Is it an active leak, or a drip that can wait until Thursday?
You're on your back with a wrench in a crawl space and the phone buzzes in your pocket. It could be a slab leak. It could be a running toilet. You can't tell from the vibration, and the caller can't tell whether you're coming. That gap is where a plumbing call goes to whoever answers next.
So the first text sorts. It asks the one question every dispatcher asks: is water moving right now? The caller's answer decides which of three paths the thread goes down.
- Water moving. A reply that sounds urgent gets a text saying someone will call right back, never a booking link. You get an urgent Slack alert with what was sent, and from that moment the caller is waiting on you, so the alert has to reach you on the job.
- Drip, clog, water heater quote. The caller gets your booking or request page and picks a slot.
- A question your intake doesn't cover. Say, whether you service a tankless brand you've never mentioned. The agent doesn't guess. It texts that someone from the team will get back to them, and the question lands in a Slack alert for you to call back.
The first path is easiest to judge from the caller's side of the phone. Every Call button on the Northfork Heating & Plumbing demo site replays a missed call that gets the someone-will-call-you-back text, then shows the owner picking up the thread.
What a caller of Kettle Creek Plumbing would read.
Kettle Creek is made up; the wording is the kind the agent drafts once it's trained on a plumbing shop's site and intake. The caller has just heard the short spoken message and hung up without leaving a voicemail, so this text asks what's wrong. The links are placeholders. Counts are computed from the text itself.
An active leak
Caller replies: “Water is coming through the kitchen ceiling.”
A drip that can wait
Caller replies: “Bathroom faucet has dripped for a week. Can someone look at it?”
Something the intake doesn't cover
Caller replies: “Do you service tankless water heaters?”
The first text names the shop, says a machine wrote it, and closes on the opt-out line, because the review pass refuses a first text that skips any of the three. The replies under it drop the header and the footer. Past 160 characters a text travels as more than one segment, which is part of why usage is billed on top of the monthly price. Two of the three replies hand the caller to you: the agent sends them, and a Slack alert tells you to call back. More plumbing wording, including follow-ups, is on the templates page.
The burst pipe at 11 pm gets no text that night. That part is deliberate.
Texts go out only between 8 am and 8 pm in your time zone. That rule is enforced in code, and a plumber should know exactly what it means at night: the phone still rings your cell, the caller still hears the short message and can leave a voicemail, and no text goes out. You get the voicemail as an alert right away, so a flooded basement can still reach you if you're taking calls.
The caller gets one text when the window opens at 8 am, answering what they said overnight. By then someone with water coming through the ceiling has likely called another plumber. If you run on-call nights, keep that number on your site and your truck. This agent covers the working day, when you're on a job and can't pick up. It is not an overnight answering service.
One repair ticket pays for the month.
There is no trustworthy industry figure for how many plumbing callers hang up and try someone else, so here are example numbers you should swap for your own. Pull last month's call log and your average repair ticket, not your average job, since a repipe skews it.
| Missed calls a week (example) | 4 |
|---|---|
| The same, per month | about 17 |
| Share that would have booked (example) | 1 in 5 |
| Repair tickets that is, per month | about 3.4 |
| Average repair ticket (example) | $375 |
| Work those calls represent, per month | about $1,275 |
| Agent at the top of the usage range | $289 a month |
At those numbers, 1 recovered repair ticket covers a month of the agent, and there's no setup fee to pay back. If a single booked call a month is out of reach for your shop, this isn't worth buying. If the calls you miss are water heater replacements rather than repairs, the bar drops further.
Why a text to someone who just called you is allowed.
The caller dialed your number about a leak, and the text answers that call. It isn't an ad for drain cleaning, and it isn't the first message of a campaign. That distinction is the whole legal footing, and the agent is built so it can't drift across it.
- Only people who called. It messages no number that hasn't just contacted you. No list, no past-customer blast.
- Says it's automated. The first text discloses that an assistant wrote it.
- STOP means stop. Once a caller replies STOP, no agent you run will text that number again.
- No sales language. A coupon or a "10% off" line in a reply gets blocked.
The federal texting rules are summarized in the FCC's consumer guide on robocalls and texts, and the carrier-side rules the number runs under are in Twilio's messaging policy. The 8 pm cutoff is stricter than the federal 9 pm on purpose, because a few states stop earlier. This describes how the agent behaves; it isn't legal advice, and your own counsel should confirm it fits your state.
ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber: it works in front of them.
The agent doesn't log in to your field service software or write jobs into it. It attaches at two points you already control: the phone, through call forwarding, and the online booking or request page your software already gives you, which is the link in the text. A booked caller lands in your schedule the same way a web booking does today.
The record of each call and text goes to HubSpot, or to any tool that accepts a webhook, and alerts reach you in Slack. Forwarding is one code from your cell, and the texts go out from the number you forward to. On AT&T or T-Mobile that's *61* plus the new number and #; on Verizon it's *71 plus the number.
If you're on Jobber, know the alternative. As of September 2026 Jobber sells an AI Receptionist as a $29 a month add-on to plans that start at $49 (see Jobber's pricing). It answers the call itself, around the clock, where this texts after the call rings out, only from 8 am to 8 pm. If your callers would rather talk to someone and you already pay for Jobber, try that first.
$249 a month, no setup fee.
The monthly price is $249, plus AI usage and phone line costs, typically $20–40 a month. Month to month, 30-day cancel for any reason, no setup fee. The number, its carrier verification (about three business days), the training on your site, and the first weeks when I read a copy of every text as it goes out are all inside that first month.
Pass on it if
- A dispatcher or office manager already picks up every call during the day. There is nothing for this to catch.
- Most of your paying work comes in after 8 pm. Those callers wait until 8 am for a text, so your night line matters more than this does.
- You miss a handful of calls a month, not a handful a week. The table above won't balance.
- Your callers are mostly property managers and general contractors on office lines. The screening drops landlines before a text is written.
The full mechanism, setup order, and review pass are on the missed-call text back page. What usage costs in a busy month is broken down on the pricing page. Run heating and cooling too? The HVAC version deals with seasonal surges.
