AI answering service for contractors

01 · The problem

Your best hours for working are your worst hours for answering

The trades have a scheduling problem no phone system solves: the people qualified to answer the question are the ones holding a pipe wrench. A homeowner watching water spread across a basement floor does not leave a voicemail and wait. They dial the next number in the search results, and the job goes to whoever answered. Storm weeks make it worse, because the spike lands on the days your crews have the least slack.

Two of the figures the site cites: 38% of business calls go unanswered during office hours (Hiya, 2025), and 63% of callers who reach voicemail never call back (BrightLocal, 2024). A generic answering service takes a name and a number, which is half the job here — what decides whether the call is worth anything is the address and the urgency, and both are easy to get wrong over a line with a compressor going.

02 · Coverage

Whether you go there, answered inside the same sentence

Coverage is a radius around one or more of your locations, along a route, or nationwide, and the assistant checks the caller against it with a deterministic tool rather than a judgement call. The answer is in or out, not "let me see".

• The distance math is local. A bundled table of roughly 41,000 US ZIP centroids, straight-line distance scaled by 1.2 to approximate road miles. No map service in the loop means no network pause mid-sentence, and a pause is what makes a caller think the line dropped.
• Several yards, one answer. Running out of more than one base, the per-location lookups happen at once, so the check stays inside the assistant's three-second budget for a tool call.
• A map is optional, not load-bearing. Google Maps can be switched on for road distances, and any failure falls back to the ZIP table, so quoting never breaks. Out of area is handled the way you told it to, not by the assistant inventing a policy.

03 · The address

Taking a spoken address one rung at a time

Most of the cost of a bad phone address lands on the truck, not the office. The assistant asks for the whole address in one go first, because most people say theirs in one breath. When that does not work it falls back to a fixed ladder rather than asking the same open question louder.

1. ZIP code first, then the house number, then the street: the two reliable pieces before the fragile one, and a known ZIP narrows the search for the street name.
2. Keypad accepted, voice accepted. While a digit field is open the caller can key it in, and a ZIP completes itself at five digits with no pound key. Something heard by ear is read back one digit at a time and waited on; something typed gets a plain acknowledgement. More digits after that belong to the field just asked about, not the next one.
3. The ZIP is a boundary, not a radius. Any street offered has to be inside the caller's own ZIP. If no house with that number exists there, the assistant says so and asks the caller to check those two numbers rather than quietly booking a similar street one district over. Only if the same pair comes back does it name the closest match in another town, once, with the town spoken out loud — and a town the caller rejects stays rejected.
4. The awkward parts are handled: half numbers such as 1234 1/2, hyphenated house numbers, an apartment and floor in their own field, a street only half remembered.
5. The whole address is read back before the subject changes, in labelled lines with the house number and the ZIP spoken digit by digit, and nothing is booked without an explicit yes. Not objecting is not consent. If a check moved the address into a different ZIP, the caller hears that first, with both ZIPs named.

Then the time. Offered slots are genuinely open, appointments go into Google Calendar or Calendly, and the hour is spoken in the timezone of the job address rather than the office's.

04 · On the line

How it sounds on a real call

Example · Brightline Contracting is invented; (555) 019-8460 is not a working number. The turns follow the real address ladder and transfer behaviour.

05 · Reaching a person

The hand-off, and what happens when nobody is free

A transfer is the exception, not the default. It fires when the caller asks for a person in plain terms, or after the assistant has offered one for a question it cannot answer. An unfinished phrase gets a clarifying question first, because "can I speak with…" cut off mid-sentence is not a request yet.

• Priority order, first to answer wins. Managers are dialled in the order you set, with a ring timeout you choose. Whoever picks up is bridged, with a one-line summary of what the caller wants in hand, and the assistant leaves the line.
• Voicemail is caught two ways. Carrier-level answering-machine detection is the first, and it is not trusted alone: the greeting on the answering leg is also checked for the boilerplate only a mailbox says ("at the tone", "record your message"). The match takes several words together, so a person saying "yes, I can take that" never trips it. A leg identified as a mailbox is dropped and the cascade moves on.
• Nobody free is still an answer. The caller is told the team will call back, and every manager who missed it gets the caller's number and the summary by text, with the recording link by MMS where that is switched on.
• The cascade is frozen when it starts, so editing the manager list mid-call does not reorder one already running. The call is never dropped either: a hand-off that cannot complete hands the conversation back to the assistant.
• Rules you write about which conversations matter drive an alert to the dashboard rather than an automatic transfer: a manager sees the flagged live call and decides whether to join it.

06 · Quotes

A range from your numbers, never a figure it invented

The quote tool runs in one of two modes: distance-based, a base fee plus a per-mile or per-pound rate, or crew-hours, a base fee plus your hourly rate times crew size and hours. Travel fee, add-ons and a minimum job sit on top, and the whole thing is widened by the percentage spread you set before the assistant says it out loud.

The result is always a range, delivered with the sentence that a manager confirms it. The model does not do the arithmetic; it reads out what the tool calculated from your table. With no rates configured it does not improvise a number — it collects the job details and passes them to you.

Around the call, the usual record: audio, a searchable transcript, a summary as it ends, a success score and a sentiment read. Two-way SMS and MMS run on your own number, and a customer who says "don't text me" is not texted again. Where customers photograph the job first, the photo pipeline the answering service for moving companies uses is available here; the full module list is on the capabilities page.

07 · FAQ

Questions contractors ask

08 · Pricing

What it costs

Self-serve checkout is not open yet, so the way in today is a request for access or a call to the demo line. Same figures as voxgard.com/#pricing.

Hear it

Call the line and give it a hard address

A live Voxgard assistant answers the demo number, not a recording. Give it a street it is likely to mishear, or a house number that does not exist in your ZIP.