AI answering service for moving companies

01 · The problem

A mover's phone rings at the worst possible moment

Somebody shopping for a move rings three or four companies in an afternoon and books whichever one had a person free to take it down properly. The information is dense: a date, two addresses, a third-floor apartment with no lift, a piano. Miss any of it and the estimate that comes back is wrong.

Meanwhile the people who could take that call are on a truck or in a basement garage with no signal. 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 service that takes a name and a number does not close the gap either — the manager still calls back cold and starts from the beginning, by which point the customer has a quote from somebody else.

02 · The intake

What it asks, in the order it asks it

The moving intake is a fixed sequence rather than the model improvising: one field to ask about per turn, so nothing is skipped and nothing is asked twice.

1. The caller's name.
2. The move date, which has to resolve to a real date between today and eighteen months out. A date landing in the past gets its own handling: it is almost never the customer's mistake but a spoken day matched against the wrong month, so the assistant asks about the month rather than making them repeat the day.
3. The pickup address, plus the ZIP on its own if the address came without one, then the floor, the lift and the parking there. A house gets asked about parking only.
4. The drop-off address, with the same ZIP follow-up and the same access question.
5. Home size, awkward items, and an email address, each optional and each switchable off in the dashboard.
6. The read-back: the collected details in one sentence, then a wait for a yes. It names only the fields it actually holds, and anything it gave up on is spelled out as missing rather than glossed over.

The rules underneath

• Four fields cannot be declined. Name, move date, pickup and drop-off. The optional ones can be refused, and a refused field is never brought up again.
• It does not nag, and it does not lose an answer either. Each field has a small ask budget — twice for the required four, once for most optional ones — after which the lead is marked incomplete. A rejected answer gets its own separate budget, so a move date the customer said out loud survives a first attempt at parsing it that went wrong.
• A fact given once sticks, and an address arriving in two breaths ("2210 Ash Street", then "Fort Collins, Colorado 80521") is joined into one rather than the second half overwriting the first. "24947 Tennyson Street" does not become ZIP 24947 either.
• Each address is read back once, when the assistant leaves that side of the route, and again only if the caller corrects it. The recap at the end is the second and last time.

03 · On the line

How it sounds on a real call

Example · Ridgeline Moving & Storage is invented; (555) 014-2233 is not a working number. The turns follow the real intake order and no-price behaviour.

04 · The price question

Why it does not name a number, unless you tell it to

The intake ships collect-only by default: the assistant is not given the pricing tool at all, and its instructions tell it to promise a manager callback. A number said out loud on a Tuesday becomes a number the customer expects on moving day, and a mover who has not seen the stairs is guessing.

Turn pricing on and the assistant gets a tool that calculates from your own configuration in one of two modes: hourly, a base fee plus your rate times crew size and hours, or distance-based, a base fee plus a per-pound or per-mile rate over a minimum charge. Either way the result is widened by the spread you set and spoken as a range, with the sentence that a manager confirms it. The model never does the arithmetic; it reads out what the tool returned. On a collect-only assistant the calculated number is kept away from the model entirely, so a bot told not to quote is never handed a figure it could read out by accident.

05 · Photos

The customer photographs the rooms; the estimate starts before anyone drives out

Two-way SMS and MMS run on your own number, so the line the customer just called can receive their photos.

• All the photos are read together. Every picture of that home goes into one analysis rather than one estimate per picture. Carriers chop a batch into separate messages half a minute apart, so anything texted in within a three-minute window is collected into a single pass.
• What comes back: the home size, a rough total volume, the items it can see, and the special items named — piano, safe, pool table, large appliances, antiques — each with a note on why it matters. Those are flagged for the estimator, never silently surcharged.
• The price is not the model's number. The photo only picks the size; the range is computed from the same quote configuration described above. With none set up, the reply gives size and special items and says a manager will price it. The automatic text repeats the spoken line and calls it a rough estimate rather than a binding quote, and a failed analysis sends nothing at all.
• If the customer is still on the phone, the assistant waits for a gap and brings the photos up in conversation instead of talking over them.

06 · Afterwards

What reaches the office

• A partial lead is still a lead. Every step writes to the call record as it happens, so a caller who hangs up on question three leaves behind everything they had already given, flagged incomplete.
• An alert, once. On a confirmed lead everyone on the account gets a notification and a live dashboard event: new moving lead, call the customer back. Any calculated range is appended to it.
• The move date lands on Google Calendar. Connected, the confirmed lead becomes an all-day event titled "Move: {name} — {from}→{to}", carrying both addresses, home size, big items, the quote, the email and the phone. It is written unconditionally, because two moves on one day is information, not a booking conflict.
• The whole lead goes to your CRM, forwarded verbatim to a connected CRM or webhook after the call, complete or not, with the completeness flag attached. The email inside it is badged for what it is: stated on the call, or verified against the contact record.

It sits next to the audio, a searchable transcript and a summary written as the call ends. Related: the contractor answering service page covers the service-area and escalation side of the same engine; the capabilities page lists every module.

07 · FAQ

Questions movers 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 try to break it

A live Voxgard assistant answers the demo number. Give it an address in two halves, or ask it for a price.