An AI receptionist for plumbers and electricians on the job
The phone rings when you are on a ladder, under a sink, or holding two wires apart. You let it ring, because you have to. The caller tries the next name on the list. In the evening you find four voicemails, two with no number. An AI receptionist is a way to pick up while your hands are busy: it answers, works out whether the job is an emergency, takes the address, and books the visit. This post explains how to set one up for a trades business, and what it should never promise on your behalf.
The phone problem in the trades
Most trades businesses are one or two people and one phone. The phone is also the diary, the invoice book and the sat-nav. Every unanswered call is a job that may go to someone else, and every answered call is a job interrupted. A receptionist would solve it, but not for the hours you would need one: a few calls a day, spread from seven in the morning to nine at night.
A voice agent fits that shape. It answers every call the same way, says it is an AI, and does the sorting you would do yourself if you could pick up. When something needs you now, it gets you. When it can wait, it books it and lets you finish the job in front of you.
Sorting emergencies from everything else
The most useful thing the agent does is triage, and it does it with questions you write. Keep them simple enough for a stressed caller to answer.
- Is water coming through a ceiling or across a floor right now?
- Is there no power at all, or just one socket or one room?
- Can you smell burning, or see smoke or sparks?
- Is anyone hurt or in danger?
Any yes means an emergency. The agent puts the caller on hold with music, rings your mobile, tells you in one sentence who is waiting and what is happening, and connects you. If you cannot pick up, it goes back to the caller, says so honestly, takes a message, and sends you the details so you can ring back between jobs. If the caller mentions a smell of gas, the agent's only job is to tell them to leave the building and call their country's gas emergency line; write that line into the instructions yourself. Everything else, from a dripping tap to a new bathroom, is routine and goes into the diary. How a warm transfer works shows the handover in detail.
What it collects so the visit goes well
A good message from a trades receptionist is not "someone called about a boiler". Tell the agent exactly which fields to collect and it will ask for them one at a time: the caller's name and number, the full address, the type of property and which floor, the problem in the caller's own words, how to get in if nobody is home, when the caller is free, and how they found you. It can read the address back to check it, and it can send the caller a text with the agreed time and your name, using the built-in SMS tool.
After the call, it writes a summary and an outcome, so you can see at a glance which calls were booked, which need a callback, and which were suppliers or sales. If you use a job-management app, a webhook can hand the new job to it as soon as the call ends. Tools and webhooks explains how that connects.
Prices and promises it must not make
Callers will ask what it costs. The agent may quote a call-out fee or an hourly rate if you put those in its material, because those are facts. It must never quote a fixed price for work nobody has seen, and never say "someone will be there by three" unless the diary says so. Write these as plain rules: "Never give a total price. Say that the electrician will quote after looking at the job." And it must never say "booked" until the calendar has confirmed the slot. That last rule is built into NordTell, but it is worth writing anyway so the agent explains it to the caller.
Setting it up between jobs
You can do this on your phone in the van, in pieces. Write the instructions as if briefing a mate who is covering the phone for a week: who you are, what you do, what counts as urgent, what to collect, what never to promise. Add your opening hours and tell it what to do outside them, when emergencies should go to your on-call number and everything else should be booked for the morning. Put your mobile in as the transfer target. Then test it in the browser with the microphone: play the panicking caller, the price shopper, and the landlord with three flats.
When it behaves, connect a number. You can buy one inside NordTell, or keep the number on your van and forward it when you are busy. Bring your own phone number explains how, and After-hours phone answering with an AI agent covers the night setup.
Where NordTell fits
NordTell is built so a one-van business can run this without a developer: plain-word instructions, warm transfer to your mobile, text confirmations, and a summary of every call. You pay for minutes, not seats, and the smallest package is sized for a business that gets a few calls a day. The servers are in the EU and the company is in Copenhagen.