Answering service · Canada
The answering service for Canadian HVAC companies
It is minus thirty, a furnace has quit, and your phone has not stopped since six this morning. EveryRing answers every one of those calls, books the ones that can wait, and puts the ones that cannot through to you.
The calls you are missing
Heating work does not arrive evenly. There are weeks where nothing happens and then the first real cold snap arrives and a season's worth of calls lands in four days, all of them at once, all of them urgent to the person ringing.
That is precisely the week when nobody in the company can answer a phone. Every technician is on a roof or in a basement, the office is already three calls behind, and each unanswered ring is a household with no heat phoning the next company on their list.
Hiring for that week is not possible, and paying an answering service by the minute for your busiest week is a bill that arrives exactly when the phone was hardest to answer.
What it does on one of your calls
It answers as your company, by the name you chose, and says the call is recorded when you have recording on.
- No heat is treated as urgent, and reaches you. It rings your mobile, says who is calling and what has happened, and connects them only when you press 1. If it hits your voicemail it hangs up rather than leaving somebody's emergency on an answering machine.
- Everything else gets booked. A seasonal service, a quote for a replacement, a filter question that turns into a visit: it takes the details, checks which technician is actually free, and puts the job in the calendar with your travel time allowed for.
- Details first, so the area is checked before a time is offered. Name, number and address, then the problem. A company covering the city but not the county does not want a Thursday slot promised to somebody ninety minutes out.
- It reads the address back digit by digit, which matters more in this trade than most: a technician sent to the wrong street in February is an hour lost and a household still cold.
- The overflow is the point. It answers the fifth simultaneous call exactly as it answers the first, which is the thing neither a person nor a voicemail box can do.
What it will not do
It does not guess at equipment. No opinion on an AFUE rating, on whether a part is still under warranty, on what a replacement will cost or on whether a furnace is worth repairing. Those answers depend on things only a person who has seen the unit can know, and a wrong one on the phone costs you either the job or the margin.
It will not price work you have not published. If your profile does not carry a number for a diagnostic visit, it says somebody will ring back with that and writes the callback down, rather than inventing a figure you would then have to honour or argue about.
It gives no safety advice. If somebody says they can smell gas it does not tell them what to do; it takes the call seriously, gets you, and leaves the judgement to a person who is qualified to make it.
It answers in English. It sends no marketing messages of any kind, to anybody, because there is no feature in the product that could: the only texts that leave are replies, confirmations and reminders for work somebody asked for. And there is no way to export your customer list, ours or anyone's. Neither is a policy we wrote down; both are things the software cannot do.
Against a human answering service
| What is being compared | A human answering service | EveryRing |
|---|---|---|
| Published rate, Canada | Commonly sold by the minute, with a setup fee | $199 to $399 a month, plus a one-time setup fee |
| At 2am | If you bought the after-hours plan | Always, at no different rate |
| What happens to the call | A message you ring back | The job booked, in your calendar, on a van that is free |
| What it knows | A script you wrote for them | The profile you published, and it refuses to guess past it |
| Your number | Often theirs, forwarded | Stays yours |
Rates for human services vary by provider and by how many minutes you buy. Compare the ones you are considering on their own published prices: ours are on the pricing page and do not change by time of day.
Questions HVAC companies ask
Can it handle the cold snap, when everyone rings at once?
That is the case it is for. It answers every call at the same time, so the fifth caller hears the same greeting as the first rather than a busy tone or a voicemail box.
How does it know a no-heat call is urgent?
You tell it what counts as an emergency for your business when you set up your profile. It follows that, rings you first, and tells you what the call is about before you decide whether to take it.
Will it book maintenance as well as repairs?
Yes. Different kinds of work can take different amounts of time, and it books each one for the length you said it takes, so a fifteen-minute call does not eat an hour of the diary.
What happens to calls it could not answer a question on?
Each one becomes a callback on your list with the question attached. Reading them is usually how a business discovers the thing customers keep asking that is not on its website either.
What does it cost?
From $199 a month, the same in July as in January. See the pricing page for what each plan includes.
Can I hear it first?
Yes. We will set it up with your services and hours, and you ring it yourself before deciding anything.
Hear it before you decide
The quickest way to judge this is to listen to it answer as if it were your business. We will set it up with your hours and your services and ring you.