What does an answering service for gas engineers actually do?
An answering service for gas engineers picks up your business line when you are mid-service, doing a flue check or driving between jobs, and deals with the caller in your name. A breakdown gets triaged. A landlord check gets a date. An installation enquiry gets written up properly. A caller who smells gas gets the emergency number before anything else. You hear about all of it by text and email.
What it does not do is diagnose. The person on the phone is there to take the call, not to act as a gas engineer. The value is in asking the questions you would ask, so that when you ring back you already know whether you are looking at a pressure top-up or a new boiler conversation.
Why does the phone ring hardest when you have the least time for it?
Heating work does not arrive evenly. It arrives on the first properly cold morning, when boilers that have done nothing but hot water for months are asked to heat a whole house at once, and it lands on the same days you are already booked solid with the ones that failed yesterday.
That is when a missed call hurts, because a household with no heating does not leave a voicemail and wait patiently. They go down the search results, ringing each engineer in turn until one of them picks up. The job goes to whoever answers first, which is not the same as whoever would have done it best.
It is also when stopping to answer hurts. Ten minutes on the phone in somebody's kitchen is ten minutes that job overruns, and the overrun lands on your next customer, who is cold too.
How are breakdown calls sorted from everything else?
At setup you decide what a breakdown call has to capture before it reaches you. Here is a starting point, which you change to suit the way you work:
- No heating, no hot water, or both.
- Anything showing on the boiler display, read out exactly.
- The figure on the pressure gauge, if they can see one.
- The make of boiler, and its rough age if they know it.
- Anyone in the house who is elderly, unwell or very young.
- Owner, tenant, or a landlord ringing on a tenant's behalf.
With that in front of you, ringing back is a decision rather than an interview. You can see which jobs need you today, which can wait until the morning, and which you could sort in two minutes on the phone between visits. What happens to each one is your call. On any plan it can reach you as an urgent text. From Growth up it can also be put straight through to you, or booked into your next free slot.
What happens when a caller says they can smell gas?
This call does not wait for your preferences. The wording agreed with you at setup puts one thing first: the National Gas Emergency Service on 0800 111 999, which is free, open 24 hours, and the right number for a suspected gas escape or carbon monoxide. The caller is told to ring it now.
After that the address and what they have described come straight to you, marked urgent, so you are not starting from nothing if they ring you for the follow-up work once the emergency service has been. Beyond that number and the words you have approved, nobody on our side tells a caller what to do with their gas supply.
Can landlord gas safety checks be booked during the call?
Yes, from the Growth plan up. They are the tidiest work your phone brings in. A landlord has to have gas appliances checked every twelve months by a Gas Safe registered engineer, and the Health and Safety Executive allows the check to be done from ten months after the last one without losing the existing expiry date. So the caller has a window rather than an emergency, and a date in your diary settles it there and then.
The details that make the visit go ahead first time:
- The date on the current gas safety record.
- How many gas appliances the property has, and what they are.
- The tenant's name and a number to arrange access with.
- Whether a landlord or an agent is paying, and where the invoice goes.
- Whether anything has gone wrong since the last check.
Where does a new boiler enquiry go?
An installation enquiry is a bigger job than a breakdown and far easier to lose, because the customer is in no hurry and will happily collect three quotes. Answered well, it arrives with you as a survey ready to book: the property, the boiler that is there now and where it sits, whether they want it moved, and whether they are replacing it by choice or have been told it needs replacing.
On Growth the survey itself goes into your calendar before the customer hangs up. Booking it on the call means the customer is waiting for your survey, not still looking for somebody to do one.
What will it cost a heating engineer?
Plans start at £59 a month and are priced by how many calls come in. For this trade the useful comparison is not one plan against another but a year of the plan against a single job. Growth, the plan that books breakdowns, surveys and gas safety checks into your diary, is £249 a month, which comes to £2,988 over twelve months.
Put your own price for one boiler installation beside that figure and you have your break-even: the number of installs you would need to keep, from calls you would otherwise have missed, before it has paid for itself.
If you only need the phone answered and the details sent on, Light at £59 and Essential at £129 answer in exactly the same way. The difference is 30 or 50 calls included a month.
Setup is from £49.50, normally £99. That covers writing your greeting, your breakdown questions, the gas emergency wording, and which calls are worth pulling you off a job for. Every plan and what it includes is on the plans and pricing page.
What if heating is only part of the work you take on?
If you take plumbing jobs as well as heating, one line handles both. Each kind of work has its own questions, so a leaking cylinder and a dead boiler reach you already sorted. The plumbing side is covered on the page about an answering service for plumbers, and the way the answering works for any trade, from the greeting to the call log, is on the telephone answering page.
How do you try it without committing?
The trial is a week, free, and asks for no card details. The honest test is to divert the phone on your busiest days rather than your quiet ones, then read back what came in. Your number stays yours throughout, so ending it is switching the divert off.
To ask anything before that, ring 01709 222834 or send a message through the contact page.