Answering service for UK tradespeople

Every job you are on is a call you are not taking

The phone rings when you are least able to answer it. Hands full, up a ladder, under a floor, in somebody's loft, or halfway through a job you cannot walk away from. By the time you call back, an hour or a day later, they have already booked somebody else.

Around 85% of callers who reach voicemail never call back, and roughly 80% will not leave a message at all. For tradespeople that is not an inconvenience, it is the difference between a full diary and a quiet fortnight. Nobody rings one plumber. They ring three, and they book the one who picks up.

The three calls tradespeople lose most

The call that arrives mid job

This is the bulk of it. You are working, so you cannot answer, and the caller has no way of knowing whether you are busy or out of business. They assume the second and move on.

Evenings, weekends and bank holidays

Domestic customers ring when they get home. Emergencies do not check the calendar. A burst pipe on a Sunday goes to whoever answers a Sunday phone, and it is one of the best-paying jobs of the week.

The call you take badly because you are driving

Answering with the van running and the radio on is often worse than not answering. You scribble a number on a job sheet, mishear the postcode, and lose the job anyway.

What a virtual receptionist for tradespeople does

Voco answers in your business name, in a voice you choose, and works from what you have configured rather than improvising. On a typical call it will:

• Find out what the job is and whether it is urgent

• Take the caller's name and number, spelled back and confirmed

• Take the address and postcode, and confirm it is inside the area you cover

• Ask the questions you have told it to ask, such as property type, whether the water is off, or how old the system is

• Answer the questions you get asked constantly, such as your hours, your call-out charge policy, whether you give free quotes and which areas you serve

• Follow your emergency rules and escalate anything that meets them

• Book into your diary where you have enabled calendar booking

• Send you the whole thing by SMS and email within seconds of the call ending

Where it does not know something, it says so and takes details for a callback rather than guessing. It will not quote a price you have not given it, and it will not promise a time you cannot make.

Emergency calls, triaged the way you would triage them

Not every urgent call is an emergency, and not every emergency is worth turning out for at eleven at night. You decide which is which.

You set the definitions. No heating in December, water coming through a ceiling, a gas smell, a lockout, a total power loss. Anything matching those can ring your mobile straight away, or go to whoever is on call. Everything else is captured in full and waiting for you at seven the next morning, in priority order.

The customer gets a clear answer about what happens next either way, which is most of what they wanted from the call.

Job details, not a name and a number

An answering service that hands you "John rang about a leak, wants a callback" has done half a job. You still have to ring back, work out what the job is, where it is and whether it is worth the trip.

Voco captures it as a record. The job, the address, the postcode, the urgency, the property type, whether they are the owner or the tenant, when they are available and anything else you have asked it to find out. You can price the job, or decide to pass on it, before you pick up the phone.

That also means you can work the list properly. A boiler with no heat and somebody asking for a quote on a bathroom in six weeks are both leads, and they do not need calling back in the order they landed.

Filtering the calls that waste your morning

Every trades business gets them. Sales calls, insurance chasers, people ringing about a job forty miles outside your patch, and callers who want a price over the phone for work nobody could price over the phone.

Voco checks the postcode against the area you cover and tells anyone outside it plainly, rather than taking details you will never use. It handles the price question the way you have told it to, whether that is a rough range, a call-out fee or a straight "we would need to see it first". Sales calls are ended politely and logged so you can see how many you are getting.

Call answering for builders, larger contractors and construction firms

The same setup scales past the sole trader. Where you run several teams, calls can be routed by job type or area, site enquiries can be separated from domestic ones, and subcontractor and supplier calls can be captured without going through whoever happens to be near a phone in the office.

For a contractor, the value shifts from not missing the job to not losing the detail. Every call is logged with a transcript and a recording, so a disputed instruction is a matter of record rather than recollection.

Answering services for specific trades

The service is the same underneath. What changes is what counts as an emergency, what you need to know before you get in the van, and what callers ask about. Each page below covers the specifics.

Plumbers

Burst pipes and leaks, no hot water, boiler breakdowns, and the out-of-hours calls that pay best. Plumbers.

Electricians

Power loss, fault finding, consumer unit work, certification enquiries and landlord jobs with a deadline attached. Electricians.

Heating engineers

Breakdowns, servicing, installation enquiries and the seasonal call volume that arrives all in one week. Heating and HVAC engineers.

Locksmiths

Lockouts, break-in repairs and the calls where the caller needs to know how soon you can be there, not what it costs. Locksmiths.

Call handling for tradesmen and self-employed traders

Call handling for a self-employed tradesman is a different problem from call handling for a firm with an office. There is no one else to pick up. Every call that arrives while you are under a sink, up a ladder or driving between jobs either goes to voicemail or interrupts the work you are being paid for, and roughly eight in ten callers who reach voicemail ring the next number instead of leaving a message.

Voco answers those calls in your business name while you carry on working. It takes the address, the job, how urgent it is and when the caller is available, then sends you the details as a message you can read between jobs. You decide which calls are worth stopping for, rather than finding out at six o'clock.

For a one-man band that usually means no receptionist, no answering machine and no missed work. For a firm running two or three vans it means the same, without anyone in the office fielding calls that could have been captured automatically.

What phone answering for tradespeople costs

Voco costs 29p a minute ex VAT on pay as you go, with no monthly fee and no contract. A typical trades call runs about two minutes, so most calls cost under 60p, and a quiet week costs close to nothing because you only pay for the calls that come in. Calls are billed by the minute and rounded up to the whole minute.

That matters for the trades more than most sectors, because call volume is seasonal and unpredictable. A monthly plan charges the same in a dead February as in a burst-pipe January. Human answering services in the UK generally start around £35 to £49 a month before you have taken a single call, and cover outside business hours usually costs more again.

Put your own numbers through the missed call calculator to see what the calls you are currently missing are worth against what answering them would cost. If your volume is steady and high, the monthly plans work out cheaper per call.

Fitting around how you already work

Nothing to install and no new number. Calls forward from the number already on your van and your website, and you choose when they forward: only when you do not pick up, only outside your hours, or every call.

Voco books into a connected calendar where you have enabled that. Otherwise the job arrives as a message with everything already captured, ready to put into whatever you use.

Getting started

You can be live in minutes. Signing up walks you through a short setup flow covering your business details, the work you do, your hours, your area and the questions you get asked most. Choose a voice, confirm, and it is ready to answer.

Getting it right takes a bit longer and is worth doing properly. Budget around an hour to set your emergency rules, your area, your price answers and the questions you want asked on every job. Test it on your own phone before you forward anything.

There is no setup fee, no contract, and a 30 day money-back guarantee. Plans start from £49/month.

Related: how call handling works, compare answering services, work out what missed calls are costing you, all industries.