AI answering service for plumbers

Make a few test calls first: a routine repair, a billing question, and one asking for a person twice (it puts a caller through on the second ask, not the first). Check what Wakeman wrote down, and check what reached your on-call phone. Call the Wakeman number directly, then call your own business number from another phone to make sure forwarding works. Leave booking off until you have checked the times it will offer. Keep test calls apart from real ones, and compare real jobs against the whole bill before you decide.

Human answering services work out at roughly $2.76–$5.00 per included minute on their published plans. Wakeman is $49, $149 or $399 a month with 100, 500 or 1,500 minutes included, then 45¢, 35¢ or 29¢ a minute by plan. Spam calls are never billed. You set a monthly spend limit. It is checked after each call ends, so the call that crosses it, and any calls happening at the same time, can take you a little over.

It has safety words written in advance for gas, carbon monoxide, a downed power line, fire or smoke, a medical emergency, a child or pet locked in a car, water near electrics, a structural collapse, major flooding and sewage inside. When a caller describes one, Wakeman marks the call as an emergency and tries your on-call phone during the call. It is an AI speaking, so it may not say those words exactly, and we cannot promise the call to your phone gets through. It is a safety net, not an emergency service.

On Pro and Max it can write booked jobs into Jobber. Housecall Pro is not generally available yet. Booking is off until you turn it on, because Wakeman doesn’t see your whole Jobber calendar. Once it is on, it offers only the times you have set in Wakeman, and each booked job goes into Jobber.

Yes. We never move your number away at signup, so leaving is easy if it doesn’t work for you.

Both, and mostly the difference is the name. An answering service has traditionally meant a call centre taking messages, and a plumbing virtual receptionist a remote person or an AI answering as your front desk. What matters is what happens on the call: whether it tells a burst pipe from a routine job, writes the job down properly, and reaches your on-call phone when it should. Wakeman is an AI that does those three things, and it says it is an AI at the start of every call.

It can be. On every plan, Wakeman answers the calls your team misses at any hour, day or night. If you switch on “Answer only while we’re closed”, it answers only outside the hours you set. Like any phone service it can have an outage, so it doesn’t promise that every call is answered.

Yes. Every call opens with a short notice that the caller is talking to an AI and that the call is recorded. A caller who asks for a person a second time is put through to your on-call phone.

Both names describe the same job, and so does "AI CSR". Wakeman is an AI receptionist: it answers the calls your team misses in your company’s name, and says it is an AI at the start of every call. Like a plumbing answering service or a virtual receptionist, it writes each job down; unlike a message-taking service, it tells an emergency from a routine call and alerts your on-call phone for the dangerous ones.