Never miss a job again: AI call answering for builders & trades

When you're up a ladder, elbow-deep in a job, or running a saw, you can't stop to answer the phone. The trouble is, the caller rarely waits — they just ring the next name in the search results. PhoneBot answers those calls for you, takes down the job, and sends you the lead before the customer has put the kettle on.

Why trades miss so many calls in the first place

It's not that you don't want the work. It's that the phone always rings at the wrong moment. You're on a roof in Carlow with both hands on a slate. You're under a sink with the water still running. You're stood in front of a customer and it'd be rude to break off. Or the angle grinder is going and you wouldn't hear it anyway.

And after five o'clock, or on a Saturday morning when half your enquiries actually come in, there's nobody at the phone at all. Here's the hard part: a missed call from a stranger almost never gets a voicemail. People looking for a plumber or a sparks just hang up and dial the next number. That job is gone, and you never even knew it existed.

PhoneBot is built to catch exactly those calls. You keep your own number and simply forward calls you can't answer — or all after-hours calls — to a dedicated PhoneBot number. It picks up in a natural Irish voice every single time.

What PhoneBot actually captures on a trade call

A receptionist who doesn't know the trade is no use. PhoneBot is set up to get the things you need to quote and call back:

• The job or the materials — "a leaking immersion," "rewiring a two-bed," or "two pallets of blocks and ten bags of cement" — including quantities where it matters.
• The caller's name, so your callback feels personal.
• A callback number — and it reads the digits back one at a time to confirm them, so you're never left with a wrong number and a lost job.

The whole lot lands with you straight away — by email, WhatsApp, a spreadsheet, or through Zapier into whatever system you already use. You can read it between jobs and ring back when your hands are free. See how it works for the full flow.

A person always stays in the loop

Trades worry, rightly, about a machine promising something daft. PhoneBot doesn't do that. It won't commit to a firm price or lock in a booking. It tells the caller plainly that someone from the team will be in touch to confirm the details.

That's the right fit for trades, because nearly every quote is bespoke — it depends on access, the state of the existing work, how far you're travelling, and what you find when you get there. If you give PhoneBot a price list, it can read out indicative prices for standard items, but the firm number always comes from you. The caller feels looked after; you stay in control of the quote.

A worked example: an after-hours order at the merchant's

Say Murphy Building Supplies closes at half five. At seven in the evening, a builder rings, hoping to sort materials for a job starting first thing. Normally that call dies on an answering machine and the builder rings a rival yard in the morning.

Instead, PhoneBot answers. It takes the order — "fifteen bags of cement and a pallet of 100mm blocks, needed for collection at eight" — gets the builder's name, and reads his mobile back digit by digit to be sure. It tells him someone will confirm stock and price in the morning. By 8am the counter staff already have the lead in their inbox, the order is half-ready, and the builder collected from Murphy's instead of the yard down the road.

The maths is hard to argue with

This is the part that makes trades sit up. PhoneBot is a flat monthly fee — Starter at €99 and Professional at €199 — with no per-call charges, ever. The first 3 hours of calls are free, so you can try it on your own line before you spend anything.

Now weigh that against one job. A single bathroom, a day's rewire, a decent run of fencing, or one pallet order at the merchant's is worth far more than a year of PhoneBot. You don't need it to save dozens of calls. You need it to catch one job a year you'd otherwise have lost — and most weeks it'll catch more than that. Full numbers are on the pricing page, and you can see other trades it suits on industries.

If you've ever wondered how much work walks past your missed calls, the cheapest way to find out is to point your after-hours calls at PhoneBot for a few weeks and see what comes in.