HVAC Reviews

My husband Duane has run no heat calls on Christmas Eve nine years out of the last ten. That is not a complaint exactly, it is just the job, but there is a version of it where he also has to be the answering service from the truck, and that version made him short with everybody, including the people standing in a cold house and including me. He would come home with his plate in the microwave and frost still in his beard some nights. This year Launchbarr had his Voice AI answering after hours. On Christmas Eve a furnace quit out in the country and the call got answered, the information got taken down right, and Duane got a clean message instead of a panicked voicemail he found two hours late. The customer left a review after the repair that mentioned the sweet girl who stayed calm on the phone. Carla knows that girl. She has never once needed a parka. Duane was home for supper this Christmas Eve for the first time I can remember as a normal thing, not a lucky break. He kept looking at his phone like it owed him an explanation. Then he said the quiet part: "She can have the 2 a.m. ones too. I mean it. Every one of them."

Everybody in heating and air knows April. Nothing is broken hard enough to scare anybody, the phones go to sleep, and I am doing math at the kitchen table trying to keep three techs busy without sending anyone home. I had a notebook, an actual paper notebook, of changeout quotes from the summer before that I meant to call on. Meant to. Most of them sat there until the names stopped meaning anything to me. Launchbarr started following up on those old quotes without me having to be the guy making awkward calls in the spring. A lady in the next town over whose system I quoted in August, when she decided to nurse it one more year, got a follow up right around the time it quit again in March. She told me on the phone, "Well, you are the ones who kept up with me." We put her system in the next week. I am not a follow up person. I am a fix it person. Having that handled means April does not feel like holding my breath anymore. My senior tech asked me in the shop last week what changed. I told him, "Turns out the notebook was never a system, Ray." I talk to myself when I am wrong. It happens enough.

I co own the company with Dave. Dave does load calculations like a man defusing something, and he will spend an extra hour getting the size right while another company is already hanging a bigger unit and gone. It used to cost us jobs, because a homeowner hears two prices and Dave sounds like the expensive one who wants to sell duct work. Our website now has our real installs on it and plain talk about why the right size matters, written the way Dave says it at the table, just cleaner. A couple in the next town over read the page twice before they called anybody. By the time Dave got there, he did not have to start from zero. He still calls it the computer page. But I have heard him tell people, "Go read what we put on there, it will save me twenty minutes of drawing on your napkin." From Dave, that is high praise.

I do not answer numbers during church and I am too old to start. Used to cost me, Sundays, when everybody waits till the house is an oven to call it an emergency. The AI answers now. I fought it, I admit that. A man whose AC quit during the offering told my wife our office girl was a credit to us. My wife nodded. There is no office and no girl, me, two techs, and a dog. It books the call, I get the notes, and Hank keeps a morning that is his.

First heat wave of June, it hit 103 by noon and every AC in town seemed to quit at the same lunch hour. I am Gus, I own the place, and I was on a roof in that heat with my phone buzzing in my pocket every four minutes, which is how a man ends up mad at customers who have done nothing but be hot. Used to be I would climb down, call back the ones I could read, and lose the rest to whoever picked up first. Launchbarr set up their voice to answer when we cannot. That first wave, she took the calls while all three of my techs were already out, asked about the breaker, the thermostat, whether the outside unit was even humming, and booked the jobs in order like she had worked our summers before. One lady in the next town over left a review saying the girl on the phone kept her calm while her house climbed past ninety. My lead tech read it out loud in the shop. I told him, "She kept me calm too, and she never even met me."

My husband Brian runs the calls and I run everything with a calendar on it, which in October used to mean me calling down a list of past customers begging them to think about a tune up while the leaves were still pretty. Half the numbers I had were wrong and the other half let it ring. This fall the reminders went out from Launchbarr on their own, to our own customers, in our name. People just answered them and picked their day. Brian ran tune ups three weeks straight and never once had to hear me say the phones are dead. He asked if I had been working the list at night. I told him the list works itself now, and I have gone back to being his wife in October instead of his reminder department.

I am not the owner, I bought in with Tom eight years ago, he is the furnace brain and I am the one who stares at the quote folder. Every summer we would leave a stack of changeout quotes with nice people who said let us think about it, and by the time anybody followed up, another company had the job or the unit had died on a Sunday and gone to whoever answered. Launchbarr follows up on those dead quotes without me writing a single awkward check in text. A couple out across the county got three polite nudges over a few weeks and answered the last one the day their old unit started rattling again. Signed, deposit down, installed the next week. Tom says I finally learned sales. I told him I learned to let the quotes chase themselves.

I am old school about one thing: if we say we are coming Tuesday between nine and eleven, somebody better hear from us before Tuesday. We used to blow that with sticky notes. Now the reminders and the on my way texts go out from Launchbarr without me touching them. My no shows about dried up, and a customer across town told my tech she planned her whole morning around that little text that said he was twenty minutes out. Ronnie, organized. Nobody who knew me in 2009 believes it.

I dispatch for our shop, which means my screen used to be five different places at once: the shop phone, two cell phones, Facebook messages, the website chat blinking, and an email inbox nobody checked until Friday. A no cool message could sit in the wrong pile for half a day in July, and I would be the one apologizing for it. Launchbarr put every call, text, message, and email in one place in front of me. My owner asked what I did with my afternoons now. I told him I dispatch, Priya, just without the scavenger hunt first.

I will be honest, I thought the Google thing was for pizza places. My nephew kept saying people look for a heat and air company on the map first, and I kept saying people call who their neighbor used. Launchbarr tuned up our Google profile proper, right categories, every service we actually do, real pictures of my trucks and my ugly mug in front of a condenser. A man in the next town over told me he picked us off the map because we looked like a real shop and our hours were right. I told my nephew he is right once a decade, and this was the once.

I am Cody, I am twenty nine, and I am slowly taking the office side off my dad, who ran this company for twenty six years out of a spiral notebook and a memory like a steel trap that has started to rust in spots. Jobs lived in his head. If Dad was on a roof, the whole company was on hold. Everything sits on one board now through Launchbarr, every lead, every job, every follow up, where I can see it and Dad can see it and neither of us has to call the other to ask what is happening Thursday. He still keeps the notebook in his truck. He just does not need it, and last week he left it home on a Saturday on purpose, which for my father is basically a retirement announcement.

I own our shop and I will tell you the maintenance plan money used to be the hardest money to collect in this town. Paper agreements, checks in envelopes, me calling nice retired people to remind them their plan renewed, feeling like a bill collector instead of their air conditioning lady. Launchbarr put the plans on automatic billing and the renewals just happen, card on file, receipt sent, visit scheduled. One of my longtime customers, Elias, told me at his tune up, "Rosa, you finally run this place like the big companies." I said, "I run it better. You still get me."

Rosa is my wife and our shop is hers, I want that straight before I tell this. She built it from one truck while I was still working for the county, and I run a service route for her now, which makes her my boss in two houses if you count ours. She is fair. She is also not a woman who loves the phone, especially at ten at night when a walk in cooler of a house is getting warmer by the hour. The first summer Launchbarr had the after hours voice on her phones, a family across town called at midnight with a baby and no cool. That voice took it all down, right questions, right address, and Rosa got a clean booking instead of a scrambled voicemail. The mother mentioned the kind lady on the phone in her review. Rosa read it twice at breakfast. She told me, "Frank, for ten years I was the kind lady on the phone and it was killing me slow." Now she sleeps through calls that used to own her, and the company still catches every one. I have been married to that woman twenty three years and I have never seen her hand a job off easy. She handed off the phone in a week.

I never asked for reviews in my life. Felt like begging. My techs would fix a furnace at nine at night and I would think the work should speak, and then I would watch the big outfit across town stack up reviews like cordwood. Launchbarr asks for me now, right after the job, while the house is cooling back down. They come in steady, and they say real things: showed up when he said, wore the shoe covers, explained the part. My barber read one and asked if I hired a marketing fella. I told him, "Earl does not hire fellas. Earl finally lets the happy people talk."

My brother Sal and I own this outfit together, he runs install and I am Sal, the other brother, the one writing this, I run service and quotes. Wait, simpler: I am Marco. Sal would hate that I messed up the first line, which tells you who handles paperwork. Our estimates used to take me two days to type after a full route, and two days is forever when a house is at ninety degrees. Now I build the quote on the spot and it goes out by text from Launchbarr before I have backed out of the driveway. A lady in the next town over told me she picked us because she had our price in her hand while the other company was still going to get back to her. Sal says I got fast. Really the paper got out of my way.

I lead the install crew at our shop, I am not the owner, and the thing I used to hate was driving to a changeout with half the information. Wrong tonnage in my notes, no idea if the customer wanted the thermostat moved, calling the office from the driveway like a rookie. The whole job lives on the app now. I pull up the address, the equipment, the notes from the sales call, the pictures, all of it, standing in the driveway before I knock. A homeowner across town watched me scroll and said, "You boys have done this before." We have. Now it looks like it too.

I miss calls. That is the whole confession. Now when I miss one, a text goes back to that person the second it happens, from Launchbarr, with my name on it, asking what they need. Half the time they text back and I have a booked call before I am off the ladder. A man across town wrote back, "Fastest call back I never got." I put that on the shop fridge. Pete, prompt, courtesy of a text I did not send.

I am Greta, I own the company with my name on the truck, and I am not, by nature, a follow up and thank you note person. I fix furnaces in February up here. After a job now, a thank you goes out, and a little check in later, through Launchbarr. I am still not. But my customers feel looked after, and they send me their people, and I will take being mistaken for sweet if it comes with referrals like that.

I ran this shop on word of mouth for nineteen years and I was proud of it right up until word of mouth started meaning the younger families in this town, who never heard my name because I was not where they look. Launchbarr put local ads out for us, just our side of town and the next two over, the places my trucks already go. One lady said, "My daddy used you, but I found you on my phone myself." Both things can be true now. That is new.

I am Allison, I am the daughter, and I handle the marketing side my dad pretends does not exist. He is a brilliant furnace man who thinks a website is a business card that got lost. Launchbarr built us pages for every service and every town we run in, not just one page that says we do heating and air somewhere in Kansas. Dad asked how they knew so much before he got there. I said, "Dad, I finally wrote down what you know, and put it where the next town over can read it."

Christmas week, twenty degrees, and I had promised my kids I was not working the holiday unless the world ended. For half the town it kind of did. Furnaces quit in bunches when it gets that cold here. The shop still answered every call through the voice Launchbarr set up, booked them in order, marked the true no heats urgent and the still running ones honest. I ran two days of calls after Christmas with a full board and zero guilt, because nobody sat in a cold house wondering if we had gotten their message. My oldest asked if the shop elves did it. Close enough, buddy.

I manage the office at our shop and my whole job used to live in my head and on sticky notes stuck to a monitor from 2014. Who needs a call back, whose part is in, which estimate is aging out: Janet knows, ask Janet, and God help them when I took a vacation day. Now there is a list that tells me every morning who to follow up with and when, built by Launchbarr from our own jobs. My boss asked what changed. I said, "The sticky notes work for the company now instead of me."

Walter, sixty one, third generation on the trucks, and I do not do new software. My son signed us up, which is how most progress has entered this family since 1998. A customer across the county called and asked for "the crew from the pictures, the tidy one." I have been waiting forty years for tidy to be the word. The computer can stay.

Somebody told me for years my ads were fine and I believed them because the phone rang some. Rang is not the question. The question is which ads, which pages, bring the calls worth answering. I can hear what was actually said on a call now and see which ad it came from, through Launchbarr. Turns out one ad brought me price shoppers from across the county and one page brought me the neighborhoods I pray for. Killed the first, kept the second. Ignacio does not light money on fire anymore just because the phone made noise.