AI receptionist for plumbers and electricians

It's 11 pm on a Sunday in January. A tenant in a terraced house has water coming through the kitchen ceiling from the bathroom above. They ring the first three plumbers on Google. Two go to voicemail. The third answers, takes the address and says someone will ring back within minutes. That third firm gets the job, and very likely the boiler service next autumn too.

An AI receptionist for plumbers is the thing that makes your firm the third one. It picks up when you can't: when your hands are wet, when you're driving between jobs, when you're asleep. It books routine work into your diary, answers the questions you hear twenty times a week, and takes down emergencies properly so the person on call can ring straight back with everything they need.

This page is written for small plumbing, electrical and heating firms in the UK: one-van operators, husband-and-wife businesses with someone doing the books, and teams of three to ten engineers. It covers the calls you get and when, what the AI should and shouldn't deal with, three sample conversations, a setup checklist, costs worked through, and the compliance points that matter for Gas Safe and NICEIC registered work. It's honest about the limits, too. The AI cannot put a caller through to you mid-call, and it doesn't send texts.

Why plumbers miss the calls that pay

Most missed calls in this trade aren't missed out of carelessness. They're missed because the person who answers the phone is also the person doing the work. You can't take a call with a blowtorch in one hand, or while you're isolating a consumer unit, or lying on your back under a combi boiler with a torch in your mouth.

The calls you miss fall into a few groups:

The emergency you'd have taken. Burst pipe, no heating with a baby in the house, a tripped RCD that won't reset, a leak through a light fitting. These callers ring down a list until a human answers. If you're not first, you're usually not anyone.
The booked job that would have filled next Tuesday. A tap replacement, a new outside socket, a radiator that needs bleeding and balancing. Not urgent, but it's steady work. These callers often leave one voicemail and then try someone else the same evening.
The quote request. Bathroom refit, rewire, boiler swap, heat pump enquiry. These take longer to win, and the firm that responds first with sensible questions tends to get the site visit.
The admin call. "Are you coming today?", "What time will you get here?", "Do you do landlord gas certificates?" Each one interrupts a job for a minute of your time.

Voicemail doesn't solve this. Plenty of people won't leave one, and those who do leave "it's Dave, call me back" with no address or problem described. Then you play phone tag from the van at 6 pm.

An answering service with human operators is the traditional fix. It works, but operators read from a script, can't see your diary, and charge per call or per minute. The AI approach is different: it answers from what you've told it about your business, can book directly into available slots, and costs a flat monthly fee for a set allowance of minutes.

The calls a plumbing, heating or electrical firm gets

Before setting anything up, it helps to be precise about what actually comes in. The mix varies by trade, but the pattern is familiar to anyone who's run a van.

Plumbing calls

Leaks: under sinks, from washing machine hoses, from overflow pipes, through ceilings.
Blockages: toilets, kitchen sinks, outside drains (and whether you do drains at all).
Taps, toilets and showers: dripping, running constantly, low pressure, a shower mixer that's gone cold.
Bathroom and kitchen fitting enquiries, often with "can you give me a rough price?"
Frozen and burst pipes in a cold snap.
Hot water cylinders and immersion heaters.
Questions about whether you're available this week, and what you charge for a call-out.

Heating and gas calls

No heating or no hot water, usually a combi boiler showing a fault code. Callers will read the code out, so it's worth telling the AI what to do with that (more on this below).
Annual boiler services and landlord gas safety records (CP12s), which cluster around tenancy renewals.
Boiler replacement quotes.
Radiators that are cold at the top, noisy systems, power flushing.
Smells of gas. These need a fixed, safe response, covered in the hand-over section.

Electrical calls

Power cuts to part of the house and RCDs that keep tripping.
Extra sockets, outside lights, EV charger installs, garden office supplies.
EICRs for landlords, who need one at least every five years in England under the private rented sector rules, and for house sales.
Consumer unit upgrades and full or partial rewires.
Smoke and heat alarm installs.

Busy hours and seasons

The daily pattern for most trades is lopsided. Monday mornings are heavy: anything that went wrong over the weekend gets reported first thing. There's another bump in the early evening, when people get home from work and find the problem, or finally have time to ring about the job they've been putting off. Then a smaller but valuable trickle after 9 pm, which is almost all urgent.

The seasons are just as predictable:

The first cold week in October is when everyone turns their heating on for the first time since spring and discovers the boiler won't fire. Heating engineers know this week well.
December to February brings frozen condensate pipes, burst pipes and no-heat calls. Bank holidays over Christmas are the worst time to be unreachable.
Spring is when bathroom and kitchen refits get booked, and when landlords catch up on certificates before summer lets.
Summer is quieter for heating but busy for outdoor electrics, EV chargers and, if you do it, air conditioning.

Knowing this tells you where an AI pays for itself first: out of hours, on Monday mornings, and during cold snaps when you physically can't answer everything.

What an AI receptionist for plumbers handles

Klugon's assistant answers from the information you give it and the tools it has. On a phone call, it can:

tell callers your opening hours, service area, address and contact details;
list the services you've set up, such as boiler service, tap replacement or EICR, with their durations;
check free slots in your diary and book one;
cancel a booking if a customer rings to say they no longer need you;
search your knowledge base for answers you've written, such as call-out charges, areas covered or what a landlord certificate includes;
save the caller's name, number and notes as a lead.

It does this in English, and also answers calls in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese and Arabic if you set the language for the assistant.

One limit on calls: it can cancel a booking but not move one. If a customer rings to change Thursday to Friday, it can cancel Thursday and book Friday as a new booking, or take their details for you to sort out. In WhatsApp and website chat, it can reschedule directly.

Booking rules that suit the trades

Tradespeople don't work in neat 30-minute appointments, and the booking settings need to reflect that. You set:

Opening hours and your timezone. The diary only offers slots within them.
Slot intervals of 10, 15, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90 or 120 minutes. Many trades use 60 or 120 to keep the diary in usable blocks.
A service length for each job type. A boiler service might be 60 minutes, a tap replacement 90, an EICR on a three-bed half a day. You enter what you actually allow.
A buffer after each booking, which is where you account for travel between jobs.
Minimum notice, so nobody books a job for 20 minutes from now. The default is 60 minutes; most trades set it higher.
How far ahead people can book, by default 60 days.
Closed dates, for holidays and training days.
Staff. If you have more than one engineer, you assign services to people and the system checks clashes per person. A gas engineer can be the only one offered for boiler services; your apprentice won't be booked on a consumer unit change.

A common approach is to let the AI book only the predictable jobs (services, certificates, small repairs) and to treat anything bigger as a quote request. That keeps your diary honest. The customer gets a booking reference in the conversation itself. There's no automatic confirmation email or text afterwards, so if you want customers to have something in writing, you send it from your usual job software.

Questions it can answer from your knowledge base

You can upload PDFs, Word files, text files and CSVs, paste text, or import a page from your website. Then the AI searches that material when someone asks a question. For a plumbing or heating firm, that typically means:

your call-out charge and hourly rate, if you publish them;
the postcodes or towns you cover;
whether you work on oil, LPG or only mains gas;
which boiler brands you're accredited to install;
what a landlord gas safety check involves and how long it takes;
whether you do drains, unvented cylinders or commercial work;
payment terms, and whether you take card on site.

Write these in plain sentences, the way you'd say them on the phone. "We cover Leeds, Wakefield and anywhere within about 15 miles of LS10" works better than a list of 40 postcodes.

What it must hand over to a person

This is the most important section on the page. An AI receptionist for a trade must know where its job stops.

What hand-over means in Klugon. The AI cannot transfer a live call to your mobile. There's no call-forwarding to a person during a call. What it does instead is flag the job for your team:

On a phone call, it saves the caller's name, number and the details (address, what's happened, what they've already done) as a lead, with a note that it's urgent. That posts to the Slack channel or Zapier zap you've connected, and the call appears in your Klugon inbox.
On WhatsApp or website chat, it marks the conversation as needing a person. It shows in your inbox with a "Needs a person" banner and posts to Slack or Zapier in the same way.

Then a human, whoever's on call, rings the customer back. How quickly that happens depends on how your team watches that Slack channel or what your Zapier zap does with the alert. Klugon doesn't send email or text alerts to you.

One more honest point: after a conversation is flagged, the AI keeps replying if the customer keeps talking. It doesn't go silent. That's usually fine, because it can keep the customer company and repeat the safety advice, but you should know it happens.

Emergency call-outs

For a burst pipe or a total loss of heating, the right outcome is a fast human callback with the full picture. Tell the AI, in its instructions and knowledge base, to collect:

Full name and the best number to call back.
The full address including postcode, and whether they're the owner, a tenant or an agent.
What's happening, in their words: where the water is, whether it's still running, whether electrics are affected.
What they've done so far. Have they found and turned off the stopcock? Isolated the boiler?
Any vulnerable people in the house, such as a newborn or an elderly relative with no heating.
Access: parking, keys, whether someone will be in.

You can also give it plain, safe first-aid steps to read out, such as where stopcocks usually are and that water near electrics means switching off at the consumer unit if it's safe to do so. Write these yourself. The AI repeats what you've given it; it isn't a plumber.

It should not promise an arrival time unless you've told it exactly what to say. "Our on-call engineer will ring you back" is safer than "someone will be there in an hour".

Gas smells and carbon monoxide

If a caller says they can smell gas, or their CO alarm is sounding, the AI's job is not to book anything. Your instructions should make it give the standard safety message and point them to the national gas emergency line, 0800 111 999 in Great Britain, before anything else. The HSE's gas safety pages cover what households and businesses should do. Then it can take details and flag the conversation, so you know the customer exists, but the emergency service comes first.

Write this rule in plain words in the assistant's instructions: "If anyone mentions a gas smell, a CO alarm, headaches near the boiler or a pilot light that smells, tell them to leave the property, not to use switches, and to call 0800 111 999 now. Do not book an appointment."

Other things it should hand over or decline

Diagnosis over the phone. "Is it the diverter valve?" isn't a question the AI should answer. It takes the fault code and symptoms and passes them on.
Firm prices for anything non-standard. It can quote a fixed price you've published, such as a boiler service, but a rewire or a bathroom needs a survey.
Complaints and disputes about previous work. These need you.
Anything that asks it to confirm you're registered for something you're not. Keep the registrations list in your knowledge base accurate.
Commercial and contract enquiries from letting agents or facilities managers, if you'd rather handle those personally.

An AI answering service for electricians

Electricians get a different flavour of call from plumbers. There's less water damage panic and more "half the house has gone dark" and "the RCD keeps tripping when it rains". An AI answering service for electricians has to handle three things particularly well.

Tripping and partial power loss. The useful questions are which circuits are off, whether the main switch has tripped or just one RCD, whether it's happening at a particular time or with a particular appliance, and whether there's any burning smell or scorch marks. A burning smell or visible damage should always be treated as urgent and flagged. Everything else can usually be booked for the next available slot with the notes attached. Your instructions can say: "Never tell the customer it's safe. If they describe burning, buzzing, sparking or hot sockets, tell them to switch off at the consumer unit if it's safe to do so and flag the conversation."

Landlord and sale EICRs. These are routine, schedulable, and often booked by letting agents on behalf of a tenant. The AI can book them as a service with a sensible duration based on property size, record the tenant's contact details for access, and answer standard questions about what an inspection involves and roughly how long it takes. If your price depends on the number of circuits, say that in the knowledge base and let the AI collect bedroom count and consumer unit age so you can quote properly.

Install enquiries. EV chargers, garden rooms, outdoor sockets and lighting. These are quote work. The AI asks the questions that save you a site visit where possible: distance from the consumer unit, whether the property has a driveway, whether there's existing outdoor power, what charger they have in mind. It saves this as a lead for you to call back.

NICEIC and Part P questions

Customers increasingly ask whether you're registered. If you are registered with a competent person scheme such as NICEIC, put your registration details in your knowledge base so the AI can say so accurately, and tell it what to say when customers ask about building control notification for notifiable work such as a consumer unit replacement or a new circuit in a bathroom. Keep the wording factual. "We're NICEIC registered and notify building control for notifiable work, and you'll receive the certificate after completion" is the kind of sentence that works. Don't let the AI improvise on the rules themselves; if a customer asks a technical regulations question, it should flag it for you.

An HVAC AI answering service for heating and cooling engineers

"HVAC" is the American term, but the work is the same in the UK: boilers and heating systems, heat pumps, air conditioning and ventilation. An HVAC AI answering service carries most of the plumbing and gas rules above, plus a few of its own.

Boiler fault codes. Callers will read out an error code from the boiler display. Rather than letting the AI guess what it means, give it a short note in the knowledge base per brand you service, such as "For any fault code, take the boiler make, model if they know it, the code shown, and whether there's hot water but no heating or neither. Don't try to diagnose." The engineer then rings back with the code already in front of them.

Annual servicing. Gas boiler services are steady repeat work. The AI can book them, and if you've given it the information, it can explain what's checked and how long it takes. It can't remind customers when next year's service is due. Klugon doesn't send reminders, so keep using your job software or your own list for that.

Heat pumps. Air source heat pump enquiries are quote work and often come with questions about government grants. Tell the AI exactly what to say, in your own words and with a date, about whether you are an approved installer for any scheme. If you're not sure the information is current, have it take details and flag instead.

Air conditioning. Summer heatwaves bring a rush of AC enquiries and breakdowns, and these come with their own rules. Work on refrigerant circuits needs F-gas qualifications, which the GOV.UK guidance on fluorinated gases sets out. If you don't hold them, make sure the AI says plainly that you don't do refrigerant work, so customers aren't left waiting.

Commercial maintenance contracts. Offices, shops and restaurants with planned maintenance agreements tend to call about breakdowns that affect trading. If you have contract customers, list them by business name in the knowledge base and tell the AI that any call from a listed contract customer is flagged as a priority.

Three sample conversations

These are samples written to show how the setup above plays out. The businesses and callers are made up. They aren't recordings, and the AI voice on Klugon's site is AI-generated.

Sample: a burst pipe at night

A sample phone call. The business is made up: Harlow & Daughters Plumbing and Heating, Leeds.

AI: Thanks for calling Harlow and Daughters Plumbing and Heating. This is the AI assistant. How can I help?

Caller: There's water pouring through my kitchen ceiling. I think a pipe's burst upstairs.

AI: I'm sorry, that sounds stressful. First thing: do you know where your stopcock is? It's usually under the kitchen sink, or where the water pipe comes into the house. Turning it clockwise will shut off the water.

Caller: Under the sink, yeah. Hang on. Okay, it's off. It's slowing down.

AI: Well done. If any water is near light fittings or sockets, switch off at the consumer unit if you can do that safely. Can I take your name and the best number for our engineer to call you back?

Caller: Priya Shah, 07700 900123.

AI: Thanks, Priya. And the full address with postcode?

Caller: 14 Mill Lane, LS10 2AB.

AI: Are you the owner or a tenant?

Caller: Tenant. The landlord's away.

AI: Understood. Is anyone in the house who'd be at particular risk, like a young baby or someone unwell?

Caller: No, just me.

AI: Thank you. I've passed this to our on-call engineer as an emergency with everything you've told me: burst pipe above the kitchen, water now off at the stopcock, tenant, landlord away. They'll ring you back on 07700 900123. Please keep your phone close. Is there anything else I should add?

Caller: No, that's it. Thanks.

What happened behind the scenes: the AI saved Priya as a lead with the address and notes, which posted to the firm's Slack channel. The call sits in the inbox. The engineer on call saw the Slack message and rang her. The AI didn't promise a time, didn't quote a price and didn't try to transfer the call.

Sample: booking a landlord gas safety check on WhatsApp

A sample WhatsApp chat. The business is made up: Calder Valley Gas Services.

Customer: Hi, I'm a letting agent. Need a CP12 on a 2-bed flat in Hebden Bridge, current one runs out on the 30th.

AI: Hello. We can do that. A landlord gas safety check for a flat with one boiler and a hob takes about 45 minutes. Our next available slots in Hebden Bridge are Tuesday 4 November at 10:00 or Wednesday 5 November at 14:00. Which would suit?

Customer: Tuesday 10am. The tenant's called Mark, his number is 07700 900456.

AI: Thank you. Could you give me the full address with postcode, and your name and agency?

Customer: Flat 3, 22 Market Street, HX7 6AA. Sam Ortiz, Ridgeway Lettings.

AI: Booked: landlord gas safety check, Tuesday 4 November at 10:00, Flat 3, 22 Market Street, HX7 6AA. Booking reference CVG-1042. I've noted Mark as the tenant contact for access. Our standard price for a single-boiler gas safety check is in our price list as £75. Is there anything about the appliances we should know, such as a gas fire?

Customer: No, just boiler and hob.

AI: Perfect. If you need to move or cancel it, just message here with the reference.

Here the AI booked into the firm's diary, used a price the owner had published in the knowledge base, and gave a reference. It didn't promise to email the certificate or send a reminder to the tenant, because Klugon doesn't do either.

Sample: an electrician's quote enquiry on the website chat

A sample website chat. The business is made up: Brightline Electrical, Stockport.

Visitor: Do you install EV chargers?

AI: Yes, we install home EV chargers. To give you an accurate quote, could I ask a few questions? Do you have off-street parking, such as a driveway?

Visitor: Yes, driveway at the side.

AI: Roughly how far is it from your consumer unit (fuse box) to where you'd like the charger?

Visitor: The fuse box is in the garage, so maybe 5 metres.

AI: That helps. Do you know how old your consumer unit is, or whether it has RCD protection? A photo is fine if you're not sure.

Visitor: No idea, it's whatever was there when we moved in, about 2012.

AI: Thanks. Do you have a charger in mind, or would you like us to recommend one?

Visitor: Happy for you to recommend.

AI: Could I take your name, phone number and email so our electrician can call you with a quote?

Visitor: Tom Reid, 07700 900789, tom@example.com.

AI: Thanks, Tom. I've passed your details to the team with everything above. They'll be in touch to talk through options and arrange a quick survey if needed.

Website chat conversations can't be replied to from the Klugon inbox, which is why the AI collects a phone number and email. On WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, your team can reply directly from the inbox within Meta's 24-hour window.

Setting it up: a checklist for trades

Here's the order most firms find easiest. None of it needs technical skills, but the knowledge and instructions are worth doing carefully.

Sign up and start the voice trial. The trial is 7 days. A card is required and is charged when the trial ends unless you cancel. During the trial you test the assistant in your browser. A phone number can only be added once the trial has ended.
Add your business details. Name, address, service area, opening hours and timezone.
Create your services. Boiler service, CP12, EICR, tap replacement, call-out (first hour), and so on, each with a realistic duration. Assign them to the right engineers.
Set booking rules. Slot interval, travel buffer, minimum notice and closed dates.
Write the knowledge base. Prices you're happy to share, areas covered, registrations, what you don't do, payment terms, and the emergency procedures above.
Write the assistant's instructions. Who it is, what to say about emergencies, gas smells and electrical risks, what to collect on every call, and what to flag. Include a greeting that tells callers they're speaking to an AI assistant. The default greeting doesn't say this, so write your own.
Connect Slack or Zapier. This is how leads, bookings and hand-overs reach you. Pick a channel the on-call person watches. The Slack integration posts each event as a message.
Test in the browser. Ring through every scenario: emergency, gas smell, routine booking, price question, complaint. Read the conversations in your inbox afterwards.
Add a number once the trial ends. Either buy a new number or keep your existing one by forwarding it. Forwarding means Klugon gives you a dedicated number and you set your carrier to forward your public number to it. There's a step-by-step in keeping your number with call forwarding. Number porting isn't supported.
Decide when the AI answers. Many trades forward only when they don't answer, or only out of hours. Your carrier controls that, not Klugon.

Working with your job management software

Tradify, ServiceM8, Jobber, Fergus and similar tools aren't connected directly to Klugon. Bookings the AI makes go into Klugon's own diary. Zapier receives an event for each new lead, booking and hand-over, and if your job software has a Zapier connection, you can build a zap to create a job or customer from that event. Test it with a dummy booking first. Otherwise, re-key the bookings into your job software each morning, which takes a few minutes for a typical day.

If you run your diary in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar, Klugon can check those calendars for busy times and add events after setup, on the voice Business plan or above. It isn't automatic two-way sync, so treat Klugon's own diary as the one the AI books from.

What it costs, worked through

Klugon's voice product is priced in US dollars. Here's how it compares with the usual alternatives for a small firm.

Klugon voice Starter: $99 a month (or $79 a month billed yearly), with 1,000 voice minutes, plus $9 a month for the phone number. Extra minutes, if you go over, are $15 per started 100 minutes. Full details are on the pricing page.

To see whether 1,000 minutes is enough, make some assumptions. Say the average call to the AI lasts 3 minutes, which is about right for a booking or a detailed emergency. That's roughly 330 calls a month, or around 75 a week. A one- or two-van firm forwarding only missed and out-of-hours calls will usually be well under that. A firm with five engineers sending every call to the AI might need the Business plan, at $299 a month for 3,600 minutes and up to three numbers.

A part-time receptionist: say 25 hours a week. At the National Living Wage of £12.71 an hour from April 2026, that's about £318 a week before employer's National Insurance, pension and holiday cover, so roughly £1,380 a month at minimum. They'd also only be answering for those 25 hours, not at 11 pm on a Sunday.

A human answering service: these typically charge per call or per minute, plus a monthly fee. The operator takes a message but usually can't book into your diary. For a fuller look at the trade-offs, see the comparison of AI answering services and call centres.

What one recovered job is worth. Say you currently miss 6 calls a week that you'd have liked, and one in four would have turned into a job averaging £180. That's about 1.5 jobs a week, or roughly £1,170 a month. If the AI catches even a third of those, it more than covers the subscription. Plug in your own numbers: your average job value, and how many voicemails you get that never ring back.

Compliance and registration points

Gas Safe Register

Anyone working on gas appliances in Great Britain must be on the Gas Safe Register, which is the official list of engineers legally allowed to do gas work. Customers sometimes ask the AI to confirm this. Put your registration number and the categories you're qualified for (domestic natural gas, LPG, and so on) in the knowledge base, so the AI can answer accurately. Never let it say an engineer is qualified for something that isn't on their card. If a customer asks about a type of gas work you don't cover, it should say so and offer to flag it.

NICEIC and electrical certification

The AI should state your registration and that you issue the appropriate certificates, and nothing more. If a customer asks about a certificate from a previous electrician, or whether something meets regulations, that's for you. See the electrician section above for the wording.

Data protection

Your AI receptionist collects names, phone numbers, addresses and details about people's homes. In UK GDPR terms, you're the controller of that data, so you need a privacy notice that covers it and a lawful basis for keeping it. The ICO's advice for small organisations is the place to start. A few practical points for trades:

Tell customers in your privacy notice that calls and chats are answered by an AI assistant and logged.
Klugon doesn't record calls. Calls appear in your inbox as conversations. That avoids most call-recording questions, but you still hold the details collected.
If a customer mentions a vulnerable person in the house, that's sensitive. Collect only what helps the engineer, such as "elderly resident with no heating".
You can export leads, customers and conversations as CSV and delete individual records. Full erasure from Klugon is by email request.
Klugon is operated by a German company under the GDPR, and transfers to processors are covered by standard contractual clauses as listed in its privacy policy.

How it compares with the tools trades already use

You probably already use a mix of: a mobile phone, voicemail, Checkatrade or a similar directory, a job management app, and maybe a call-answering service.

Job management software (Tradify, ServiceM8, Jobber and the like) is where jobs live once they're won: quotes, invoices, job sheets, photos, certificates. Some include online booking forms. They don't answer the phone. Klugon sits in front of them, catching the call or message and turning it into a booking or lead. Keep using your job software for everything after that.

Directories and lead platforms send you enquiries but don't answer your own number. A customer who finds you on a directory and then rings the number is still a call you can miss.

Voicemail is free and takes messages, but many callers won't leave one, and those who do rarely leave useful detail.

Human answering services are good at warmth and can handle odd calls a script doesn't cover. They charge per call and usually can't see or fill your diary.

Klugon's AI phone receptionist answers, books into a diary, answers questions from your own information and flags emergencies. For firms that mostly need night and weekend cover, the after-hours answering service page goes into how to set it up for out-of-hours calls only.

Measuring whether it's working

After the first month, check:

Calls answered by the AI and minutes used, on the Analytics page. Look at the busiest hours chart. If most calls come in between 7 and 9 am, that's when you're losing work now.
Bookings made by the AI, and whether they were the right kind of job with the right duration.
Leads and hand-overs. Were the emergencies flagged correctly? Was the callback fast enough?
Questions without a good answer, on the Insights page. Each one is a gap in your knowledge base. Fill it.
Your own sense of the day. Fewer interruptions on a job is a real result, even if it doesn't show up as a number.

How the trades hub fits together

This page covers plumbers, electricians and heating engineers. The AI receptionist for contractors hub covers the trades sector as a whole. If you also run a garage, a landscaping business or a cleaning firm, the specific pages for auto repair shops, gardeners and landscapers and cleaning companies cover their own call patterns. You can also read about how the AI receptionist for small business works in general, and about handing calls to staff when the AI shouldn't deal with something.

Frequently asked questions

Can the AI transfer an emergency call to my mobile?

No. It can't put the caller through to you. It takes the details, marks the job as urgent, and posts it to your Slack channel or Zapier. Your on-call engineer then rings the customer back.

Will it answer at 3 am on Christmas Day?

Yes. It answers whenever your plan is active and calls are routed to your Klugon number. There's no built-in office-hours limit on calls. You decide which calls reach it through your call forwarding settings.

Can it tell a caller what a boiler fault code means?

It shouldn't, and you should tell it not to. It takes the make, model and code and passes them on, so your engineer can call back prepared.

Will customers know they're talking to an AI?

Only if you tell them. The default greeting doesn't say it's an AI, so write your own greeting that does. Most trades find customers are fine with it as long as the AI is useful.

Does it send booking confirmations or reminders by text?

No. Klugon doesn't send SMS, emails or WhatsApp reminders. The customer gets a booking reference in the conversation. Send anything else from your job software.

Can it quote prices?

It can repeat any fixed price you've put in your knowledge base, such as a boiler service or a landlord gas check. For anything that needs a survey, it collects details and flags it for you to quote.

Can I keep my existing mobile or landline number?

Yes, by forwarding it to a Klugon number after your trial ends. Porting isn't supported. Many firms forward only when they don't answer, so they still take calls themselves when they can.

What happens if someone says they smell gas?

If you've set it up as this page describes, the AI tells them to leave the property and call the national gas emergency line on 0800 111 999, and it doesn't book an appointment. It then takes their details and flags the conversation.

Does it record calls?

No. Klugon doesn't record calls. Each call appears in your inbox as a conversation.

Is there a free trial?

There's a 7-day trial. A card is needed, and it's charged when the trial ends unless you cancel. You can test calls in your browser during the trial, and add a phone number once it ends.

Most firms start by forwarding out-of-hours calls only, then widen it once they've seen how the AI handles a few weeks of real enquiries.