time and enabling faster service delivery, which improves both operational efficiency and customer responsiveness.
- Personalized Service: AI analyzes customer preferences, service history and feedback to tailor treatment recommendations and communication, delivering a more personalized experience that boosts satisfaction and loyalty.
- Knowledge Management: AI-powered tools can process large volumes of technical manuals, prior support cases and provide a conversational interface able to answer technical questions quickly.
- Continuous Improvement from Data-Driven Insights: AI continuously analyzes service performance data to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and improvement opportunities, allowing companies to optimize operations and elevate service quality over time.
Q: How can a pest control business use AI for predictive customer service?
Coop: Predictive services is something that’s really exciting to talk about in the pest industry. To date, technology companies like WorkWave have been focusing on automation and optimization as primary benefits of implementing technology systems, from CRM to scheduling to routing and mobile applications. As we continue to be the leader in these areas, we’re now able to turn an eye toward predictive pest control services- helping our clients anticipate the needs of their customers to win, retain and maintain more business. Here are a few ways predictive AI might improve pest assessment in the near future:
- Anticipating Service Needs: By analyzing customer data, service history and trends, AI can predict when a property might need specific treatments. This allows a pest control business to reach out proactively, often before the customer notices an issue.
- Identifying At-Risk Customers and Preventing Churn: AI can analyze customer engagement, behavior and feedback to identify which customers might be considering switching to a competitor. This allows companies to address pest issues promptly and potentially improve customer retention.
- Forecasting Demand: By considering factors like seasonal changes, market trends and historical data, AI can change a company’s approach to pest control by predicting future service demand. This helps pest control companies prepare their resources to meet customer needs during busy periods.
Q: Can you describe what’s possible with AI in pest control field service management?
Coop: The answer to this question is really endless. The pest control industry has the unique opportunity to be at the forefront of innovative solutions — one that can change what, when and where pest control services are delivered to customers.
If we break down the possibilities of AI-powered software solutions into bite-sized milestones, some things to look forward to might be:
- Optimized Daily Planning: The AI-powered dashboard displays optimized routes and schedules for the day, considering real-time traffic, weather conditions, and technician skill sets.
- Proactive Issue Identification: The AI system flags high-priority jobs based on customer engagement, sentiment analysis and predictive maintenance alerts from smart monitoring devices installed at key accounts.
- Automated Resource Allocation: The AI identifies a complex pest infestation that poses a potential risk for customer churn and automatically assigns the most qualified technician to handle the job, notifying the operator of the change.
- Real-time Monitoring: Throughout the day, the operator can monitor job progress and customer feedback in real-time while the AI system continuously optimizes schedules to accommodate any new urgent requests or cancellations.
- Personalized Customer Support: When a customer calls in with a question about their service history, the operator can quickly pull up their information and use the AI-powered recommendation engine to offer personalized suggestions for proactive treatment.
- AI-driven Insights Backed by Data: After each day, the operator reviews the AI-generated report highlighting key performance metrics, customer sentiment trends, and revenue forecasts, allowing them to make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.
The only part of the equation that will remain unchanged by AI, really, is the why behind what pest control companies do: to deliver safe, effective and environmentally responsible pest management solutions to the benefit of everyone.
Dr. Robert Coop, known as Coop, is the Senior Director of AI Strategy at WorkWave, where he leads AI and machine learning initiatives, driving innovation in product development and operations through generative AI, ChatGPT and other advanced technologies. With over a decade of experience in data science and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering with a focus on Machine Learning from the University of Tennessee, Coop has developed and executed strategic roadmaps in a diverse set of scenarios, including the manufacturing industry, healthcare industry, and professional services.
