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Backlog cases cleared in under two weeks
Weeks from first interview to a fully trained team
Cambridge Air Solutions designs and manufactures industrial heating, cooling, and ventilation systems for warehouses, plants, and other high-bay facilities. Its value proposition: be the easiest company in the space to do business with.
Winter is when that promise gets tested. Heating season floods the customer service team with calls and emails — tech service requests, parts requests, everything in between. This past year, the backlog passed 2,000 cases sitting outside SLA.
Bryant Blair, Cambridge's CFO, has spent over a decade in manufacturing, almost all of it in HVAC, and runs the business by theory of constraints. "There's always one thing in your business that's keeping you from getting to the next level, and it's usually related to delivering service and value to your customers," he said. "For us, it was our inbound call center for a long time — our ability to service those customers."
Hiring the problem away was harder than it sounds. Demand swings hard: "We spike in the winter, and then it's a little calmer in the summer." 13 permanent seats in St. Louis would carry fixed cost through six months with no work to fill it — and Cambridge doesn't hire seasonally, on principle. "When we hire somebody, we're implicitly making a contract with that family," Bryant said. "We don't take those decisions lightly."
Even if the math had worked, the calendar wouldn't: "End-to-end, probably six months to hire those 13 people," said Bryant. Busy season would be over by then.
A BPO was on the table too — Bryant had worked with them before — but the setup fee meant committing before he'd learned anything, and coaching would run through someone else's chain of command. For a company where culture is the product, that was the sticking point. "We didn't want customers calling in and it not feeling like Cambridge, both from a values and a knowledge perspective," he said.
Cambridge screened Hire Bloom candidates through the same lens it uses on every local hire. "When you hire somebody for your company, culture's always a lens that you look through," Bryant said. "Why, when you're augmenting your staff internationally, would you not use that same lens?"
The interviews and the training ran through Cambridge's existing customer service agents — not through Hire Bloom, and not through a vendor's account manager. For the agents, it turned into more than a staffing exercise. "It was a great leadership opportunity for them to interview and hire people, and then train those people," Bryant said. "I've heard nothing but good things."
13 team members were onboarded in under two weeks, with about another week of training. No setup fees, and the team could flex with the season. "It really checked all our boxes for a growing company like Cambridge," Bryant said.
The backlog cleared fast. "We were able to clear that backlog in under two weeks, from our 2,000-plus down to zero, and start answering phone calls live," Bryant said. "I haven't seen anything like it before."
The cost was a fraction of what the same team would have run in St. Louis, and it required no up-front commitment. That last part is what Bryant, a self-described penny-pinching CFO, kept coming back to. This was a decision he could reverse.
"You can experiment with this in such a low-cost way," he said. "You go the traditional BPO route, you're in for $100,000 before you figure out if this is a good solution. You go the AI route and full tool automation route, you're maybe in for around the same before you figure out if it's a good solution."
His advice to operators weighing the same call: "Don't go through a one-way door and lock yourself into something. Go through a two-way door, and then if it's not working, you can dial it back or scale it up really easily." Or, more bluntly: "Step your toe into the water. Don't dive in for a half-a-million-dollar investment with no undo button."
Cambridge did strongly consider pointing AI at the problem. Bryant's answer is not the one you'd expect from a CFO staring down 2,000 open cases.
"It's right for someone in my seat to be super curious and interested in AI, but not obsessed," he said. He plays with it constantly, professionally and personally. The question was what Cambridge would actually be optimizing for.
"When you have an opportunity to get a customer on the phone, you want that to be a surprisingly delightful experience for the customer, because you don't get that opportunity very often to interact with the customer live," he said. "And so that's what we're trying to optimize — turning our customers into raving fans."
"Even though we were 2,000 cases behind, we didn't want to optimize just closing tickets," Bryant said. "If we deploy AI, it would be wonderfully effective at closing tickets. But it might not be as effective at turning those customers into raving fans."
His people know when to spend an extra five minutes on a call, hear someone out, or offer free shipping on something the SOP doesn't quite cover. "We still need a Cambridge human judgment, and our customers still expect human-to-human interaction," he said. "We're instead trying to think through how we can use AI to assist and augment the capabilities of our human operators, not have AI replace the human operators."
For operators in home services, where a company might touch 10 times the customers an OEM does, he thinks the stakes are higher, not lower. "You might not have the frequency of touchpoints that I have with my customer to recover a bad interaction," he said. "Don't waste it. Treat those touchpoints, good and bad, as the gold they are."
The advice he'd give anyone augmenting a team, domestic or international, is the same thing Cambridge went looking for: "Make sure you hire people that are culturally aligned, that are trained on your systems, that are knowledgeable with your processes and products, and feel like an extension of you."
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