The receipts, before the story.
Instant Water Heaters lives or dies by the phone, and the phone was losing.
"Over 20 hours a week, just answering basic intake questions."
Owner · Instant Water Heaters
Who, what, and how long.
- Client
- Instant Water Heaters
- Industry
- Plumbing and water heater install and repair, St. Louis
- The ask
- Stop sending calls to voicemail, and stop losing the after-hours emergency jobs.
- What we built
- A custom 24/7 voice agent (Betty) that answers the phone, qualifies every caller with a 13-step plumbing intake, quotes the job, logs it to the CRM, and texts the on-call technician.
- Stack
- Custom Voice AIOpenAIMake.comAirtableTwilioLinqGoogle DocsSlack
- Timeline
- A few weeks, then tuned on real customer calls
The phone was the bottleneck.
Instant Water Heaters installs and repairs water heaters across St. Louis. The work is high-margin, and the emergencies are the best of it. A dead water heater is an urgent, same-day buy. The customer is ready to book the moment someone picks up.
The problem was that nobody could always pick up. At peak, calls stacked up and rolled to voicemail. After hours, the emergencies that should have been the easiest yes went unanswered until morning, by which point the customer had already called the next plumber. And the overflow that did get answered landed on the owner, who was personally absorbing hours of the same basic questions every week.
Every call that rolled to voicemail was a same-day, high-margin job, handed straight to the next plumber in the search results.
Pain points
- Calls going to voicemail during peak hours. Every missed call was a job handed to a competitor.
- After-hours emergencies, the highest-margin work, going unanswered overnight.
- Inconsistent intake. Details got missed, and technicians arrived unprepared.
- The owner spending 20+ hours a week answering the same basic questions by hand.
Meet Betty, the voice agent who answers the phone.
Betty answers on the first ring, day or night, in a warm, natural voice. She is trained on the way Instant Water Heaters actually does intake: tank versus tankless, pilot lights, pressure relief valves, the questions a sharp dispatcher would ask.
She runs a 13-step script on every single call, so nothing gets skipped no matter how busy it is.
One call in. A work order out.
From the caller's side it is one phone call. Behind it, Betty qualifies, logs, and dispatches, then keeps the job moving until a tech is on the way.
- The call comes in, 24/7. Betty answers on the first ring. No hold music, no voicemail.
- Betty qualifies. She runs the 13-step intake, captures the heater type and the problem, and quotes the job from the knowledge base.
- Everything lands in the CRM. Name, address, problem, and access notes write straight into Airtable. No retyping, no missed fields.
- A work order is created. Betty generates the job and a shareable work-order doc the team can open.
- The on-call tech gets a text. An SMS goes out with the full job detail, so the plumber shows up prepared.
- The job is dispatched within minutes. Start to finish, while the old system would still have been ringing.
What Betty handles while the caller just talks.
- Logs the full conversation history for every call, so nothing is lost and every job is auditable.
- Texts the customer to send photos of the unit, then processes and attaches them to the work order.
- Posts a notice to the team in Slack for a quick human audit before dispatch.
- Follows up automatically if a job sits without an update, so nothing falls through the cracks.
The whole system,
not just the call.
Betty is the front door, but the build runs the entire job behind her. Voice calls, the website chat widget, and inbound texts all flow into one routing layer that logs every conversation, checks authorization before anything moves, spins up the work order, loops in the team, and handles the customer's photos, all automatically.
What changed.
The receipts up top are the headline. Here is the rest of what moved, the parts a caller never sees.
| // Metric | Before | After | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone coverage | Business hours only | 24/7/365 | always on |
| Calls at peak | Rolled to voicemail | Every line answered | 0 missed |
| After-hours emergencies | Lost overnight | Captured and dispatched | in minutes |
| Lead qualification | Whoever answered guessed | Same 13 steps, every caller | consistent |
| The money talk | An awkward callback | Handled on the first call | up front |
| Job detail to the tech | A name and a number | Full intake, plus photos | prepared |
| Stalled jobs | Quietly forgotten | Auto-followed-up | within the hour |
| Owner time on intake | 20+ hours a week | Handed off to Betty | reclaimed |
Inexpensive to run.
Built to last.
No enterprise call center. No new phone system to learn. Just one number that answers every time, running on tools that stay cheap at the scale of a local plumbing company.
A custom real-time voice agent (Betty), tuned for plumbing intake and natural phone conversation.
Turns what callers actually say into clean, structured intake.
Routes every call, logs the history, and runs the follow-up and dispatch logic.
System of record for every job, with clean fields and zero double entry.
The phone line, the technician alerts, and the photo intake.
Carries the customer contact and the photo-request text thread.
A shareable work-order doc per job, ready for the field.
A quick human audit step before a job goes out the door.
The turn.
For a home-services business, the phone is the front door. When it goes to voicemail, the job walks next door. Betty makes sure it never does. She answers every call, asks every question, quotes the work, and gets a tech moving, at 2pm or 2am, without the owner ever picking up.
If the phone is the bottleneck in your business, that is exactly the kind of thing I look for first.