After-hours & overflow call capture for HVAC shops
The calls you miss are the jobs you don't book.
HVAC Answer Desk picks up the inbound calls your team can't get to, after hours and during the daytime rush. It takes the job details and gets them to you, before the caller tries the next shop in the search results.
Inbound only. The desk answers your phone. It never dials your customers or anyone else's list.
Missed call captured
Tue 2:14 PM · 8 min after it came in
Dana R. · 414-555-0148
2231 W Fairview Ave
Furnace, no heat since this morning. House is at 58. Two kids at home.
Carrier unit, roughly 9 years old.
Flagged urgent. Wants someone today. Asked us to confirm by 4 PM.
Most missed calls don't happen at night
That is the part shop owners tend to get wrong, and it is the reason an after-hours-only answering service leaves most of the money on the table.
- Across more than 3,000 shops, 38% of inbound calls turn into booked jobs. At shops with fewer than five techs, it is 24%.
- After hours accounts for only about 10 to 14 percent of call volume. The rest lands in the middle of a Tuesday, when every person who could answer is on a roof or under a furnace.
- A missed call does not wait for you. It dials the next shop on the list, and that shop books the job you paid to advertise for.
Booking-rate and after-hours figures: ServiceTitan same-store data across 3,000+ shops.
What the desk actually does
One job, done properly: catch the call, get the details right, hand it over clean.
Answers what you can't
Every inbound call your team doesn't pick up. Nights, weekends, and the daytime rush when the phone rings while all three trucks are out.
Gets the details right
Name, callback number, address, the system, what it's doing, and how urgent it is. It asks the questions you'd ask, and it doesn't guess when it doesn't know.
Hands it to you clean
A text summary with everything you need to dispatch. Emergencies get flagged and escalate straight to your phone. No new software to learn.
How it works
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We learn how you book
Your hours, your service area, what counts as an emergency, what you want to happen with a maintenance call versus a no-heat call at 9 PM. Setup is on us, not on you.
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You forward the calls you can't take
Keep your number. Nothing changes for the person calling you. The desk only ever sees the calls your team doesn't pick up.
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You get the job, not a voicemail
Job details arrive by text, in a form you can dispatch from. Anything urgent comes straight to your phone instead of sitting in an inbox.
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At day 90, you get the number
A report of the jobs booked from calls you would have missed, and what those jobs invoiced. If it didn't pay for itself, that report is where you'll see it.
We measure one thing: jobs booked from calls you would have missed. Not minutes answered, not calls handled. If that number doesn't justify what you're paying at day 90, you will see it in the report before you see it on an invoice.
Pricing
Straightforward, month to month, no long contract to sign your way out of.
Founding pilot
$325/month
90 days · setup waived
- Everything in the standard offer
- No setup fee
- Day-90 report of jobs recovered
- In exchange: a written case study, if the numbers earn it
Standard
$497/month
$750one-time setup
- After-hours and overflow call capture
- Urgent calls escalated to your phone
- Monthly report
- Month to month
As you grow
$697 – $1,297+
higher volume and more of the follow-up
- More call volume
- Follow-up on quotes that went quiet
- Reminders and rebooking
- Priced to what it's actually doing
Inbound only. The desk answers calls placed to your number. It does not make outbound calls to your customer list, which keeps you well clear of the rules that govern telemarketing.
Founding pilots are limited. Not scarcity marketing. It's one person onboarding each shop properly, and there is a real limit to how many that is at once.
Where this is right now
HVAC Answer Desk is new, and founding pilots are open. There is no wall of customer logos on this page because there is not one to show you yet. That is exactly what the founding pilot is, and it is why it is priced the way it is.
It is run by Nate Needham at ABI Automated Business Innovations, a small shop in Madison, Wisconsin that builds and operates this kind of system for small businesses. When you call, you get me. When something breaks, you know whose problem it is.
If your phone is already covered and the calls are already getting booked, I will tell you that on the first call and we can both get back to work.
nate@tryhvacanswerdesk.com ABI Automated Business Innovations
Questions people actually ask
- Is this a person or a computer?
- An AI voice agent, with a person monitoring it. It tells callers what it is. It is not pretending to be your receptionist, and it will not pretend to know something it doesn't.
- Will it call my customers?
- No. It only answers calls placed to your number. No outbound dialing, no campaigns to your list.
- What happens when it can't answer a question?
- It stops, takes the details, and hands the call to you rather than inventing an answer. Anything urgent goes straight to your phone.
- Do I need to change how I book jobs?
- No. We fit the desk to the way you already work and send the details in a form you can dispatch from.
- What if I want out?
- It is month to month after the pilot. You keep your number. It was always yours.
- Why is it cheap right now?
- Because early customers take on more risk than later ones, and a written case study is worth something to me. That trade is the whole deal.
Stop paying for calls you don't answer
Tell me roughly how many calls a week go unanswered and I'll tell you whether this is worth doing. If it isn't, that's a short conversation.