If you run an HVAC, plumbing, or electrical business, here's a number that should concern you: up to 40% of inbound calls go unanswered during peak hours and after-hours.

That's not a guess. It's a pattern we see across hundreds of field service companies we work with.

Where the calls go

The math is simple. A typical plumbing company gets 30-50 calls per day. During a busy Tuesday morning, your dispatcher is already on the phone scheduling an emergency water heater replacement. Two more calls come in. One goes to voicemail. The other hangs up after four rings.

That customer who hung up? They're already dialing your competitor.

The after-hours gap

The problem gets worse after 5 PM. Emergency calls — burst pipes, no heat in January, electrical faults — don't follow business hours. Yet most field service companies either:

Send everything to voicemail
Pay for an answering service that takes messages (but can't book jobs)
Forward calls to the owner's personal phone (hello, burnout)

None of these capture the lead effectively.

What a missed call actually costs

Let's say your average job ticket is $350. If you miss 5 calls per day and even 2 of those were real jobs, that's $700/day in lost revenue — or roughly $15,000/month.

For a business operating on tight margins, that's the difference between growing and staying flat.

The fix isn't hiring more people

The traditional answer is "hire another dispatcher" or "get an answering service." Both cost $3,000-5,000/month and neither actually does anything with the call — they just take a message.

What field service businesses actually need is something that can:

Answer instantly — no rings, no hold music
Understand the request — "my AC isn't blowing cold" means something specific
Book the appointment — check your real calendar and schedule the job
Qualify the lead — is this an emergency? What's the service type? What's the address?

That's exactly what AI voice agents do. Not in a robotic, press-1-for-sales way — in a natural, conversational way that customers actually prefer over hold music.

Getting started

The businesses seeing the biggest impact are the ones that started with after-hours coverage first. It's the lowest-hanging fruit: capture calls that were previously going to voicemail, and let the AI book next-day appointments while you sleep.

Once you see the ROI from after-hours alone, expanding to overflow during business hours is an easy next step.

Want to see how many calls your business is missing? Get a free demo and we'll show you the data.