Why a plumber misses the call, every time
An answering service for plumbers exists because of where your hands are. You are under a sink, in a loft, halfway through a tank, or driving with the radio on and the phone in the door pocket.
The phone rings for twenty seconds and stops. By the time you are out from under there, washed and back in the van, the caller has already rung somebody else.
Nobody loses work because they are bad at answering the phone. They lose it because the two things cannot be done at once, and because a person with water coming through a ceiling is not going to wait for a call back.
What happens when they ring and you cannot pick up
Your number stays yours. When you are busy it diverts to us, and a real person picks up with your greeting, in your business name. Nothing in that call announces an answering service, because from your customer's side there is not one: there is your business, answering its phone.
What comes back to you is not “someone rang”. It is the job, written down. An example of the kind of message that lands while you are still under the sink:
Kitchen tap dripping badly, cupboard getting wet. Mrs Hall, LS27. Water is off at the stopcock and she can manage until tomorrow. Booked in for Thursday morning. She says access is round the side.
You get that by text and email. You did not stop working, and she did not ring the next plumber on the list.
What counts as an emergency is your decision, not ours
Plumbing is the trade where this matters most, because some calls genuinely should interrupt you and most should not. During setup you tell us what is urgent for your business.
Usually it is water that will not stop, no heating in a house with a baby or an elderly customer, or a leak coming through a light fitting. Those we put straight through, or ring you on the number you keep for exactly that.
A dripping tap and a quote for a new bathroom are not that call. They get handled properly, booked or logged, and they wait until you are off the job. The whole point is that your phone stops interrupting you for things that could have waited, and still interrupts you for the one that could not.
The calls that were never going to be jobs
Some of what rings your phone is not work. A caller forty miles outside where you travel. Someone who wants a price for a job you do not take on.
A gas question when you are not Gas Safe registered, or a non-gas job when that is all you do. A letting agent ringing round for a cheaper quote on a job another plumber has already priced.
So we ask what you would ask:
Where the property is, and whether that is inside where you travel.
What is actually wrong, in enough detail for you to picture it.
Whether they own it, rent it or manage it for somebody else.
When they need somebody, and whether that is today or next month.
Whether anyone else has already been out and priced it.
What reaches you is the stuff worth reaching you. See how the answering itself works for the mechanics behind that.
Getting the job into the diary while you are still under the sink
Taking a message is the floor, not the ceiling. From the Growth plan upwards we work in the calendar you already use, so the job goes in during the call rather than sitting in your phone as a note you deal with at ten at night.
That is the difference between a lead and a booking, and for a plumber it is usually the difference that pays for the whole thing: a customer who already has a time and a date has no reason to carry on ringing round.
The same applies to the quote you sent last Tuesday. Following it up is the job nobody does, and from Premium we make that call for you.
What an answering service for plumbers costs
It starts at £59 a month, and the thing that decides the price is how many calls come in, not how much we do with them. For a plumber the question is narrower than the price list makes it look.
If you want the phone answered and the details in your pocket, the entry plans do that. If you want the call to finish as a job in your diary, with the leads sorted and the evenings covered, that is Growth at £249. Booking is where the money is in this trade, because a customer who has a date has stopped shopping.
Setup is a one-off, currently half price at £49.50 instead of £99. It buys the hour that makes the rest work: your greeting, the answers to the things you get asked constantly, and the rules for what is allowed to interrupt you. The four plans, what each includes and the per-call rate above your allowance are all on the plans and pricing page.
Is it worth it if you only miss a couple a week?
Run it on your own numbers rather than ours, and be mean with them. Say you miss two calls in an average week. That is 104 a year. Assume only one in five of those would have turned into work, which is a deliberately pessimistic rate, and you are left with 20 jobs. At an average job of £220, that is £4,400 of work that rang your phone and went elsewhere.
Essential costs £1,548 over the same year. The arithmetic only has to be a third right to be worth doing, which is the reason this is sold on the missed call rather than on the convenience. The calculator on our homepage runs it on your week rather than this one, with the working left on screen so you can pull it apart.
Starting, and stopping if it is not for you
Seven days free, no card needed. Divert the phone when you are on a job and leave it alone the rest of the time, or send us everything and see what a week of it looks like written down. If you do not like it, turn the divert off and you are exactly where you were.
If you would rather talk it through before any of that, ring 01709 222834 or use the contact page. We also answer for electricians, heating engineers, salons and clinics, and the job is the same underneath: your phone, answered by a person, while you get on with the work.