Plumbing answering service
After-hours answering for plumbing companies
A burst pipe at midnight doesn’t wait for your office to open, and neither does the homeowner standing in two inches of water. Rigline answers the calls your team can’t get to, figures out which ones are emergencies, and gets the details to your on-call plumber or onto the schedule.
What it does with your calls
Which plumbing calls can an AI answering service handle?
Most of them. The agent’s first job is telling an emergency from something that can wait, then getting each one to the right place.
Emergencies go to your on-call tech
- Burst or frozen pipes
- Active leaks coming through a ceiling or wall
- Sewage backing up into a drain, toilet, or tub
- A leaking water heater or no water to the house
Routine calls get booked
- Drain cleaning appointments
- Water heater replacement quotes
- Leaky faucets and running toilets
- Fixture installs and remodel estimates
Either way it takes down the caller’s name, callback number, address, and what’s going on, and you get a summary of the call.
Live demo
Hear it answer a plumbing call
Type in your company name and pick your trade. The demo answers as your business, so you hear what your customers would hear at 11 PM. Ask it about Rigline when you’re done.
Your trade
Call Bluebird Plumbing
It answers as your company. Talk to it like a customer would.
Not sure what to say? Try one of these:
- “A pipe burst in the basement and water is spraying everywhere.”
- “Your water heater is leaking from the bottom.”
- “You’d like someone to look at a slow kitchen drain next week.”
- Or ask it how Rigline works and what it costs.
Uses your microphone. Demo calls are recorded and transcribed so we can improve the agent. Nothing you book here is real, and no one is dispatched. On a weak connection the agent can sound delayed; real phone calls don’t have that lag.
How it works
How does an AI answering service work for a trades business?
Calls your team can’t get to go to an AI phone agent set up for your shop. It handles them the way a good dispatcher would, and you get a record of every one.
- 01
Missed calls forward to Rigline
You keep your number. After hours, or after a few rings during the day, calls nobody picks up forward to your agent instead of voicemail.
- 02
It answers as your company
Your name, your service area, your rules. It tells callers it’s an AI assistant, then gets to work: what’s wrong, how urgent, where, and how to reach them.
- 03
Emergencies go to your on-call tech
A live transfer to the on-call phone, or a text with the address, the problem, and the callback number. Your choice.
- 04
Routine calls get booked
Tune-ups, estimates, and next-day jobs go on the calendar. Every call comes with a short summary by text or email, plus the recording.
Setup is done for you
There’s no software for you to learn. Tom builds your agent, connects it to your phone line, and keeps tuning it once real calls come in.
- A call with you about how your office handles the phones today, what counts as an emergency, and who’s on call
- Your services, service area, hours, and any prices you want quoted
- Forwarding set up on your current number, then test calls before anything goes live
- Ongoing review of real calls, with fixes when the agent gets something wrong
Pricing
What are missed calls costing you?
Put in your own numbers. You’ll see what unanswered calls cost you, and your Rigline price, which is 10% of that number each month. No sales call needed to get it.
Your trade
Picking a trade loads typical starting numbers. Change them to match your shop.
All inbound calls. Your phone system or carrier can usually show this.
Nights, weekends, and the times everyone’s on a job. Industry data says about 27% for home services.
Your average job times the chance a caller books. Industry data puts that around 1 in 6, so a $370 repair works out to about $63.
What missed calls cost you
$4,352 / month
About 68 missed calls a month, or $52,224 a year.
Your Rigline quote
$440
per month
$500
one-time setup
That’s 10% of what missed calls cost you each month. Includes up to 450 call minutes a month (twice what your numbers suggest), then $0.49 a minute.
Each $1 you’d spend on Rigline is up against about $10 in missed jobs. Your first year, setup included, comes to $5,780.
This is a real quote built on your numbers. During setup we check your call volume against your phone records. If the numbers hold, so does the price.
Want to see how the math works and where the starting numbers come from? Read about the calculator.
FAQ
Plumbing questions
Will it tell a caller how to shut off their water?
If you want it to, yes. A common setup has the agent walk the caller through finding the main shutoff while it sends the job to your on-call plumber. You decide during setup which tips it gives and which calls it leaves to the tech.
Can it quote prices for a drain cleaning or water heater?
Only the prices you give it. If you have a flat service-call fee or standard drain cleaning price, it can share that. Anything that depends on what the plumber finds gets booked as a visit or estimate instead of guessed at.
What if the caller is a property manager with several units?
The agent captures the property address, the unit, who’s on site, and the best callback number, the same way your office would. Property managers often call after hours, so it’s worth telling us how you handle them during setup.
Do I have to change my phone number?
No. You keep your number. Calls that nobody answers (after hours, or after a set number of rings during the day) forward to your Rigline agent. Most phone systems and carriers support this kind of no-answer forwarding, and we set it up with you.
How much does Rigline cost?
Your price comes from your own numbers. The calculator asks how many calls you get, how many you miss, and what a missed call is worth to you. The monthly plan is 10% of what those missed calls cost you, with a minimum of $199 and a maximum of $1,500 a month. Setup is a one-time fee equal to one month of the plan, between $500 and $1,500. We check your call volume against your phone records during setup, and if your numbers hold, so does the quote.
Other trades
Built for trades where the urgent calls come at night
HVAC
- No heat when it’s freezing outside
- No cooling in a heat wave, especially with elderly people or infants at home
- Water leaking from the furnace, AC, or condensate line
Electrical
- Sparking outlets, switches, or panels
- A burning smell from an outlet or the panel
- Partial power loss or a breaker that won’t reset
Restoration
- Sewage backing up into a basement or through a floor drain
- Flooding from a burst pipe, water heater, or appliance
- Water coming through a ceiling
Takes about a minute
Try it before you decide.
Type in your company name, pick your trade, and call it the way one of your customers would. If you like what you hear, book a 15-minute call with Tom.