AI receptionist for plumbers: stop losing jobs to voicemail
An AI receptionist answers the calls you can't take on a job, books the work and sends you the details. From about £45 a month.
- Monthly cost
- £45–£100 a month
- What it's worth
- Around £780 to £1,500 a month in jobs that would otherwise go elsewhere
- Setup
- Easy to set up
The problem
When you're under a floor or draining a system, you can't pick up. Many people ringing a plumber about a leak don't leave a voicemail; they ring the next number. Miss 5 calls a week, and if a third of those were jobs worth £180, that's roughly £1,300 a month going to whoever answered.
What the AI does
An AI receptionist answers every call and text you don't, day and night. It asks what the problem is, how urgent it is and where the customer is, then books the visit using your online booking settings or takes a message. Every call is logged with a short summary, transcript and recording. Calls that mention words you choose, such as "emergency" or "leak", are put straight through to you.
A worked example
A one-van plumber in Bristol misses calls most mornings while on jobs. With Jobber's AI Receptionist answering, routine jobs get booked into the next free slot and any call that mentions a leak or an emergency is put straight through to their mobile.
Before
Around 5 missed calls a week, many of them lost to competitors
After
Every call answered, with 1 to 2 extra jobs booked a week, worth about £180 to £360 a week
The tool
Job management software for home service businesses: quotes, scheduling, invoicing and payments, with automatic follow-ups and an optional AI receptionist.
Pricing: From $29/month (Core, billed annually). Automatic quote follow-ups need Connect, from $99/month. The AI Receptionist is included on Plus, or $29/month as an add-on.
How to set it up
- Sign up for Jobber and set up your working hours, service area, job types and online booking settings.
- Add the AI Receptionist (included on the Plus plan, or a $29/month add-on) and forward your unanswered calls to it.
- Choose the keywords that should put a call straight through to you, such as "emergency", "leak" or "no heating".
- Ring your own number from another phone and test a routine job, an emergency and a sales call.
- Read the call summaries every evening for the first two weeks and tighten your settings wherever it got something wrong.
What goes wrong
- If your diary in the app isn't kept up to date, it will book jobs into slots you've already filled.
- Some callers hang up on anything automated. Turn on text-back so anyone who hangs up gets a message straight away.
- Check with Jobber which plans the add-on works with before committing. The cost range here runs from the cheapest plan plus the add-on to the Connect plan plus the add-on.
- It can't diagnose a problem over the phone, so don't let it quote prices for anything but fixed-price jobs.
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Last updated 17 October 2026.