For Egan Landscape Group, the phone isn't a channel. It's the business. The Plymouth, Massachusetts company spent more than two decades growing from a small garden center into a full-service landscaping operation serving residential and commercial clients across the South Shore.
Their reputation is strong enough that clients wait weeks for a project to start. But getting clients to wait requires getting to them first — and in landscaping, the race to the bid starts the moment someone picks up.
When no one could pick up, Egan was losing ground. Not because of the quality of their work, but because the overflow solution they had in place wasn’t delivering the experience every call deserved.
With CallRail, Egan Landscape Group has:
- Captured 53 calls in a single week that would otherwise have gone completely unanswered.
- Shortened every callback by delivering caller name, contact details, and request summary before the team dials back.
- Removed the urgency to hire an additional person to manage peak season call volume.
- Replaced a third-party answering service with a faster, more reliable in-house setup.
- Scaled to a new service area after acquiring Briggs Landscape Construction with a single business profile update.
Before Voice Assist: An answering service that didn't deliver
Prior to implementing CallRail’s Voice Assist, the company used a third-party call center to handle calls the team couldn't reach. On paper, it looked like coverage. In reality, agents in Texas, South Carolina, and Florida were answering calls on behalf of a company whose value is built on local knowledge.
Callers felt heard. But after that, follow-through broke down. Messages arrived late, lacked context, stayed disconnected from HubSpot (their CRM), and gave Egan’s team little to act on.
During a snowstorm, callers were routed to Florida-based agents. During a mid-season irrigation emergency, there was no local escalation path. Egan needed more than after-hours coverage — they needed local context, structured handoffs, and a reliable way to escalate urgent issues.
The team's administrative assistant was doing what she could — qualifying every caller, booking directly onto account managers' calendars, and entering contact details into HubSpot while still on the phone. The system worked, but only when she could answer. At peak, she was juggling three or four simultaneous calls in a single morning.
Why missing calls in a competitive market costs jobs
In landscaping, the first callback wins the job. Clients don't wait, they call three companies and hire whoever picks up. For a company taking on projects from routine maintenance to installations worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's a high-stakes missed call. And for businesses running Google Ads or Local Service Ads, with the average cost per lead in home services at $66.02, it wastes the ad spend that drove it too.
Egan is booked out weeks ahead, running spring cleanups into July. Their reputation keeps the phone ringing, but it only converts into work if someone answers.
It's a race to the bid — clients are looking for who gets back to them first, who's cheapest, who can come out quickest. Clients choose us because of our quality of work. They know that when Egan shows up, we get the job done and exceed expectations. That’s our difference.
Abigail King
Marketing and Administrative Assistant, Egan Landscape Group
Rolling out Voice Assist at the start of peak season
Egan was already running Google Ads, Google Business Profile, and HubSpot through CallRail for call tracking and marketing attribution. What they needed was a reliable way to answer every call that came in.
When Voice Assist, CallRail’s AI voice assistant, launched last year, it was added to a couple of numbers with the answering service picking up the remaining lines.. "Let's flip it on for a couple of numbers and slowly roll it out," they said. The question was whether it could keep up with the volume.
Turns out it could. The team named their voice assistant Brooklyn, after the owner's daughter. "She's referred to in our office as a real person," Abigail said. "She's an extension of our team." On peak days, Brooklyn handled every overflow call while our administrative admin worked through the queue.
Brooklyn proved just as adaptable when Egan acquired Briggs Landscape Construction — Abigail updated Brooklyn's business profile with the new service area herself. No meetings. No retraining. Founder and President, George Egan, called to test it and said: "Wow, she answered all my questions."
How the HubSpot workflow changed every callback
The team built a HubSpot workflow so that the moment a call ended with Brooklyn, the team's shared inbox received an email with the person’s name, phone number, email address, and a plain-language summary of what they needed, including any availability details like “I can only do Mondays.”
By the time the in-office admin assistant finished her current call, she already knew what to book for the next one. No re-asking for names or contact information — just the time slot. The workflow also helps Egan’s Director of Revenue, who reviews call recordings and call quality directly in HubSpot through the Call Tracking integration, without needing a separate login.
The single biggest impact has been time back. When our in-office admin assistant is on the phone handling one appointment, Brooklyn is already handling the next three calls. By the time she hangs up, she goes straight to her inbox and sees exactly what each caller needs — name, contact info, purpose, even their preferred availability.
Abigail King
Marketing and Administrative Assistant, Egan Landscape Group
53 opportunities for first bid
In a recent seven-day period, Egan Landscape Group received 139 total calls through CallRail. Brooklyn handled 53 of them — every one that came in while someone else was already on the line. Looking at the HubSpot records, the vast majority led to appointment requests. "Without Voice Assist, those 53 calls would have been completely missed," Abigail said.
The team had also been weighing whether to bring on a second administrative person to manage peak-season volume. Brooklyn removed that urgency. Customers noticed too. As one put it: "My first interaction was Brooklyn, she's great."
For Egan, the phone is still everything. The difference now is that Brooklyn picks up when someone else can't — and every caller gets an answer.
Every call your team can't reach is a bid someone else will win
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