It is 8:40 on a July evening and the air conditioning has stopped. The homeowner searches for repair companies and rings the first one. Nobody answers, so they ring the second.
HVAC and home service companies get calls at the worst moments. The crew is on a roof and the office has gone home, yet the phone is the first thing a new customer reaches for. An AI receptionist answers those calls and turns them into booked jobs.
Why trades lose calls
A service business has two types of day. In the busy one, everyone is out on jobs and the phone rings unattended. In the quiet one, the office closes at 5 but customers keep calling.
Both are common in the trades, and both end the same way. The customer calls the next company on the list.
Hiring a person to sit at a desk through every gap is costly. An AI receptionist answers without a rota, and the call flow you already use decides when it takes over.
Start from a trades template
AI Voice comes with templates, and two of them suit the trades. Heating and cooling is written for HVAC calls, and Home services suits plumbers and electricians. The set also has Front desk, Appointments and After hours.
Pick the template closest to your business, then edit the instructions. List the services you offer, the areas you cover, your opening hours and what counts as urgent. The instructions box holds up to 8,000 characters, and an opening line sets the first thing a caller hears.
Choose one of 10 voices, and the assistant is ready to go.
A call from ring to job
Return to the broken air conditioner. The homeowner rings, and the assistant answers with your opening line.
It asks for the caller’s full name and, when you use Dispatch, the street address. It asks what is wrong, then follows your instructions for the next step. Here is how the call might continue:
- It confirms the problem and the address.
- It offers real open times for a visit.
- The caller picks one, and the assistant creates a Dispatch job.
- It texts the caller the booking details.
The job appears on your Dispatch board, and the person who is booked gets a note in their inbox. The caller is a client record now too. The assistant greets known callers by first name and adds first-time callers as new clients automatically.
After-hours calls that become tomorrow’s schedule
Put the AI Voice step first in a call flow that covers evenings and weekends. Calls that come in at night are answered, booked and waiting on the board when your team arrives.
Your team starts the morning with a list of jobs and call-back notes instead of a voicemail inbox to work through. Every call is in Call History as answered by the AI assistant, so you can check exactly what was said.
For emergencies, tell the assistant in the instructions what counts as urgent and who to hand off to. You can set up to 10 hand-off destinations, and each one is a person or another call flow.
Taking over a live call
Sometimes a customer needs a person right now. A long-standing client with a flooded basement should not have to repeat themselves to a machine.
Anyone with an extension and the Manage Phone & Messaging right can take a call over from the Calls column while the assistant is still on the line. The caller keeps talking, and the conversation moves to a person without a hang-up or a redial.
Telling customers where their job stands
Calls from existing customers are a big share of a service office’s day. Where is the technician? Has the part arrived?
With the Dispatch option switched on, the assistant checks the caller’s job and gives the status, the arrival window and the technician’s first name. It answers from the business facts you write in and knows each caller from their client record, past calls, emails and texts, so a returning customer is recognized.
What it costs
The AI receptionist is included on every plan and paid by usage. The AI voice charge is worked out per 1,000 tokens and paid from your prepaid credit after each call, on top of your normal calling rate, and each call shows as its own AI Voice line under Billing, Credits. Current rates are on the pricing page.
Set it up for your company
Go to Settings > Telephony/Texting > Call Routing, open a call flow, add an AI Voice step and choose Heating and cooling or Home services. You can also ask Claude or ChatGPT, connected to BaseCloud, to set it up for you. Write your services and service areas into the instructions, connect it to your Dispatch jobs and make a test call from your own phone.
See how the whole system works on the HVAC page, or read about the phone system the AI receptionist runs on.
