Ninety seconds, and nothing to type.

Ask any sole trader what happens to a call they cannot take and you get the same shape of answer. Sometimes the caller leaves a voicemail, which gets listened to at eight that night when it is too late to ring back. Usually they do not. Usually they ring the next number, because a burst pipe is not a scheduling problem for them either.

The advice that gets offered is always the same three things. Get an answering service, which charges by the call and cannot see your diary. Get a receptionist, which is a salary. Get a system, which means an evening of setup, a monthly fee and a second place where jobs live.

What none of those do is the actual thing, which is to answer a stranger politely, find out what they want, look at the diary that already exists, and offer them a time. That is a small job. It is also a job that has to be done in the moment or not at all, which is why it does not get done.

1. The phone rings. You are under a house, up a ladder, or holding something you cannot let go of.
2. You decline it, or you do not reach it and it rings out.
3. Andy answers, says what it is, and says that a message will go to the business straight away.
4. It asks four things. Who is calling, what number to use, what suburb, and what has gone wrong.
5. It listens to the answer in the caller's own words rather than forcing them through a menu.
6. It reads the diary you already keep and finds space that is genuinely free.
7. It offers two times. If neither suits, it takes a preference and stops guessing.
8. It texts the caller a confirmation while the phone is still in their hand.
9. It writes the job into your calendar, with the number and the caller's own sentence in the entry.
10. At the end of the day it sends you one message about everything that happened.

Hearing a caller on a work site

Speech recognition demonstrations happen in quiet rooms. Real calls to a trade happen next to a compressor, from a car with the window down, from a shopping centre, or from somebody standing in the water they are ringing about. Accents across a suburb vary more than any test set. A system that mishears an address and books a van to the wrong street has done more damage than a missed call.

Knowing what a gap in a diary means

A calendar shows a two hour space at eleven. That space might be lunch, might be the drive from one side of town to the other, might be a job that was booked by phone and never written down, or might be genuinely free. Offering a time that turns out not to exist is worse than offering nothing, because now a customer is waiting at home.

Telling urgent from ordinary

A caller saying water is coming through the ceiling and a caller wanting a quote for a new bathroom sound similar for the first ten seconds. One of them needs the call handed to a human immediately. Getting that judgement wrong in the cautious direction annoys the tradesperson every day. Getting it wrong in the other direction is much worse than that.

Being straight with the caller

People are entitled to know they are talking to software. Saying so costs some callers, who hang up. Not saying so is a deception that gets found out on the second call, and it would also be misleading conduct. Our position is that Andy identifies itself in the first sentence, every time, and we will take the cost of that rather than argue about the wording.

• No payments. No card details, no deposits, no payment links, no escrow. The money stays between the trade and the customer, and we never sit in the middle of it.
• No invoicing or quoting. Trades already pay for software that does this. A second, worse copy inside a phone assistant helps nobody.
• No marketplace. We never offer a caller to a different trade, never rank one business above another, and never take a percentage of a job. This is the one that would be most profitable and it is the one we are most firm about.
• No customer relationship management. No pipelines, no lead scoring, no fields to keep tidy. If using it creates admin, it has failed at the only thing it was for.
• No second diary. It writes to the calendar you already use. If we ever cannot, the honest answer is that it does not support your setup, not that you should move to ours.
• No selling or sharing of call data. Not to advertisers, not to lead brokers, not as an anonymised industry insight product. This is written into the privacy policy as well, so that it is a promise and not a preference.
• No pretending to be a person. Covered above, and it is not negotiable.

The company exists so that there is a real legal entity behind the promises on this page rather than a brand name. Everything on the register is public and can be checked without asking us. What is published here is the minimum that lets you do that.

If any of the above stops being true, the change belongs on this page before it belongs in a sales conversation. That includes the good version, where something finally ships.