Automating the Redial, Not the Relationship

By Pam Torrey, Senior Director of Marketing at Leaping AI

Bath Experts is the exclusive Jacuzzi Bath Remodel dealer across Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky, and last summer the company added a Cabinet Refacing division in its Indianapolis and Cincinnati markets. For the first episode of Built for Growth, I sat down with Jay Shah, the company's VP of Marketing, to talk about lead databases, specifically, what happens to all the leads that don't convert on the first call. 

Jay's team works with more than 90 lead and publication partners, a mix of traditional and digital, mostly on a performance basis. That kind of volume is a good problem to have. New leads get dialed fast and get most of the attention, which is exactly as it should be. But every partner relationship, every campaign, every aggregator adds to a pile that never stops growing: the leads that didn't convert on the first call, or the second, and then quietly stopped getting called at all. 

"Every company is sitting on a lead database," Jay told me. "Some of those contacts have value. Others you're never going to talk to." For Bath Experts, that pile was tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of leads. 

Where Aged Lead Reactivation Runs Into TCPA Compliance 

The instinct is to treat a backlog like that as a marketing problem, something you fix with more channels and sharper creative. Bath Experts does run a full mix of reactivation channels: third-party call centers doing warm transfers, email campaigns, direct mail. But Jay was clear that compliance sets the real boundary on that list, not creative or budget. Anything over 90 days old gets scrubbed against the federal Do Not Call list to stay TCPA compliant, which cuts the usable list considerably. Whatever's left inside that window is where the actual opportunity sits. 

That's the window Leaping AI was built to work. When Bath Experts started, Leaping only touched leads older than a week or two. As the team got more confident in how the model performed, they moved that threshold earlier, and kept moving it. Today, Leaping dials outbound leads that are as new as 1 day old. The freshest leads, the ones that came in today, stay entirely with human agents. 

"Voice AI vendors are a dime a dozen," Jay said. "You go to a conference and you're going to be inundated with booths pitching you their voice AI product." A trusted recommendation carried more weight with him than any of it. He asked a peer in the industry for a name he could rely on, then met a member of the Leaping AI team in person at a conference. A real conversation at lunch told him more than any pitch deck could. "I wanted a partner that sort of felt genuine and was easy to get in touch with," he said. "Communication's really important for me." 

Where Bath Experts Draws the Line Between AI and Human Agents 

Getting the rest of the company on board took more than a good first impression. Ownership and other leaders at Bath Experts had the questions you'd expect: would this take jobs away from employees? What would it do to appointment quality? Jay called the skepticism fair, and he didn't try to argue his way past it. He gave the whole leadership team the phone number and asked them to call in, pretend to be a prospect, and judge for themselves. Once the sets and demos started coming in from leads the team wasn't touching before, the argument mostly made itself. "This is revenue we wouldn't have otherwise had," he told them, "if Leaping AI wasn't making these calls." 

Bath Experts drew a clear line instead of pushing automation as far as it could go. Some companies in this space let AI dial every fresh lead the moment it arrives; Bath Experts kept that territory for people. Human agents fully own day-zero leads with no exceptions and keep dialing alongside the voice AI agent once a lead ages past that point. On inbound calls, a human answers first every time; the voice agent only picks up if no one gets to the call within 20 seconds, or if it comes in outside business hours. 

"The goal with AI is to close the gaps in our processes," Jay said, "not to replace the processes altogether." That line matters more than it sounds like it should. It's the difference between automation that fills a real hole in your operation and automation that just replaces people doing a job they were already doing fine. 

Rolling Out Voice AI in Under a Month 

Operationally, the rollout was fast. Bath Experts went from kickoff to live in under a month, something Jay credits to having the right people in the room early. His marketing manager and call center manager worked alongside the Leaping team to get the CRM and Zapier integrations set up without delay, and what they built together became a reference setup Leaping now points to for other customers on the same CRM. Before Leaping AI, Bath Experts ran an offshore human call center for about a year; the switch held set rates consistent with what that team had produced, with less oversight required to keep quality in check. The company has since expanded into texting too, following the same pattern: full human confirmation at first, with more autonomy earned as the model proves itself. 

Asked what he'd tell another marketing leader considering something similar, Jay didn't mention a single feature. He talked about referrals. "A sales pitch deck puts me to sleep," he said. "But if one of my friends tells me a company's great and these are the results they drove, that carries more weight than anything else." Bath Experts fixed its lead database problem by finding the right partner first, and letting the technology follow. 

Listen to the full conversation with Jay Shah on Built for Growth, Episode 1, including how Bath Experts screens lead partners for bad data and what changed once texting entered the mix.