domcloud

AI receptionist

How many jobs are you losing to calls you cannot answer?

The call comes at ten past six, while you are in a loft with your hands full. It goes to voicemail, and most people do not leave one — they ring the next number on the list. This answers it instead: takes the job down properly, and then follows up referring to that specific job — the leak, the fuse board, the date they mentioned — rather than sending a generic reminder. You get the lead and the transcript either way.

$99per month, entry tier

Three tiers. Every one has included minutes and a published overage rate — no fair-use clause

  • Web chat
  • Inbound calls
  • Missed-call text-back
  • Out-of-hours
  • Email & form follow-up

The problem

Nobody leaves a voicemail any more. They ring the next number.

The enquiry does not arrive when you are at a desk. It arrives while you are under a floor, up a ladder, or driving — and the one thing it will not do is wait. By the evening, when you finally look at the phone, the person who rang at ten past six has already spoken to somebody else.

The cost is not the call. It is that a job you were qualified to do, close enough to reach, and available for, went to whoever picked up first — and you never knew it existed. That is what the research on response time keeps finding, and the gaps are not marginal.

7×
as likely to qualify a lead when contact is made within an hour, against trying an hour later.
HBR, 2011 — audit of 2,241 US companies
60×
as likely to qualify it, against waiting 24 hours or more. Same audit, same measure.
HBR, 2011
42 hrs
was the average first response in that audit. 23% of the companies never replied at all.
HBR, 2011
21×
drop in the odds of qualifying a lead between calling at five minutes and calling at thirty.
Oldroyd et al., lead-response study, 2007 data

These are published findings about lead response time generally, from named studies you can go and check — not claims about results this service has produced. It is new, and we will not dress research up as a track record.

What’s included

Everything in the price

  • A receptionist configured on your actual business — your services, your area, your prices where you publish them, and the jobs you would rather not take
  • Web chat, inbound calls, and cover for the hours when nobody is near the phone
  • Missed-call text-back within seconds of the call dropping, rather than whenever someone next checks the phone
  • Follow-up that carries the conversation with it — the job described, the timing, the objection raised — instead of a generic 'just checking in'
  • A sequence that stops the moment the lead replies, books, or asks it to stop
  • Every conversation transcribed and attached to the lead, so you can see what was said and what was promised before you call back
  • Escalation rules you set: which jobs reach you immediately, and which wait for the morning summary
  • Handover to a real number at any point in the conversation, including the moment someone simply asks for a person
  • Leads delivered where you already work — your inbox, your phone, or the system you already keep them in
  • A monthly read of the transcripts, and the wording changed where it is losing people
  • Included minutes on every tier, with the overage rate published rather than discovered on an invoice
  • It sits behind the number you already advertise — a divert you set, and cancel, from your own phone

Tiers

Three tiers, and every one tells you what a busy month costs

Answering calls costs real money per minute, so an unlimited flat fee is a promise that quietly breaks on the month you get busy — which is the month you most needed it. Each tier includes a block of minutes and publishes what a minute beyond it costs, so you can work out a bad month before you sign rather than reading about it on an invoice.

Answer

Nothing gets missed.

$99 / month

$200 setup · 150 minutes included · $0.50/min after

The sole trader whose phone goes to voicemail because both hands are full.

  • Calls answered around the clock, web chat, and missed-call text-back
  • Qualifies rather than collects — the job, the address, the access, the urgency
  • Emergency detection, with the escalation rules you set
  • Hands to a real number the moment anyone asks for a person
  • Spam and robocall filtering
  • Every call transcribed and kept

Close

Most start here

And it follows up until they book.

$199 / month

$350 setup · 350 minutes included · $0.45/min after

The small shop where leads go cold because nobody has time to chase them.

  • Everything in Answer, plus:
  • Follow-up that carries the conversation with it, and stops the moment they reply
  • Quote chasing — the largest recoverable pot in most trades businesses
  • Booking, confirmations, reminders and reschedules
  • Review requests after the job, within the review platform's own rules
  • Dormant leads reopened
  • Syncs to the system you already keep jobs in

Learn

And it tells you what is costing you work.

$350 / month

$600 setup · 600 minutes included · $0.40/min after

The outfit with someone on the phones and no idea how well it is going.

  • Everything in Close, plus:
  • Analysis of the calls a human answered, not only the ones we picked up
  • Booking rate by person, by job type and by where the call came from
  • Where calls are lost, at the point in the conversation they are lost
  • Outstanding quotes, ranked by value and by how long they have been sitting
  • The work you are turning away — which is what tells you what to hire for
  • The questions people keep asking, routed into changes on your website
  • A monthly written review, from a person rather than a dashboard

Minimum term is three months where the setup fee is paid and six where it is not, the same as the websites we run. Consistently over your minutes is usually an argument for the next tier rather than the overage, and we will say so.

A call, start to finish

This is the whole thing. Six forty-two on a Thursday, and you never saw it.

Read what it asks, and particularly when it asks it. The question about whether the walls are open is the one that decides the price and the deadline, and it is the question a message-taking service never thinks to ask.

  1. Assistant

    Good evening — you've reached the answering service for the electrical team. I can take the details and get this in front of them. Can I start with your name?

  2. Declan

    Declan Moore.

  3. Assistant

    Thanks Declan. What's the job?

  4. Declan

    We're mid-renovation and I need cables run through the house. New sockets in most rooms, and I'd like ethernet points put in while the walls are open.

  5. Assistant

    And the walls — open now, or still to come down?

  6. Declan

    Open. That's the thing, the plasterer's booked for the 29th, so it has to be done before then.

  7. Assistant

    That's the part that decides the whole job, so I'll put it at the top. I've emailed you the summary so you have it in writing — you'll have a quote or any follow-up questions within three working days, and if the plasterer's date moves, reply to that email and the job updates.

An illustration of how the intake is configured, not a recording of a delivered call. The caller, the contact details and the job are invented.

What you got out of it

Answered 18:42. Both emails out by 18:46. Nothing for you to remember.

You were up a ladder for all of it. This is what was waiting when you looked.

Your onboarding form, filled in

The same form you would have filled in yourself, from the same conversation — except it was filled in while the call was still happening.

Job type
First-fix wiring — renovation
Property
4-bed semi, ~1,600 sq ft, two floors
Scope
Sockets throughout, plus ethernet points
Site status
Walls open — first fix accessible now
Deadline
Before plasterer, 29th — hard
Contact
Declan Moore · 07700 900148 · declan.moore@example.com

To Declan, 18:46

Your enquiry — first-fix wiring, 4-bed semi

Hi Declan — thanks for calling. Here's what we took down: first-fix wiring through a four-bedroom semi of roughly 1,600 sq ft, sockets throughout plus ethernet points, walls open now, to be completed before the plasterer on the 29th. You'll have a quote or any follow-up questions within three working days. If the plasterer's date changes, reply to this email and we'll update the job.

He now has it in writing, from a call he made at a quarter to seven, and he knows exactly when to expect you.

To you, 18:46

New lead — first fix, hard deadline 29th

Declan Moore · 07700 900148 · declan.moore@example.com. Four-bed semi, ~1,600 sq ft over two floors. Sockets throughout plus ethernet points. Walls are open now. Hard deadline: plasterer on the 29th, so the window is roughly a fortnight. Quote or questions due by Tuesday. Full transcript attached.

The deadline is at the top because it is what decides whether you can take the job at all — not buried three lines into a message you skim in the van.

Your callers’ data

It answers your customers. Here is exactly what happens to what they say.

This is the part worth reading slowly, because the people it holds data about are your callers rather than you — and they never agreed anything with us. Under GDPR you are the controller and we are the processor, which is written into our terms at clause 9 rather than being a promise on a sales page.

  • Your caller is told what they are talking to

    It says it is an assistant whenever it is asked, and we will not configure it to deny that. The recording notice at the start of the call is set to what your jurisdiction actually requires — and where that is unclear, we configure the stricter option rather than the looser one.

  • The recordings and transcripts are yours

    Not ours, and not a dataset. You are the controller and we are the processor, which means we act on your instructions. Ask for the lot and you get the lot, in a form you can keep, at any point and at no charge.

  • It is only ever used to answer your calls

    Never for marketing, never for our own purposes, never to train a model, and never for another client. We do not contact your callers ourselves for anything — they rang you, not us, and the follow-up goes out in your name.

  • Deleted within 30 days of you leaving

    Everything is exported to you first, so the record stays with you rather than with us. Switch the service off and your number routes straight back to you the same day — see terms clause 9 for the whole of it, in writing.

Get it answering

Tell us what your callers ask for, and we will tell you what it would take

What you do, the questions that decide a quote, and how you would rather calls be handled out of hours. We reply within one working day, and we will tell you if the answer is a cheaper tier than you were expecting.

We reply within one working day.

What’s not included

Where we stop

Being specific about the limits is cheaper for both of us than discovering them halfway through.

  • Outbound cold calling. It answers and follows up with people who contacted you first — dialling strangers is a different service with different law attached to it
  • Pretending to be a person. It says it is an assistant whenever it is asked, and we will not configure it to deny that
  • Quoting or committing you to a price, unless you give us the rate card and tell us to
  • Taking card details or payment inside the conversation
  • The website it answers on. If you do not have one yet, that is the websites service rather than this one
  • Porting your number away from your carrier. We sit behind it instead, which is slower to set up and far easier to walk away from

Questions

The things people ask before saying yes

What actually makes the follow-up different from an autoresponder?
An autoresponder sends the same message to everyone who ever filled in a form. This follows up on the conversation that happened: someone who rang about a fuse board tripping and said they were away until the 14th gets a message about the fuse board, after the 14th. That difference is not a nicety, it is the entire reason follow-up works or gets ignored — a generic chase reads as a mailing list, and a specific one reads as the person they spoke to remembering them. It also stops the moment they reply, so nobody gets chased about a job they have already booked.
Will people know they are not talking to a person?
If they ask, yes — it says it is an assistant, and we will not set it up to claim otherwise. That is not only an ethical position: a caller who is misled and later works it out has learned something about your business that no amount of follow-up recovers. It introduces itself as answering for you, takes the job, and hands over to a real number the moment someone asks for a person or the conversation needs one.
What happens when it does not know the answer?
It says so and takes a message, or hands over — it does not guess at a price, a date, or whether you cover a particular street. Inventing an answer is the failure mode that costs you the job at the point where the customer finds out, so it is configured to prefer 'I will get that confirmed for you' over a confident wrong answer. Anything it could not answer shows up in the monthly read, which is usually where the next round of improvements comes from.
What if it says something wrong?
Every conversation is transcribed and kept, so there is a record rather than an argument. If something is wrong we change the configuration, and you can switch it off entirely from your phone while we do. We would rather you saw a bad transcript than had it hidden from you — the alternative is finding out from a customer.
Do we need a new phone number?
No. It usually sits behind the number you already advertise, picking up what you do not answer — after hours, on a roof, already on another call. You can also point it at everything if you would rather, or give it a separate number and test it alongside what you do now before committing.
How long until it is live?
About a week for chat and enquiry follow-up. Calls take longer, because the number routing has to be set up and tested with real calls before anything is pointed at it — putting an untested receptionist in front of your main line is how you find out about a problem from a customer instead of from a test.
What happens to the leads and the transcripts if we leave?
They are yours, and they go with you. The number routes back to you, the conversation history is exported, and there is no exit fee — the same terms as the websites we run. If it is not earning its monthly fee you should be able to leave without a negotiation, which is also the only honest way to sell something whose value shows up in your calendar rather than in a report.
What happens if we go over the included minutes?
You are billed the overage rate for that tier, which is published on this page rather than buried in a contract. We would rather show you a rate you can multiply out in advance than run an unlimited plan we have to renegotiate the moment you get busy — and getting busy is the outcome you are paying for. If you are consistently over, the honest advice is usually the next tier up rather than the overage, and we will say so rather than letting it run.
Can it really analyse the calls we answer ourselves?
Only on a setup where those calls reach us, and that is worth being precise about before you buy the Learn tier. The normal arrangement is a divert: your number rings you first, and we pick up what you miss. On that setup we only ever see the missed calls, so the calls your team answered are genuinely invisible to us. Analysing those needs either your recordings from the system you already use, or an arrangement where calls come to us first — and that second one means an outage on our side stops your phone ringing, which we will not do to a trades business by default. It is the first thing we work out on the call, and if the answer is that it cannot be done cleanly on your setup, Learn is not the right tier and we will tell you so.
How is this different from the AI assessment?
The assessment is a one-off piece of analysis that finds where automation is worth doing in your business, and it is refundable if it finds nothing. This is a specific automation, already built and run for a flat monthly fee, for the problem almost every business that answers enquiries already has. You do not need the assessment first — if answering and follow-up is obviously your bottleneck, start here.

Tell us what you're up against

Describe the situation in a couple of lines. We'll tell you straight whether we can help, what it would cost, and how long it would take.

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