AI receptionist for tradies and small business, Sydney
You can't answer the phone with your hands in a switchboard, under a sink or halfway up a ladder. An SMS receptionist picks up the slack, so the job doesn't go to whoever answered first.
What it does
When a call comes in and you don't get to it, the caller gets a text from your number within seconds. Not a voicemail nobody listens to — a plain message that says you're on a job and asks what they need. Most people reply, because texting is easier than leaving a voicemail.
From there it holds an actual conversation. It answers the questions you get twenty times a week: do you cover this suburb, do you charge a call-out fee, how soon could someone come out, do you do this type of work. It takes the job details, the address and a preferred time, and it books a request into your calendar.
Then it sends you one summary: who called, what they want, where they are, when they want you, and how urgent it sounds. You decide what to do with it. If it doesn't know an answer, it says so and flags the message for you rather than guessing.
Missed call text back
The mechanism is simple and that's the point. Your existing number is forwarded through a Twilio line. When a call rings out, goes to voicemail or is declined, Twilio fires an event. Make.com picks it up and sends the first SMS from your business number, usually inside five seconds — while the caller still has the phone in their hand and hasn't yet dialled the next name on the list.
Every reply from that point runs through the Claude API with your own information behind it: your services, your service area, your prices, your hours, and the answers you'd give yourself. It writes like you asked it to — short, plain, no exclamation marks — and it never invents a price or promises a time you haven't approved.
Nothing changes about how you use your phone. You keep your number. If you pick up, it stays quiet. If you're busy, it starts the conversation and hands it back to you the moment you're free.
What you get
- Missed call text back on your existing business number, within seconds.
- Conversational replies trained on your services, suburbs, hours and prices.
- Booking requests captured with address, job description and preferred time.
- A clean summary SMS or email to you for every enquiry.
- Escalation: anything it can't answer gets flagged, never guessed.
- After-hours cover, so Saturday morning calls don't go cold until Monday.
- A monthly rundown of how many enquiries it caught and what they were about.
- Changes to the wording or the answers whenever you want them, at no extra cost.
Who it suits
It suits anyone whose hands are busy while the phone rings: plumbers, sparkies, mechanics, mobile groomers, physios between clients, one-person cleaning crews. If a missed call is a lost job worth more than a couple of hundred dollars, the maths gets obvious quickly.
It is not a call centre and it doesn't pretend to be a person. Callers are told they're texting with an assistant, because being caught faking that is worse than not having it at all.
From $990 +GST one-off setup, then $249 +GST/month. No lock-in.
Twilio message and number costs are billed at cost on top, typically a few dollars a month for a sole operator.
All prices AUD and exclude GST.