Why plumbers can't afford to miss a call during business hours

It's twenty to eleven on a Wednesday morning. You're open. The van says so, the Google listing says so, and so does the sign on the unit.

You're also flat on your back under a kitchen sink with a basin wrench in one hand and a torch in your teeth. The phone goes in your pocket. It rings out.

That call came in during business hours, to a business that was open, and nobody answered it. It's an easy way to lose work, and you never see it happen.

Open on paper, shut on the phone

Plumbing is done with both hands, usually wet, often in a crawl space with no signal. The hours you're open are the hours you're least able to pick up.

A shop with an office has the same problem one step removed. Whoever sits at the desk is also dispatching, ordering parts, chasing an invoice and talking to the customer who's already on the other line.

After hours, callers half expect to get no answer. At eleven in the morning they don't. Your listing says open. A phone that rings out at eleven tells them you're too busy for new work, or that you've packed up.

Who rings in the daytime

Three kinds of caller ring between eight and five, and each one is worth more than you'd think.

• The planner. The water heater is fifteen years old and starting to weep. The bathroom's being redone in the spring. There's no water on the floor yet, so they're ringing round for prices on their lunch break. These are the bigger tickets, and this caller has time to try three shops.
• The property manager. Forty units and a short list of trades they trust. They ring in office hours because that's when they work. Whoever answers gets the job, and a fair chance at the next one.
• The emergency that happens in daylight. Pipes don't wait for the evening. A burst at ten in the morning goes to whoever picks up at ten in the morning.

Lose an evening emergency and you've lost one job. Lose a property manager's first call and you may have lost an account you never knew was on offer.

Count it by the hour

Your phone already has the numbers. This takes about ten minutes.

• Pull the last 30 days. Open the call log on your business line, or your carrier's online account, and find every call nobody answered.
• Sort them into three columns. Eight to noon. Noon to five. Evenings and weekends.
• Mark the ones you rang back inside fifteen minutes. Then mark the ones that turned into booked work.

Most owners expect the third column to be the long one. Look hard at the first two. Those calls came in while you were open and working, which is the reason nobody picked up.

Take the daytime calls that never became work and multiply by your average ticket. A drain clearance at a couple of hundred dollars, a water heater at a couple of thousand, a repipe at several times that. Wherever your average sits, that's last month's figure.

What picking up mid-job costs you

The obvious answer is to take the call where you are. Try it and watch what happens.

The customer in front of you is paying for your attention and can see you've stopped. A three-minute call turns into ten by the time you've dried your hands, found a pen and written an address on a scrap of cardboard. You quote from memory because you can't see the diary. And the caller can hear that you're only half listening.

So you've shorted the job you're on and made a poor start on the next one.

What works in the daytime

Four honest options. None of them is perfect.

• A callback rule you keep. Check the phone at the end of every job, before you start the van, and ring back inside fifteen minutes. It costs nothing. It stops working the day you're on a four-hour repipe.
• A text the moment you miss a call. An automatic text tells the caller you've seen them and you're coming back to them. It holds a good share of people who'd otherwise move on. We wrote up how to set one up properly.
• Somebody at a desk. A good office manager earns the wage. It's still one person and one line, with a lunch break and two weeks off in August.
• An AI receptionist. It picks up on the first ring while you're under the sink, asks what's wrong and where, tells a burst pipe from a quote request, books the job into your diary and texts you the details. You read them when your hands are dry. If you're wondering how it sounds, we answered that straight, and there's a fuller comparison in AI receptionist vs answering service.

Whichever you pick, test it the same way. At twenty to eleven on a Wednesday, with you under a sink, does the caller get an answer?

Common questions

Isn't after-hours where the emergency money is?

Emergency rates are higher after hours, yes. But count your calls by the hour before you decide where the money is. Daytime is when the planned work, the quotes and the property managers ring, and those are often the bigger jobs and the repeat ones.

I'm a one-man shop. Does this apply to me?

More than to anyone. A bigger shop has somebody else who might pick up. When you're the plumber, the dispatcher and the office, every call that lands while you're working goes unanswered unless something else answers it.

Can't I just ring back between jobs?

You can, and you should if there's nothing better in place. The trouble is the gap. A caller with a problem usually tries the next number within minutes, so a callback an hour later often reaches somebody who has already booked.

What does a daytime caller need to hear?

That they've reached the right place, that somebody understands the problem, and when you can come. A caller who gets those three things on the first call has little reason to keep ringing round.

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