Is an AI phone receptionist worth it for a small trades firm?
An AI phone receptionist is worth it for a small trades firm that misses calls while it is on a job, and loses those callers to the next firm in the search results. For tradesmen it picks up when nobody can, takes the details, books a slot in your calendar and sends you the rest. With us the setup costs £750, before VAT.
Picture a heating engineer halfway through a boiler swap on a cold February morning. The phone buzzes twice in a jacket on the landing. By the time the old boiler is off the wall and the engineer has washed their hands, one caller has left a voicemail. The other left nothing, because water was coming through their kitchen ceiling and the next plumber on Google answered. A painter up a ladder, an electrician in a loft or a roofer on a scaffold loses calls the same way.
The receptionist is for that second caller. It answers in your firm's name, asks what the job is, where it is and how soon it needs doing, and offers a time from your calendar for a visit. You get the name, the number, the address and a short account of the call. When you ring back at lunch, you start with the facts in front of you.
We would rather it did less than more. A receptionist should not quote for a job nobody has seen, guess at a fault over the phone, or promise a van within the hour. Those calls come to you with the details. Owners who expect software to price their work are usually the ones disappointed by it.
The setup fee is our work: writing what it says and asks, and connecting it to the calendar you already use. The service it runs on is billed by its vendor, at cost, and that bill depends on how many calls it answers. A typical starting figure is £20 a month. If you want us to read what it said each month, correct what it got wrong and show you both, our managed plan costs £175 a month.
Starting prices, UK, before VAT
AI phone receptionist
from£750
Picks up when you cannot: takes the details, books the slot, sends you the rest.
AI assistant, managed
£175/mo
We read what it said each month, correct what it got wrong, and show you both.
Whether it pays comes down to a sum you can do tonight. Open your phone's call log and count last month's missed calls from numbers you did not know. Then think about what one won job is worth. A firm that fits boilers or replaces roofs can cover the setup with one or two jobs it would otherwise have lost. A firm doing small repairs with a diary full for six weeks gains little from more calls.
Some firms should not buy one. A sole trader whose work comes from regular customers who ring to speak to them by name will find some of those customers do not want to talk to software. A firm with someone in the office during the day only has a gap in the evenings and at weekends, and a voicemail greeting that says when you will call back covers much of that for nothing. Then there are the sales calls. If most of what you miss is people selling energy deals and listings, the receptionist will answer those politely too, and you pay for the minutes.
Look at the website before the phone. A number in small print at the foot of the page, with no word on when you answer, sends people ringing at random and giving up. On a trades site we put the number first and say when you pick up, and a quote form takes the people who would rather write than call.
Our first question to a trades firm asking about a receptionist is how many calls went unanswered last week. Send us that number and what a typical job is worth to you, and we will say whether the receptionist would earn its cost or whether a better voicemail greeting will do for now.
Written by Maksym Gavrylenko · Published