Salient

Worked example · Home services

How we would stop a home services company losing one call in four.

This is not a client case study. We have not built this for a contractor yet, and pretending otherwise would be the first thing you should not trust us on. It is the architecture we would propose on day one, with the numbers we would hold ourselves to.

The example company: an HVAC and plumbing business with eight technicians, two office staff, a field service system, and about 400 inbound calls a month.

What a missed call costs

Industry reports for 2025 and 2026 put the contractor miss rate at roughly one call in four during the day, and most callers who reach voicemail do not call back. Run that through the example company:

Inbound calls per month400Office hours and after hours combined.
Missed at a 27% miss rate108Higher after hours, when a third or more of calls come in.
Of which booking requests, at 30%32The rest are existing customers, vendors and wrong numbers.
Lost per month at a $450 average ticket$14kBefore repeat business, maintenance plans and referrals.

Where the office week goes

Answering the phone25Two office staff, and it still rings out when both are on a call. The 2026 contractor report puts the industry miss rate at 27%, and pickup after hours below 18%.
Scheduling and dispatch juggling10Finding a slot, moving a slot, calling the customer back, telling the tech.
Quote follow-ups6Quotes sent and never chased, because nobody had the hour.
Invoicing and collections4Reminders, resends, the customer who wants a copy.
Review requests2Asked when someone remembers, which is rarely.
Total, across the office47hours per week on the phone and the follow-ups, across two people

What is left afterwards

Answering the phone10Every call answered in under a minute, day or night. Booking questions booked. Emergencies to the on-call phone. Missed calls get a text back before the caller dials a competitor.
Scheduling and dispatch juggling4Jobs booked against live tech calendars and travel time. Changes written back to the field system.
Quote follow-ups1Every quote chased on a schedule, in your words, until it is won, lost or the customer asks to stop.
Invoicing and collections1Reminders run on schedule. A human signs off anything past the second one.
Review requests0.5Sent after every closed job, to the customers who rated the visit well.
Total after16.530 hours a week returned, and the phone answered at 2am

The architecture

01

Answer

A voice and text agent that picks up every inbound call and text, in your company's voice, and knows your service area, your hours and your price book ranges. It never quotes a firm price it has not been given.

02

Qualify

Address, problem, urgency, access, payment method. The same questions your best dispatcher asks, in the same order, written to the job.

03

Book

Slots offered from live technician calendars with travel time, confirmed by text, written back to the field service system you already use.

04

Escalate

Gas smells, water where it should not be, no heat in winter, anyone distressed: straight to the on-call phone with the transcript attached. The agent does not decide what an emergency is; your rules do.

05

Follow up

Open quotes, unpaid invoices and finished jobs each get their own sequence, timed and worded by you, with a human sign-off before anything firmer than a reminder.

06

Report

Calls answered, jobs booked, quotes chased, revenue recovered from calls that used to ring out. Weekly, from real data, in one page.

How we would prove it works

Before it takes a live call, we replay 200 of your recorded calls through the agent, with consent, and compare what it would have done to what your dispatcher did. Booked or not, which slot, escalated or not. One question decides it: does it book what your dispatcher booked, and escalate everything your dispatcher escalated?

Then it takes after-hours calls only, for two weeks, with every transcript reviewed. Daytime comes after the numbers say so, not after a demo.

What it costs, and what it returns

Build, 4 to 6 weeks, fixed scope$18kVoice and text agent, qualification, booking, escalation rules, follow-up sequences, one field service integration.
Operate, from month two$3.5kPer month. Monitoring, call review sampling, model cost control, small changes.
Hours returned30Per week, across the office.
Break-even8Additional booked jobs per month at a $450 ticket, against roughly 30 that currently ring out.

Every number on this page is an assumption until we look at your call logs. The first thing we would do is replace them with yours, in a paid one-week audit, and tell you honestly if the case does not hold.

If your phone rang out this week, the call is worth 30 minutes.

Bring last month's call log. If there is no real project here, we will say so on the call rather than in an invoice.

Book a strategy call
The one-week audit