How Brody Pennell Consolidated 4 Platforms into 1 with Avoca

About Brody Pennell

Brody Pennell Heating and Air Conditioning has served the west side of Los Angeles since 1945. Now in its 81st year, it is the largest HVAC company in LA, with more than 200 employees, and a growing Southern California platform of acquired brands led by president and operating partner Lawrence Castillo. In 2025, Brody Pennell rebuilt its customer facing operation around Avoca, spanning across Responder, Coach, Web Chat / Scheduler, Speed to Lead, and Outbound Campaigns.

The Avoca Impact:

• Booking rate: 65 to 70% → 90%, thousands of additional appointments captured
• Facebook and Meta lead conversion: ~15% → 25%
• 3 hours a day of manual call review given back to the call center manager

Centralization that created a mess

The phone is the whole game in a market where 20 million people live within two hours of Brody Pennell's door. As the platform grew, leadership centralized its scattered call centers under one roof. The strategy was right, but every location dragged its own vendors into the consolidation, and none of them talked to each other. Director of Operations David Salgado was logging into four or five separate platforms, one each for text, web scheduling, overflow, and chat, with a different company to call whenever something broke.

• "If one of them booked a call wrong, I had to go to two or three different places and talk to two or three different companies to fix it. I got tired of it." — David Salgado, Director of Operations and Strategic Analytics

Because the software providers were disconnected, errors reached customers directly, quoting wrong membership prices and booking appointments that never got staffed. An early AI agent in 2024 made it worse, frustrating customers who had been loyal for decades.

Collapsing four vendors into one platform

Brody Pennell replaced their entire stack. Moving four vendors and the entire customer experience onto one platform felt like a real bet, but the Avoca team flew to LA, whiteboarded the operation, and tailored the AI to how Brody Pennell actually works. What sold Lawrence was hearing it live: David would put a call on speaker and casually book an appointment, over a year after AI had been a disaster for them.

Avoca now runs as a single layer. Responder handles overflow and inbound calls, reading capacity in ServiceTitan and booking the right job on the right technician in the right slot, with the correct tags, notes, and marketing campaign attached automatically. Coach grades every CSR. Speed to Lead works social and web leads. Chat, web scheduling, and outbound campaigns all live in one dashboard.

Every call answered, even in a heat wave

Brody Pennell's phones ring 1,200 to 1,300 times on a normal day, and a heat wave can double or triple that overnight. The old model lived or died on who showed up to work. Nowadays, every call gets answered regardless of volume or staffing.

Coach reshaped their Call Center Manager's job dramatically. Manny Andrade once spent 30 to 40% of his day reviewing calls by hand. Now Coach scores every call in seconds against a consistent rubric, surfacing patterns and flagging what needs attention.

• "It gave me back at least three hours a day. I'd equate it to a professor who has to grade 100 papers. Within a few minutes it gives you 90% of the grading." — Manny Andrade, Call Center Manager

That time goes into real coaching, and the team treats the AI as one of their own. Brody Pennell put its Avoca agent, Brittany, on the leaderboard alongside the human CSRs, where she regularly lands among the top performers.

Built to scale across every brand

The booking rate rose from a solid ~70% to 90%, capturing thousands of appointments that used to be lost. Speed to Lead lifted Facebook and Meta conversion from around 15%-20% to 25% by reaching leads within a minute of when they come in.

And because every interaction now flows through one platform, leaders trust the data accuracy. That single source of truth means Brody Pennell's leadership team reviews the same board every week, trusting the numbers down to spotting when a single dispatch fee is costing bookings. With that foundation in place, they now have the confidence to grow, adding new locations and brands without rebuilding the call center each time.