Why an answering service for electricians is not just a message service
Four kinds of call come into an electrician's phone, and they are worth wildly different amounts. There is the one with no power. There is somebody who wants a quote. There is the landlord who needs a certificate by a date. And there is the caller who only wants a number and will ring six other people for the same number.
An answering machine treats all four identically. So does a call handler reading from a generic script. The job we are actually doing is telling them apart on the call, then doing the right thing with each one, which is why the setup conversation matters more than the answering.
The call with no power
This one is time-critical and the caller is ringing down a list. They get a person, not a recording, and they get asked the things that decide whether this is yours: the address, whether it is the whole property or one circuit, whether anything tripped and went back on, whether there is anyone in the house who needs power tonight. If your rules say that reaches you immediately, it reaches you immediately, wherever you are and whatever is in your hands.
The quote
Nobody loses a rewire because they answered the phone badly. They lose it because the enquiry sat unanswered for two days while they were on another job, and by then somebody else had been out. The enquiry is taken properly, with enough detail to price it in your head before you ring back, and it is in front of you the same afternoon rather than on the seat of the van.
The certificate
EICRs, landlord certificates and periodic inspections are the easiest work to book, because the date is the only variable and the caller usually has a deadline. From the Growth plan up these go straight into your diary on the call, with the property details and the access arrangements attached, and you find out about it as a booking rather than as a job to arrange later.
What gets taken is the part that normally costs you a second phone call:
- The full address and postcode.
- Whether the property is occupied, and who lets you in.
- How many circuits or consumer units are on site.
- The date the paperwork is needed by.
- Who wants the certificate emailing to them afterwards.
A landlord chasing a deadline wants a date more than anything else, and the call that produces one is hard to beat with a call back tomorrow.
The caller who only wants a price
You decide what happens here. Some electricians want a ballpark given so the tyre-kickers filter themselves out. Some want every price held back until they have seen the job. Either is fine, as long as you say which during setup, and neither one of them costs you an evening on the phone.
What happens to the detail after the call
A call that is answered well and then written down badly has not saved you anything. Every call is logged, with what was said, what was promised and what happens next. Notification comes by email and text while it still matters.
On Premium it goes further, into the records you keep rather than the ones we keep: your CRM updated, the quote you sent last week chased with a real phone call, the customer rung back when you said somebody would. That is the part of the week that gets abandoned first when the work is busy, which is precisely when it costs the most.
It also means the second call about the same job does not start from nothing. When a customer rings back to ask whether you can do the Friday instead, the answer is already on the record, so they are not asked to explain their own job from scratch a second time.
What it costs an electrician
Plans open at £59 a month and are priced on call volume rather than on how far we take each call. The honest split for this trade is simple. If the phone mostly needs answering and the detail getting to you, the entry plans cover it. If you want certificates and jobs going into the diary during the call, and evenings covered, that is Growth at £249 a month.
Setup is £49.50 at the moment rather than £99. That hour is where your greeting, your questions, your escalation rules and your position on quoting prices get written down, and it is what stops the phone being answered by somebody who knows nothing about the work you do. Every plan, inclusion and overage rate is on the plans and pricing page.
Does it pay for itself on three missed calls a week?
Use your own numbers and keep them conservative. Three missed calls in an average week is 156 over a year. Take a deliberately low conversion of one in five and you are at 31 jobs. Put your own average job in. At £180 that is £5,580 of work that rang and went elsewhere, and if your average is higher than that, so is the number.
Growth costs £2,988 across the same twelve months. The calculator on our homepage will do it again with your week and your average job, and it leaves the working on screen rather than asking you to trust the total.
Where this sits next to what you already do
If somebody already answers your phone in an office, this is not a replacement for them. It is what picks up when they are on the other line, at lunch, on holiday or off sick, so the overflow does not land in a voicemail box that nobody empties until Monday. If it is just you and the phone in your pocket, it is the difference between a working day and a working day punctuated every twenty minutes.
The mechanics of the answering itself, the script, the FAQs and the escalation, are the same across every trade we cover: there is a fuller account on the telephone answering page, and the rest of what we can take on is set out under what we do.
Try it for a week before you decide
Seven days, free, no card. Point the phone at us when you are on a job and keep it yourself the rest of the time, or divert everything for a week and read back what came in. The number stays yours throughout, so stopping is one setting on your handset.
Questions before any of that are welcome on 01709 222834, or send them through our contact form and you will get an answer rather than a sales call.