If you've never seen one of these, here's the honest version. It's a phone answering service that isn't a person and isn't a voicemail. Someone rings your number, it picks up on the second ring, it talks to them — properly, back and forth, not a menu with options one to four — and it deals with the call. Then you get a message telling you what happened.
The reason it matters isn't the technology. It's that nobody has to sit by the phone, and the calls that used to go to voicemail at 8:40pm now turn into booked jobs.
One call, five stages, about ninety seconds of the caller's time. Here it is in order.
No hold music, no "press one for sales". It answers, says which business it is, and asks how it can help — then listens to the answer and replies to what was actually said. If the number is already one of your customers it knows that, and greets them accordingly instead of asking who they are.
Three things happen. Known nuisance numbers — the ones reported by thousands of other people — never get through at all. Automated dialers give themselves away within a second or two, because there's no live person on the other end responding, and the call gets ended. And the "we can get you to the top of Google" sales script gets recognised for what it is and politely closed down.
Genuine callers never notice any of this happening. Your phone only interrupts you for real people.
Name, number, what they want, where they are, how urgent it is. That goes straight into wherever you already keep your customers — your contact list, your CRM, your job software. Whatever "CRM" you use, it means the same thing here: the place your customer records live. We connect to it rather than replacing it.
Nothing gets written on the back of a job sheet and lost, and nobody has to type up a voicemail the next morning.
It can see your real calendar — the actual one, with your existing jobs and your days off in it — so it offers times that genuinely work, takes the one the caller picks, and puts it in. They get a text confirming it before they've put the phone down, and a reminder the day before.
You decide the rules: how much notice you need, how long each job type takes, how far you'll travel, which slots are yours and untouchable.
This is the part that matters most, and it's a rule rather than a guess. It puts a human on when the caller asks for one, when it's an emergency, when someone is upset or complaining, when the job needs a judgement call on price, or any time it isn't confident it has understood. If nobody's available it takes the details and flags it as urgent so it's the first thing you see.
It also says up front that it's an assistant. It doesn't pretend to be a person, because getting caught doing that costs more than the call was worth.
Someone fills in the form on your website, or messages your Facebook page, then carries on shopping around. Whoever calls them first usually gets the job, and "first" in practice means minutes, not the same afternoon.
So it calls them — while they're still sat there with your website open — has the same conversation it would have had if they'd rung you, and books them in. You stop losing work to whoever happened to answer quicker.
If a call does slip through — you answered and got cut off, say — it texts them straight back so the conversation carries on instead of ending.
The quote you sent a fortnight ago that nobody replied to. It follows up, politely, on a schedule you set, and stops the moment they answer.
A reminder text, and a chance to move the slot rather than just not turn up.
Every call recorded and written out as text, so you can read what was said rather than take our word for it.
Reading about this tells you very little. Listen to a call, then ring it and try to catch it out — genuinely, have a go.
Ring this number and talk to it like you'd talk to a receptionist. Ask it something awkward. Try to book something. It's a demo business, so you can't break anything real.
Standard call charges apply. We don't keep your number.
Set DEMO_PHONE_NUMBER (E.164, e.g. +15551234567) and DEMO_PHONE_DISPLAY in assets/js/config.js. This box is replaced by a tappable number automatically.
An actual enquiry, start to finish, shared with the caller's permission. Ninety seconds. Listen for the point where it checks the calendar and offers a time.
Set SAMPLE_CALL_AUDIO_URL in assets/js/config.js and the player appears here. Use a real call with the caller's written permission, and cut out any personal details.
Worth being straight about, because the demos you'll see elsewhere generally aren't. None of these are things we're about to fix — they're things a phone assistant shouldn't be doing in the first place.
anyone claiming it handles everything hasn't run one for long
No. Your number stays exactly as it is — it's on your van, your website and your Google listing, and moving it would be daft. We point calls at the assistant behind the scenes, and you can send them back to your handset whenever you like.
Yes, and quite a few people start that way — you answer during the day, it covers evenings, weekends and lunch. Most move it to all calls within a month or two, usually after seeing what it caught on a Saturday.
That's the part we build for you. It gets your services, your price ranges, your area, your lead times, what you don't do, and the questions you're sick of answering. That's the 20% we customise — it's why it doesn't sound like a script someone else is also using.
A conversation about how your calls actually go, then we build and test it, then you listen to it handling test calls and tell us what to change. You'll hear it working before it ever speaks to a customer of yours, and you sign off before it goes live.
Then we switch it off and your calls go back to ringing your handset, same as today. It sits in front of your phone rather than replacing anything, so there's nothing to unpick.
Calls are recorded and written out as text so you can check them, and callers are told at the start — that's the requirement, and it's also just fair. You choose how long recordings are kept and who can listen to them.
Book twenty minutes. We'll ask how your calls actually go, then show you it handling one — using your services and your prices, not a generic demo script.