AI for plumbers
At 2am, a burst pipe calls whoever answers.
An AI answering service for plumbers picks up on the second ring, works out whether it is an emergency or a Thursday job, and wakes you only for the first.
The call that decides your month arrives at the worst possible hour
Plumbing has an unusual shape. Most trades get their leads during business hours and their best jobs from referrals. A plumber gets the highest-value calls of the year at two in the morning from somebody standing in water, and those callers do not leave a voicemail. They hang up and dial the next number, and they will keep dialling until a human voice answers.
The math is unforgiving. One emergency call answered can outweigh a month of quote requests. And the reason it goes unanswered is not carelessness — you were under a sink, driving, or asleep, which is where a working plumber is most of the time.
Emergency or not is the only triage question, and it is answerable
Nearly every plumbing call sorts into one of two piles within thirty seconds, and the questions that sort it are the same every time. The assistant asks them in order.
- Is water actively coming out right now, or has it stopped
- Do you know where the main shutoff is — and can you get to it
- Is it clean water, a drain backing up, or sewage
- Is it one fixture or the whole house
- Is there water near anything electrical
If the answers say active flooding or sewage, the assistant tells the caller how to shut the water off if they can, and pages whoever is on call. If they say a dripping faucet at midnight, it books a normal slot and lets you sleep.
What the assistant will not do on a plumbing call
It does not quote. A price given over the phone for a job nobody has seen is a fight waiting to happen at the door, and every plumber we have talked to has learned that the expensive way. It can state your callout or diagnostic fee if you want that published, and it stops there.
It also does not talk anybody through a repair. It can say where a shutoff usually is, because that is safety and not service. Beyond that it takes the details and gets a person on the line.
The same restraint applies to anything with a permit, a gas line, or a water heater relief valve attached to it. Those are not phone conversations under any circumstances, and the script says so explicitly rather than leaving the assistant to work it out. Every one of these boundaries gets written down in the first hour of scoping, before a single call is answered — a limit you did not decide in advance is a limit you discover in a transcript afterwards.
The daytime problem is different: nobody can pick up while their hands are wet
The after-hours calls are the dramatic ones. The volume problem is during the day. A one- or two-truck operation has nobody in an office, so every incoming call competes with the job in progress. You cannot answer with your hands in a drain, and by the time you are back in the van the caller has booked someone else. Nobody is doing anything wrong. There is simply no version of the day where a working plumber is also a receptionist.
Missed-call text-back fixes that particular loss cheaply. The caller gets a text from your number within seconds — your name, one question about what is going on. They answer by text, which is a thing they can do while they wait, and you reply between jobs instead of pulling over.
How many of these calls are actually being lost
This is the part most owners underestimate, and it is worth measuring before you buy anything. Your phone bill or CRM already knows how many calls came in outside hours, how many were never picked up, and how many voicemails were left. That last number is always the smallest, because almost nobody leaves one anymore.
The gap between calls received and calls answered is the whole business case, and it is your own data rather than a statistic we would have to source. We will pull it with you before we scope anything. If the gap is small, we will say so and you should not buy this.
Commercial and residential are not the same call
A restaurant with a backed-up line at five on a Friday is a different customer to a homeowner with a slow shower. The commercial caller needs to know your response window and whether you carry the insurance their property manager requires. They may be calling from a management company that has an account with you already.
That routing is worth writing down before anything goes live. Known account numbers, property managers with a standing arrangement, and after-hours commercial rates all behave differently to a first-time residential call, and the assistant should recognize the difference in the first thirty seconds rather than take the same generic message.
What it does not do
It does not run without supervision. For the first fortnight you read every transcript and tell us where it got something wrong, and that is not a trial period — it is how the thing gets accurate. After that you still get every transcript and summary, because a system nobody is checking is a system nobody should trust.
It also does not replace a person. If you have somebody good on the phones during the day, keep them. This covers the hours and the overflow they cannot, which for most plumbing operations is the majority of the week.
Questions
The things people ask before they hire us.
Not unless you tell it to. You set the rule for what counts as an emergency worth a phone call at 2am — usually active water, sewage, or no water in the building. Everything else gets booked or queued and is waiting for you at seven.
No. It states your callout fee if you publish one and nothing further. Quoting a job sight unseen creates an expectation you then have to argue with at the door, and that argument costs more than the call was worth.
It hands over. Distress is one of the built-in triggers for getting a human on the line, along with anyone who simply asks for one. Before it transfers it will ask whether they can reach the main shutoff, because that is the one thing that helps in the next minute.
One-truck operations are usually where it makes the most difference, because there is no office at all and every call competes with the job in progress. Start with missed-call text-back rather than a full answering build.
Yes. Your number stays yours and stays on the van. Calls forward to the assistant on the rule you choose — after hours only, after four rings, or everything — and you can switch it off from your phone.
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Find out what your after-hours calls are worth.
Tell us how many calls come in outside hours and what happens to them now. We will scope the smallest thing that fixes it, and tell you if the answer is nothing.
No pitch deck, no discovery-call gauntlet. One conversation, one straight answer.