AI receptionist that catches missed calls
A home-services business where this lands in Customer Service.
02 — What is actually going wrong
Your techs are under a house or up a ladder when the phone rings, so calls go to voicemail. Most callers do not leave one — they ring the next plumber on the list. The lost job never shows up in any report, which is exactly why it goes unfixed for years.
How it works
Calls that ring out roll to a voice agent instead of voicemail. It answers in your business name, works out whether the job is an emergency, quotes your standard callout, and books straight into the dispatch calendar. Anything it cannot handle it takes details for and texts to you.
What good looks like
Your voicemail box stops filling up. Every morning there are jobs on the calendar that were booked while nobody was at a desk, and the after-hours callers who used to vanish are now showing as first-appointment slots.
03 — The problem, in money
- Missed calls per week22 calls50 callsPlaceholder — not a validated benchmarkStarting point
- Booking rate on recovered calls0.35 ratio0.5 ratioPlaceholder — not a validated benchmarkStarting point
- Average job value450 USD2,530 USDPlaceholder — not a validated benchmarkStarting point
04 — The options
05 — The call
Buy it. An off-the-shelf tool wins this one — it gets you live faster, and the math does not justify building from scratch.
06 — How this goes wrong
- Letting it quote prices on jobs it cannot see. Callout fee, yes; "roughly two grand for a hot water cylinder", no — you will be held to it.
- No handover path. If the agent cannot answer, it must take a number and text a human, not loop the caller through the same three questions.
- Booking into a calendar that is not the real one. If dispatch runs off a whiteboard, you will double-book a van in week one.
- Leaving the emergency script generic. A burst pipe and a dripping tap need different urgency, and getting that backwards costs more than the missed call did.
07 — How you would actually do it
- 01Measure the real number first: pull a month of call logs and count rung-out and after-hours calls. This is also your baseline.
- 02Pick the failover point — usually ring-for-20-seconds, then divert, so humans still get first crack.
- 03Write the call script around your five most common job types and your actual callout fee.
- 04Connect it to the dispatch calendar with write access to one test technician only.
- 05Run it after-hours for two weeks before letting it take daytime overflow.
- 06Review transcripts weekly for the first month — that is where the script bugs live.
08 — Tools worth looking at
Named for orientation, not endorsement. No affiliate arrangements, and nothing here has been paid for.
09 — Run it on your numbers
Start from industry averages, then drag the inputs to match your business. The number moves live.Drag each input to your number — the starting points are neutral midpoints, not industry data. The number moves live.
10 — The evidence · what others report
Reported numbers are third-party claims, source-attributed — not verified by me, and never blended into the model above.
11 — Questions owners ask
Is this your business?
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