A two-van Edinburgh electrical contractor — owner-operator plus three engineers — plugged in our Reception agent on a Monday. By the Friday, the answerphone went quiet. A call that came in at 14:08 while everyone was up a loft in Morningside got a ballpark quote sent by text at 14:11 and a survey booked at 14:14. In 90 days they caught 184 missed calls, sent 142 ballpark quotes inside three minutes, and booked £41,200 of new work — without anyone climbing down a ladder to answer the phone.
Two of our AI agents, wired into the contractor's existing ServiceM8 diary and the BT landline + mobile call-forwarding chain. No new phone system, no new CRM, no price-list rewrites — we loaded their own price matrix verbatim.
Answered every missed call inside 12 seconds with a real-sounding response. Took the job type (EICR, fault find, fuse board, EV charger, rewire, kitchen sockets), the postcode, and the urgency. Sent a ballpark text quote inside three minutes — pulled from the contractor's own price matrix — and offered three survey slots from the engineer's actual diary. Booked straight into ServiceM8.
Chased every unbooked quote at 24h and 72h with a different angle — offering an earlier slot, or breaking the job into two visits. Handed any quote over £2,000 back to the owner with a one-line summary instead of auto-confirming. Hard rule: nothing commercial above two grand without a human.
14-day rolling average — first 90 days vs the prior 90 days. Not a one-off spike.
"I stopped ringing people back at 7pm. That's the whole thing. Phone rings while I'm working, customer gets a text three minutes later with a number on it, picks a slot, and I see it in ServiceM8 when I sit down for tea. We've not lost a Saturday job since March. The replies sound like one of the lads. Customers don't twig it's not a person until I tell them, and most of them don't care."
— Owner, Edinburgh electrical contractor (SM)
[2026-04-21 14:08:09] Reception → missed call 0131 555 0184 → callback 14:08:12: "Hi, Stuart's team — they're on the tools till 5. What can I help with?" → caller: "Fuse keeps tripping, kitchen circuit" → quote logic: fault-find £140 + repair likely £200–£400 → text sent 14:11:08: "Sounds like a fault-find, £140 to diagnose, then a fixed quote. Earliest slot Thurs 09:00 — book it?" → confirmed 14:14:22 → ServiceM8 job created #J-4118
— Reception log, day 23
No new phone system. No replacement CRM. We sit on top of what's already running on the van's iPad.
About this case study: Composite based on outcomes across 5 similar small UK electrical/trades clients (1–3 vans) over the 90 days to 2026-04-30. Names changed at the operators' request. Underlying numbers anonymised and rounded. Individual results vary — we'd rather a slightly dull true story than an inflated one. More like this: trades sector page · Wandsworth dental story.
If you're missing a third of your inbound calls during job time, the maths is the same as it was for Stuart — every one that doesn't ring back inside 10 minutes is a customer Googling your competitor. Setup is about a fortnight from sign-off, including loading your price matrix so the ballpark quotes are actually yours.
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