How Family-Owned Tragar Made AI Work for Oil Delivery and HVAC
Key results
Summary
Tragar Home Services, a three-generation, family-owned business, provides oil delivery, HVAC, and plumbing to the Long Island community. For seven decades, Tragar has built its reputation by combining technical expertise with a deeply personal, family-first approach to service.
Their North Star? Treat every customer like an extension of their family.
That got harder as Tragar grew.
Customers expected ever-faster responses, and demand outpaced what a 10-person call center could reasonably handle. Meanwhile, Tragar runs its CRM on Cargas, a purpose-built CRM for oil delivery, and its lead management in Zoho. These systems were disconnected, depriving Tragar of a single place to manage the end-to-end customer journey.
Tragar sought a way to use AI to elevate its standards of service without losing the personal touch that made customers trust the brand for generations.
After seeing that Netic could handle the nuances of oil delivery and a disparate tech stack, Tragar chose Netic as its AI partner. Tragar wasn’t looking for a tool to answer phones; they sought a comprehensive AI solution that scaled while still delivering exceptional, personal service to customers.
Today, Tragar is Netic First (N1), which means that AI is now the first point of contact on every channel, with Tragar’s own workflows, service standards, and operational rules built into the system. Tragar put in the time upfront to define exactly how it wanted the system to serve its customers. From that diligence, Netic learned the nuances of oil delivery and collaborated with Tragar to unify systems, consolidate legacy platforms, and eliminate the need for a third-party answering service.
Netic has already handled 22,000+ calls and processed over 6,000 leads, all with no hold times. By capturing demand that was already coming into the business more efficiently, Tragar was able to keep its board full and pause paid lead generation during peak seasonal demand.
Tragar didn’t adopt AI to replace the humans that power its promise. As Tragar continues to grow, Netic empowers Tragar’s employees to best spend their time delivering fast responses and trusted service to Long Island.
Now every Long Islander gets a seamless, 24/7 booking experience from the family business they know. This is Tragar’s story.
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A family-owned business treats Long Island like family
In 1956, World War II veteran John Traina started Tragar Home Services with nothing more than an oil truck. John’s business model was simple: when a Long Island home ran out of heat, no matter the time of day, he would show up with oil in his truck ready to help out.
His son took the wheel after serving in Vietnam, expanding into HVAC and growing Tragar into a full home services business. Then John's grandson, Dennis, joined after college and never looked back, continuing the family tradition of serving Long Island as Tragar’s CEO.
Though Tragar now provides HVAC and plumbing, oil delivery remains core to their operation.
It’s a 24/7 business: families always need heat even if a cold snap hits at midnight. That reputation came from decades of showing up, answering the call, and doing the right thing for their Long Island family.
A family mindset, beyond business
In 2024, Tragar launched Fueling Kindness, a nonprofit that has delivered tens of thousands of gallons of free heating oil to families in need.
During a cold night this past winter, Fueling Kindness delivered 150 gallons of free heating oil to a family with three young children. They'd been trying to fill their tank with diesel cans, and Dennis handed the mother a $200 grocery gift card. She called her husband to say they could afford to put food on the table that night.
Tragar wanted an AI partner that upheld the same family-first standard.
The AI partner that could deeply understand oil delivery
The oil delivery business demands precision at every step: deliveries recur every few weeks based on weather and each home's fuel levels, and Tragar has to track which customers are on automatic delivery plans and/or prefer COD delivery orders.
Meanwhile, because oil is a commodity on a global market, prices change daily, and shift further based on prepay agreements, credit terms, and the size of each delivery. Tragar had explored other AI systems, but hadn’t come across one that could tackle the complexities of oil delivery; they had assumed AI could only help them handle their HVAC business.
As CEO Dennis Traina explains, oil had "unique nuances that much of the HVAC industry does not have."
Then, Tragar met Netic at a home services trade show and saw a technology partner that could meet the complexity of its business, not force the business into a generic AI model.
"From the minute I met the team, you could see the future laid out. Not going with Netic was just not an option,” says Dennis. “The amount of communication and connection to my pain points was unmatched. I knew Netic would be able to dive deep into oil delivery and help us serve our customers.”
Netic’s engineers learned from Tragar’s leadership, operations, call center, and service teams to understand the real-world details of the business. Because of Tragar’s deep understanding of its pain points, processes, and customer expectations, Netic was able to use its AI infrastructure to bridge disconnected systems and improve the customer experience at scale.
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Bridging Cargas and Zoho with AI
To manage its oil operations, Tragar uses Cargas, a CRM built for fuel delivery; Cargas handles Tragar’s oil delivery end-to-end, predicting fuel needs from weather, scheduling deliveries, and routing trucks. Sales and lead generation are handled on Zoho.
"Our systems don't talk," Dennis explained. "Cargas is its own identity and Zoho is its own identity. If we want to run efficiently, you need to be able to track whether a customer is active or inactive, a lead or not a lead, in one system or the other."
Tragar knew it couldn’t just plug in cookie-cutter AI and hope it worked. To enable AI to operate holistically across Tragar’s business and provide a consistent customer experience, Tragar and Netic worked closely together to connect Cargas and Zoho, combining Tragar’s extensive operational knowledge with Netic’s AI infrastructure to bridge data across systems.
COO Steve Heller oversaw the process. “We’ve always been looking for solutions to make this whole thing run smoother. I’ve been so impressed by how quickly they’ve learned our tech stack and provided that continuity.”
The result was a first in Tragar history: one connected view of every customer across oil and HVAC, in a single source of truth. With better system continuity in place, Tragar could focus on the bigger goal: delivering a faster, more consistent customer experience without compromising its family-owned service model.
Going Netic First to deliver AI-enabled, gold-standard service to every single customer
In the era of Amazon and DoorDash, customers have sky-high expectations for responsiveness. That expectation isn't optional in oil delivery and HVAC. A slow response means a homeowner doesn’t get the help they need, or takes their business elsewhere.
Tragar's team worked hard to keep its call center responsive, but with thousands of calls, especially during surges, the volume was too much to handle for a 10-person operation. A third-party answering service Tragar tried didn’t meet the bar for an excellent experience. Hold times climbed, and Tragar was not able to deliver on their family promise to every customer in need.
Eventually, Tragar made the strategic decision to go Netic First (N1) by putting AI at the front end of customer response. Naming their agent Christine, Tragar uses Netic as the first point of contact when a customer reaches out on any channel, including calls, SMS, web booking, web chat, lead aggregators, and more. Netic answers instantly and books jobs using Tragar’s established processes and operational expertise. Netic’s AI also hands off the call to a live rep when needed.
Most importantly, Christine is an extension of Tragar, not a replacement for its quality customer care. The system was built around the gold-standard treatment Tragar provides to its customers.
Netic worked with call center manager Megan O'Shaughnessy to deploy Christine, mapping Tragar's workflows end-to-end and learning how it served its customers on live calls.
"Netic did a great job taking all of our step-by-step processes and just learning what we do every day,” Megan says. "Hearing how smooth the conversation was, it sounded very human-like. We’re able to book leads right off the bat without having them wait for a call back. It really has made a huge difference in our lead response time."
“We paused our ad spend”
Tragar witnessed the results within weeks. Since going N1 across customer channels, Netic has handled over 22,000 calls and captured 6,000+ leads.
"Be careful what you ask for," Dennis adds. "Once you have no hold times, no dropped calls, and every call answered, you're going to book more. And that's exactly what happened."
Tragar’s technicians went from "we need more leads" to overbooked. Dennis was excited that “we could pause paid advertising; Netic was capturing enough existing call volume to meet our seasonal demand.”
The change on the customer’s end is just as noticeable. "The homeowner experience has changed significantly for the better," Megan says. Long Islanders can now book a routine oil tune-up in a single call, without waiting on hold or getting transferred.
Tragar's team initially feared AI would make service cold and impersonal. Dennis found otherwise.
"People think AI is here to replace jobs, or to be more efficient and less connected to your customer," he says. "It’s completely the opposite. The staff has embraced it. Customers appreciate the faster response times. AI has become a new way for us to deliver value and strengthen the connection."
Now, instead of pulling employees from dispatch, customer support, or sales follow-up, Tragar lets its people focus on the moments where human judgment and relationship-building matter most.
“The single most impactful technology investment I’ve made in the last five years”
For a business built on treating Long Island like family, Tragar’s investment gives them back the time and money to do what Tragar does best: show up for its customers and uphold its three-generation promise. Tragar used technology to elevate, not replace, its mission. Netic scales Tragar’s seventy-year family promise to more customers than ever.
Tragar’s success proves that AI doesn’t have to replace humans or make a family business less personal. When built with discipline and conscientiousness on the right values, the right processes, and the right team, it enhances an entire community.
It's been an honor partnering with Tragar; we can't wait to see what they continue to accomplish.
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