Trades

Custom AI receptionists for home services and trades

Start free pilotFree pilot. About 14 days to a working line, no call limit.

Most calls to a trade open with a price question that cannot honestly be answered without seeing the job, and the correct response is a site visit or a fee with a condition attached rather than a number invented to keep the caller on the line. That is the one thing every trade shares. Almost nothing else is shared: a plumber's emergency is water already causing damage, an HVAC company's is a thermometer, an electrician's is a hazard the caller has described as routine, and a landscaper's is a selling season measured in weeks. Each has its own page below.

This is the parent page for the trades. If your work is one of the four below, that page is written for you specifically; this one is the argument they have in common.

Which trade are you?

Four pages, four genuinely different phone problems. Each carries an asset (a named client, a model, or an annotated call) that exists on no other page.

  • Plumbers

    The damage is still getting worse while the phone rings

    The only trade call where hold time converts directly into property damage. Carries an annotated example of the first thirty seconds of a live-water call, where the shut-off instruction comes before the booking.

    AI receptionists for plumbers

  • HVAC

    Demand set by a thermometer, capacity set by trucks

    The only trade whose spike arrives with no notice. Carries a capacity model for a deep-freeze morning, worked from the side a contractor actually controls: crews times jobs per day.

    AI receptionists for HVAC companies

  • Electricians

    The urgent calls are the ones that sound calm

    A safety filter rather than a booking tool. Carries the triage rule set: which caller descriptions must never be taken as a Tuesday appointment, and why the caller's own framing has to be overridden.

    AI receptionists for electricians

  • Landscaping & snow

    80 calls, 15 weeks, 86% from first-time callers

    A season measured in weeks, where a missed call in May costs months of billing. Carries the Lammer case: real first-party numbers from a Calgary company, published with their agreement.

    AI receptionists for landscaping companies

What happens to trade phone calls?

Roughly half are answered by a person, and speed is a deciding factor for a quarter of customers. These figures describe the category rather than any one trade.

What do all four trades have in common?

One thing, and it is the reason a booking-optimised agent is the wrong shape for any of them: the honest answer to the opening question is frequently not a number, and frequently not a booking either.

The honest answer to "how much to unclog a drain" is not a price. It is a stated diagnostic or call-out fee with a condition attached (credited to the repair if the customer proceeds) and a site visit to see the job. That is a smaller commitment than a booked job, and an agent measured on booking rate has every incentive to give the caller a number instead.

The same structure shows up everywhere in these trades once you look for it. The correct answer during a snow event, when every crew is out, is an honest wait rather than a slot. The correct answer to a caller outside your radius is to say so. The correct answer to a hot electrical panel is not an appointment at all. Each of those costs the agent a booking, which is precisely why the metric matters.

What we build instead is one line for one business, against rules that business decided: what may not be said about price, how far the trucks actually go, what happens when capacity is gone, and which calls stop being scheduling conversations altogether. Those decisions are made before the line takes a call rather than improvised on the busiest morning of the year.

If a bundled agent already does that for your shop, use it. The case for a built line is specifically the calls where the right answer costs you a booking, and every one of these four trades has a version of that call.

Every one of these trades has a call where the right answer costs you a booking: a site visit, an honest wait, a refusal. AnswerAI is built against your rules rather than against a booking-rate metric, which is why it gets those calls right.

Nick Lovett, Founder, AnswerAI

The quickest way to settle it is to hear a line built for your shop, and ask it what it costs to unclog a drain.

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Questions contractors ask

It can quote whatever you tell it to quote, and nothing else. For most trades that means a stated diagnostic or trip fee with its condition attached rather than a job price. What it will not do is invent a number to keep somebody on the line, because that number becomes an argument on site.

Start with whichever generates the calls you most dislike losing. The pages differ on the phone problem rather than on the work: a company doing both plumbing and HVAC has two genuinely different phone problems and the build handles both, but the arguments are clearest read separately.

Yes. Service radius and travel time are part of what gets built, because a job booked outside the radius is worse than a missed call; it turns a lost lead into an angry customer and a wasted truck roll.

The bundled agents are configured from the fields already in your CRM and optimised for booking rate, which is the metric the platform can show its own customers. That works when the right answer is a booking. It fails exactly where these trades make their money: a site visit, a fee with a condition, or a refusal to promise a slot the truck cannot reach.

It escalates on a rule you set: a transfer to a live number, a page, or a text to the owner. The line does not decide what counts as an emergency; you define the triggers and it applies them the same way at midnight as at noon. Each trade page has more detail on what those triggers usually are.

Let's build one for your shop and find out.

We build a working line for your services, your pricing rules, your service radius and your escalation rules, and you call it yourself. About 14 days. No call limit during the pilot.

Start free pilot

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