You are under a boiler with your phone in the van. It rings. By the time you get to it, they have called the next name on Google. That is the whole problem, and it is not a discipline problem. It is physics.
Our own research found that 62% of inbound calls to UK small businesses go unanswered, and fewer than one in five callers leave a voicemail. The rest simply move on. Full numbers are in the cost of missed calls for UK small businesses.
For plumbers, electricians, heating engineers and builders, a single job is worth roughly £150 to £2,000. That is a wide range because it spans a leaking tap and a full boiler replacement, and you cannot tell which is calling until you answer.
That is also why trades tolerate paying £100 to £300 a month to lead platforms. You are buying enquiries, then racing three or four competitors to answer the same one. Your own inbound is warmer and already yours. It just needs picking up.
It answers in a natural conversation rather than a menu of options. It takes the job, the address, the access details and the contact number, and it books the slot in your diary. Urgent call-outs are flagged and put through to you. Price-checkers are handled without interrupting the job you are already on.
It also chases the quotes you sent and forgot, sends seasonal reminders for boiler services and certification renewals, and asks for the review at the point the customer is happiest. Those are the jobs that never get done because nobody has time, not because nobody knows they matter.
It does not diagnose a fault. It does not price a job. It does not decide whether something is an emergency, it applies the rules you set for what counts as one. Anything outside those rules goes to you with the full context attached rather than being guessed at.
And it does not replace you on the phone with a customer who wants to talk to the person doing the work. It covers the calls you were never going to get to.
Three cases, honestly:
You already answer nearly every call. If you have an office manager who picks up reliably, the gain is small. The value is in the calls that currently ring out, and if there are not many, there is not much to recover.
Your work is all repeat and referral. If new enquiries are rare and your diary is full from existing customers, you do not have an intake problem. Spend the money elsewhere.
You are not going to change the follow-up. Answering is only half of it. If quotes still go unchased and reviews still go unasked, you have bought a phone answerer, not a system.
Work out what you actually lose. Count the calls you missed last week, multiply by your average job value, and take a realistic conversion rate. If that number is smaller than the monthly cost, do not buy it. If it is several times larger, the decision makes itself.
We run that calculation for free as a System Score, and we will tell you when the numbers do not justify it. Full detail on how it works for trades is on the page for trades, and pricing is on the pricing page.
Will customers know it is not a person? It is a natural conversation rather than a menu of options. It takes the job, the address and the contact details and books the slot. Anything it cannot handle is passed to you with the full context, so nobody gets stuck in a loop.
Can it tell an emergency from a price-checker? It screens the call against the rules you set and flags genuine call-outs to you straight away. Routine questions are handled without pulling you off the tools. The rules are yours, not the system’s judgement.
Do I have to change how I quote or book? No. It is built around how you already work. The gap being closed is the calls and quotes nobody gets back to, not the way you price a job.
What if I already pay a lead platform? Most trades keep both at first. The difference is that these are your own enquiries, so you are not racing three other firms to call the same customer back.
Does it answer out of hours? Yes, including evenings, weekends and bank holidays. That is usually where the largest share of missed calls sits for a trade.