The third-generation New England pest-control company uses Pest SOS as a flexible extension of its office—capturing overflow calls and helping customers feel like they’re talking to the family business no matter when they call in.
Challenge
Seasonal pest activity can push Ed Lavery & Sons from comfortably busy to completely overwhelmed in a matter of weeks. With a lean office team supporting five full-time technicians, the company needed additional call coverage that could keep up during peak times without making a family-owned business sound like a sterile call center.
Solution
Pest SOS learned Lavery’s services, pricing, processes, and technician capabilities, then developed a dynamic profile their agents use to cover overflow and after hours calls. Pest SOS allows Lavery to capture inbound business while keeping time-to-answer low.
Results
Ed Lavery & Sons uses Pest SOS to expand its team’s inbound capacity when its internal team is already on the phone, when staffing changes unexpectedly, and outside normal office hours. Working inside FieldRoutes, Pest SOS agents quote and schedule services, collect payment information, and provide detailed handoffs when an issue needs to come back to the internal team.
The Client: Ed Lavery & Sons Pest Control
Ed Lavery & Sons Pest Control is a third-generation, family-owned Connecticut pest control company serving Hartford and Northern Middlesex counties. Founded in 1960, the company has spent more than 65 years combining local expertise with a modern approach to service—summed up by its tagline, “Generational Trust. Modern Protection.”
That approach has accelerated under current owner Eric Lavery, who has brought a technology-forward mindset and new systems that have helped fuel the company’s growth.
But modernization hasn’t changed what customers value most. Ed Lavery & Sons holds a 4.9-star Google rating across roughly 500 reviews, with customers frequently praising knowledgeable, personable technicians, thorough service, responsiveness, reliability, and clear communication.
As the business grows, the challenge is preserving that experience: technology and added capacity can make Ed Lavery & Sons more efficient, but customers should still feel like they’re working with a knowledgeable, responsive family business.
The Challenge: Adding capacity without losing the family-business experience
Lavery had worked with an answering service before Pest SOS. The answering service gave customers someone to talk to when Lavery’s internal team couldn’t answer, but as the provider grew and changed its hiring practices, Kim says the customer experience suffered.
The deeper need went beyond traditional after-hours answering.
Much of Ed Lavery & Sons’ demand for Pest SOS actually happens during the workday. When everyone in the internal office is already speaking to customers, another call can arrive with nobody available to take it.
“A lot of it for us isn’t even nights and weekends. A lot of times, it’s overflow at peak hours during the day. If we’re all on the phone, we need somebody else who can answer and do a good job. ”
— Kim Lavery, Operations Manager
At the time of the interview, one office employee was beginning an eight-week medical leave. Rather than immediately hiring another full-time employee for a temporary staffing gap, Ed Lavery & Sons could tell Pest SOS to anticipate greater call volume and increase its coverage.
For a small family business, though, simply routing more calls to a call center wasn’t enough.
The person answering needed to sound knowledgeable, communicate clearly, and represent the company in a way that still felt like Ed Lavery & Sons.
The Solution: Pest SOS adds flexible virtual headcount to Lavery’s in-office customer service team
Kim describes Pest SOS onboarding primarily as a process of getting to know the business.
By the time Lavery signed on, the company already felt confident that Pest SOS could provide the coverage it needed. The more important onboarding work was building a detailed business profile so Pest SOS representatives could understand the company well enough to speak knowledgeably with customers.
“As an extension of us, they needed to be able to talk knowledgeably—like they were here in our office.”
— Kim Lavery, Operations Manager
Lavery and Pest SOS continue to communicate about service areas, available services, technician turnover, and individual technician capabilities. If only certain technicians can perform a wood-destroying-insect inspection, for example, Pest SOS needs to know that before offering an appointment. Regular touchpoints help align the Pest SOS team with what’s actually happening inside the business.
Because they work directly in Ed Lavery & Sons’ FieldRoutes environment, agents can create customer cards, start leads for service agreements, quote pricing, update payment information, and schedule work when capacity is available. They can also make outbound follow-up calls on sales opportunities.
“The goal is for them to be like another person in the office—being able to handle the majority of those things.”
— Kim Lavery, Operations Manager
Not every customer request can or should be resolved by Pest SOS.
When a call falls outside the agents’ scope, the value of the service shifts from direct resolution to providing good information for the in-house office staff to follow up on.
Kim says Pest SOS provides the customer ID and detailed notes explaining what happened. That means when someone from Ed Lavery & Sons calls the customer back, they aren’t starting the conversation over from the beginning.
If a technician wasn’t available in the customer’s area, the internal team can call back with a plan for fitting the job into the schedule. If the customer lives just outside the normal service territory, the team can make a deliberate decision about whether the opportunity is worth accommodating.
“When we call back, we feel prepared to pick up right where they left off.”
— Kim Lavery, Operations Manager
A newer Pest SOS client dashboard has made that visibility even more useful. Kim says the centralized view gives the team one place to see calls, notes, and referrals instead of piecing information together through FieldRoutes and other reports.
For an office already operating near capacity during the busy season, a cleaner handoff means less hassle for in-office agents and technicians.
The Results:
For Ed Lavery & Sons, Pest SOS is less about replacing internal staff than giving the existing team elastic capacity.
When seasonal demand rises, Pest SOS can absorb more overflow. When someone in the office is unexpectedly unavailable for an extended period, Ed Lavery & Sons can adjust its minutes rather than immediately make a long-term staffing decision. When all of the internal CSRs are already on the phone, the customer can still reach someone who’s equipped to find a solution.
Kim says Pest SOS has been a “very big help,” especially at peak times when the internal office is already occupied. But the strongest result may be less visible than the additional capacity.
“The representatives are personable, they’re easy to understand, and they communicate clearly with our customers. A lot of times customers don’t even realize—they just think it’s somebody else in the office.”
— Kim Lavery, Operations Manager
Customers may be reaching an outside partner, but Kim doesn’t want the experience to feel like they’ve been routed to a disconnected remote call center. Pest SOS works best when that distinction disappears for the customer.
Pest SOS delivers for Lavery in three ways: it expands the number of calls the business can handle, keeps average time-to-answer low, and delivers the personal experience customers expect from a family-run company.
The same level of personal service extends to the way Pest SOS interacts with its customers. When something needs to work differently, the company raises it with Pest SOS and looks for a solution.
Pest SOS, she says, is receptive to that feedback.
We’re not the type to wait until issues become big issues. It’s, ‘What do we do about this? How do we make this better? How do we fix that?’ They’re really good at listening and trying to work with us to make sure it still works for us.
— Kim Lavery, Operations Manager
That same communication happens around capacity. When Ed Lavery & Sons recently realized it would need more minutes, Pest SOS met with the team and followed up within hours with different plan options.
It is a fitting relationship for a company that spends every winter asking what it can improve before the next busy season arrives.
Ed Lavery & Sons has used technology to help accelerate its growth. Pest SOS provides a flexible way to manage what comes along with that growth: more calls, more customer conversations, and more moments when the internal office simply needs another capable person on the phone.
And crucially for the customers that call in, that extra person still feels like part of the brand Ed Lavery & Sons have worked so hard to cultivate.