A plumber's phone rings at 10:40 on a Tuesday. They're under a bathroom floor with a pipe cutter in one hand. The phone is in the van.
At 10:41 the caller rings the next plumber on the list. At 10:43 they've booked a job.
That's the trades in one sentence. It isn't a marketing problem; the customer found you. It isn't a pricing problem; they never got to pricing. It's an availability problem, and it's structural: the thing that makes you good at the job makes you impossible to reach while you're doing it.
Missed calls are the biggest line item nobody tracks
Ask a sole trader how many calls they missed last month and they won't know. The number doesn't exist anywhere. There's no voicemail from most of them, because people looking for a plumber don't leave voicemails. They call the next result.
That invisible number is usually larger than any other loss in the business, and it's the one nobody's optimising.
What the customer wants to know
The list is short and boringly consistent:
- Do you cover my area?
- What do you charge to come out?
- Can you come today? Tomorrow?
- Do you do [specific job]?
- Are you registered / certified / insured?
That's it. Five questions, all answerable from your website, none requiring you to climb out of a loft.
A bot answering them means the caller who would have moved on instead gives you their details and waits, because they got an answer and now have a reason to.
Capturing a job properly
The difference between a lead and a usable lead is detail. Configure the bot to gather:
- Postcode: first, because it rules out the jobs you can't take
- What's the problem, in their words
- How urgent: is water actively coming in, is there no heating, or can it wait
- Property type: house, flat, commercial
- Access: are they there, is there parking
- Phone number
You come out of the job at four and instead of three missed calls you have three briefed jobs, sorted by urgency, with postcodes you can route into tomorrow's run.
For multi-van operations the biggest gain is rarely the extra leads. It is that leads arrive with postcodes attached, so the office can group them geographically instead of sending vans back and forth across town all week.
Emergencies need a script, not a conversation
Trades touch gas, water, and electricity, so this needs to be written rather than inferred.
If a customer mentions a gas smell, carbon monoxide, a burning smell, sparking, or water actively flooding a property, the bot's only job is a scripted safety instruction (turn off the supply at the stopcock or consumer unit, leave the property if it's gas, call the emergency number), followed by an immediate escalation to you.
It should not attempt to diagnose. It should not suggest anything the customer could try. A model improvising about a gas appliance is a serious risk, and one clear instruction eliminates it.
The pricing question
Most tradespeople are cagey about publishing prices, and most customers ask about price first. That tension is worth resolving.
Publish what you reasonably can. Call-out charge, hourly rate, minimum charge, whether the first hour includes materials. Let the bot answer those directly. It's what the caller wanted and it filters out the people who were only ever going to be shocked by the figure.
For the job itself, the honest answer is that it needs looking at. The bot should say so plainly and capture the details so you can quote. Customers accept that readily; what they don't accept is being told nothing.
Out of hours is a second shift
Home-service enquiries don't stop at five. Boilers fail in the evening. Leaks start at night. People come home from work, find a problem, and look for someone.
For most trades that's a genuinely significant share of inbound, and it's currently arriving at an unanswered phone. A bot that captures a 10pm "my boiler's dead and I've got kids in the house" turns it into a first callback at seven the next morning, and you're the one who responded, so you get the job.
The limits worth setting
Don't let it promise a time slot. Your day depends on how the current job goes, and a bot booking you for two o'clock when you're still fighting a seized valve creates an unhappy customer and a phone call you have to make.
Don't let it quote firmly. Don't let it guarantee availability. Don't let it advise on anything the customer might attempt themselves.
Set expectations honestly instead: "I'll get this to [name] now. They usually call back within a couple of hours during the working day."
What setup involves
Point it at your website so it learns your services, coverage area, rates, and certifications. If you don't have much of a website, that's fine; the essentials fit on one page, and writing them down is worth doing anyway.
Set the capture fields above, add the emergency script, and set an urgency flag.
An evening's work, and then it runs while you're on the tools.
Knowing whether it's working
Enquiries captured during working hours: the calls you'd never have known about. For most sole traders that's the majority of what they've been losing, and seeing the number for the first time is usually the moment the case makes itself.