Industries

Seven trades. Seven completely different phone calls.

A plumbing call at 11pm and a lighting call in September have almost nothing in common: different urgency, different questions, different months, different households worth putting a postcard in front of. She's set up for the one you're in.

What's the same in all seven

Before the differences, the part we won't dress up as seven products:

  • She opens by saying she's an automated assistant and that the call is recorded.
  • She checks the ZIP against your service area before anyone is promised a visit.
  • She takes the estimate request and reads the details back.
  • She alerts you the moment someone asks for a person.
  • Every call is recorded, transcribed and filed.

Find your trade

Each one is built on the thing that actually decides that trade's phone: a burst pipe at 9pm, a heat wave, a storm morning, a house that has to be empty by Friday.

Six of those question packs are in the product today, and every one of those pages was written from the trade rather than from a template: different call, different questions, different season, different doors worth mailing. If your trade isn't here, the receptionist page covers everything except the seasonal detail, or tell us what you do and we'll go through it on a call.

Trade by trade

Four things change. Everything else is the same machine.

Most vendors' industry pages are one page with the trade name swapped. Here's the short version of what genuinely differs and, more usefully, what doesn't.

01. The call

Emergency, estimate, or season

A plumbing call is someone standing in water: it is won or lost in four minutes, at an hour nobody staffs. A landscaping call is a homeowner collecting quotes in daylight, while your whole crew is out on a mower. An HVAC call is nine people ringing inside one hot afternoon. An electrical call is somebody who does not know whether they have an inconvenience or a fire. Those want different conversations, not different logos.

02. The questions

Sixteen or seventeen, and nine of them are shared

Every trade gets asked the same nine things: hours, area, callout charge, licensing, guarantee. On top of that each trade has seven or eight of its own: drains and gas work for a plumber, filters and financing for an HVAC contractor, permits and EV chargers for an electrician, re-treats and pet safety for a pest company. She arrives holding your trade's list; you supply the answers.

03. The calendar

When the phone spikes, and when to mail

Plumbing spikes on the first hard freeze and the Thursday everyone hosts. HVAC has two surges pointing in opposite directions with the profitable months in between. Landscaping decides its whole year in about six weeks of spring. Lighting sells in ten weeks and is over. Mail has to land before the spike, not during it, and that date is different in every trade. Every page here carries its own year.

04. The households

Which attribute picks the right doors

Old houses have old pipes. Big lots need more mowing. Big rooflines take more lights. A household that just changed hands has no contractor for anything. Same mailing machine, but the attribute you sort on is the difference between a good list and a shredder full of postcards.

What does not change: she opens by saying she's an automated assistant and that the call is recorded, checks the ZIP against your service area before anyone is promised a truck, reads the details back, alerts you when someone asks for a person, and files the recording and transcript. That part is identical in all seven trades, and we're not going to dress it up as seven different products.

The shared nine

The nine questions every trade gets asked

These are the same whether you unblock drains or hang rooflines, so they're in every pack. Answer them once, in your own words, and she stops needing you on the phone for any of them.

  1. What are your hours?
  2. How soon can you come out?
  3. How do I book an appointment?
  4. What areas do you serve?Required
  5. Is there a charge to come out and look?Required
  6. What payment methods do you take?
  7. Do you guarantee your work?Required
  8. What is your cancellation policy?
  9. Are you licensed and insured?Required

Four of them she won't go live without

Leave most questions blank and the worst that happens is a polite “let me have someone confirm that.” Leave these four blank and silence itself becomes an answer, and a false one. So the product won't let her take calls until they're filled in.

  • The callout chargeSay nothing and she has effectively promised the visit is free. Free is a price, and it's the one you're most likely to charge for.
  • Licensed and insuredAsked on nearly every first call. Unanswered, it's the kind of gap where an assistant reassures someone with a claim you never made.
  • Your guaranteeSame problem, with a warranty attached: a length nobody offered is a length somebody will hold you to.
  • Your service areaWith no ZIP list there is nothing to check, so she either turns away a real customer or takes a job an hour and a half outside your area.

The pack supplies the questions. It never supplies the answers: we know what your trade gets asked, we don't know your callout fee, and inventing one would put words in her mouth you never approved.

Live voice demo

Ninety seconds tells you more than this page can.

No scripts. Not a recording. A real conversation in your browser with the same agent that answers a phone line. Ask her the awkward questions, including the ones she can't answer.

Start the voice demo

Before you start: the demo uses your microphone, and the conversation is recorded and transcribed exactly as a real call would be. What happens to it is in our privacy policy.

Worth asking, whatever your trade

  • Give her a ZIP code and see what she does with it.
  • Ask a price she hasn't been given, and watch her not invent one.
  • Ask for a human.
Today's demo answers as Delaware Holiday Lights, our sample business, so the lighting questions are the ones she's strongest on. Trade-specific demo agents are coming; until they do, judge the behaviour rather than the subject matter.
Questions

Before you pick a trade

My trade isn't one of the seven. Does she still work?
Yes. The nine shared questions cover most of what a first call is, and she's also set up from your own website, so your services and your language come across whether or not we've written a pack for you. What you'd be missing is the head start: a ready-made list of the questions your trade gets, instead of a blank page. Tell us what you do and we'll say honestly how close the fit is.
Are these seven pages the same page with the trade name swapped?
No, and that was the point of taking a while over them. Each one is built on the thing that actually decides that trade's phone, so they are different shapes: the plumbing page is one clock, the HVAC page is two opposite seasons, the roofing page is a four-hour clock and a six-week one, the roofing page is a storm week. The questions on each page are the real starter-pack questions for that trade, and the seasons are the trade's own. If two of them read identically to you, we got one of them wrong.
I do two trades. Plumbing and heating, say.
Plenty do. She's set up from your business rather than from a category, so both sets of questions can sit in the same knowledge base and she answers whichever one the caller is asking about. The trade pack is a starting point for filling her in, not a box you get locked into. Read the plumbing page and the HVAC page and take what applies from each.
Do I have to mail anything to use her?
No. Most of what's on these pages is about the phone. Mail is what you add when you want more of those calls, and every campaign includes her answering it, but the receptionist stands alone, and plenty of businesses never mail a card.
Is any of this based on your customers' results?
No, and you won't find a response rate or a cost-per-lead anywhere on this site. Everything on these pages is either how the product behaves, which you can check yourself in the demo, or a description of how the trade works. When we have results worth publishing, they'll be labelled as results.

Every one of these trades has the same first problem.

Somebody rang, and nobody picked up. Start with the trade closest to yours, or just talk to her and decide from there.