Column: Yelp Will Answer Your Leads. Who Owns the Conversation?

Since Oct. 1, Google has charged Local Services Ads advertisers for some calls nobody picks up: business-hours calls where the caller hangs on for more than 20 seconds, according to PPC Land. A missed call used to cost you a customer. Now it can also cost you the ad fee.

Three weeks later, Yelp priced the other side of that problem. Smart Lead Reply, rolling out in November for $30 a month, answers Request a Quote messages inside Yelp's own threads, gathers project details, qualifies the lead and shares a scheduling link, PPC Land reported from the company's Oct. 20 release. Every conversation is logged in the business's Yelp inbox.

Here is my position. Instant response is no longer a competitive edge. It is rent. The fight that matters for franchise systems is where the conversation ends up after the software has it.

The answer-rate problem is real, and a vendor's own data shows how bad it is. Invoca's July benchmark, drawn from its customer base, found 52% of home services calls reach a person, and 34% in HVAC. Any franchisee whose phone rings into a truck at 9 p.m. should want something answering it.

But look at who is offering. Yelp agreed in January to buy Hatch, which builds AI agents for service businesses, for about $270 million, per PPC Land. ServiceTitan used its Pantheon event this month to unveil 30 agents of its own, The Inference reported. Every platform a location touches now wants to be the thing that answers.

Run that forward inside a franchise system. One location has an agent replying in Yelp threads, trained on its Yelp page. Another uses whatever its field software ships. A third pays an answering service. Corporate sees none of it. The brand spent years writing standards for what a customer hears on the phone, and the first words a lead now gets may come from whichever marketplace the lead walked in through, with the record sitting in that marketplace's inbox.

I made a version of this argument earlier this month: the agent race is really a data race. Yelp's pricing sharpens it. At $30, the agent is close to free. The conversation history is the valuable part, and it is the part the location does not control.

Let me push back on myself. A single-unit roofer does not care about system data strategy. He cares about the lead that arrives at dinner. Thirty dollars is cheap insurance, and I would not tell him to skip it. And yes, Yelp has every incentive to make its agent good, because its services ad business depends on leads converting.

The point is narrower. The franchisor should decide what the agent knows and where the record lands, not leave it to each marketplace. Batteries Plus made that call when it put its own agents on store phones and franchise sales. Franchisees who aren't waiting for corporate will make it for themselves if the brand does not.

Revscale, which publishes this site, builds one version of that system-owned layer: AI agents configured in plain language, including an Inbound Agent that answers inquiries, asks qualifying questions, scores and routes the lead, and keeps the full conversation on the lead record, and a Voice Agent that answers and transcribes calls. That activity lands in Revscale CRM and can flow into the CRM a system already runs. Other approaches exist. What matters is that the brand, not the lead source, holds the transcript.

What I don't know: Yelp has not published accuracy figures, said whether owners can approve replies before they go out, or said whether the agent runs on Hatch technology. Google has not explained how it classifies calls an AI agent picks up. Those answers will shape the math.

The question for franchisors heading into next year's tech fee conversations is simple. When software answers your customer, whose inbox does the answer go to?

Revscale Media is published by Revscale.