If you are a plumber, an electrician or any trade running off a phone, the enquiry you lose is almost always the one that came in while your hands were full. A chatbot on your site answers it in about a second, takes the address, the problem and the urgency, and has the job in front of you when you get back to the van. That is the entire case, and for most one-van businesses it is enough.
Why does a trade lose work it never sees?
Because the moment somebody has a burst geyser or a tripping DB board, they contact three trades and take whoever answers first. You cannot answer first while you are under a sink. The alternatives most trades use are:
- Voicemail — which most people simply hang up on.
- A contact form — which goes to an inbox nobody reads until evening.
- Missed-call callback — by which time the customer has booked somebody else.
None of them answers. A bot does, immediately, and tells the customer honestly when a person will call.
What should it ask?
| Question | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| What is the problem, in their own words | Tells you whether it is a callout or a quote job |
| Suburb or address | Half your quoting decision is travel |
| Is it an emergency | Water on a floor is not a Tuesday job |
| Property type — house, complex, business | Body corporate rules change the job entirely |
| Photos | A picture of the geyser saves a wasted trip |
| Best number and best time | So the callback lands |
Six questions, asked the same way every time, arriving as a readable message instead of a two-minute voicemail you have to listen to twice.
What does it cost, honestly?
A one-van trade is a Starter build: R299 a month plus a R250 once-off setup fee, which is R549 at checkout and R299 a month after. There is no contract; you cancel at the end of any paid month.
Whether that is worth it depends on one number you already know: your average job value. If a call-out plus parts is a couple of thousand rand, the monthly fee is a fraction of one recovered job. If your typical job is a R450 tap washer and your phone is always answered, it will not pay for itself and you should not buy it.
What does a trade not need to pay for?
A lot of what gets sold to small businesses is irrelevant here. You do not need a CRM with pipeline stages, you do not need voice AI, and you do not need multilingual support unless you actually work across language lines — though on Starter you get all eleven official languages anyway, which matters more in some areas than others. What you need is: answers instantly, captures the address and the problem, tells you straight away.
What about quoting?
A chatbot should not quote your work. It does not know what is behind the wall. What it can do is get the job to you fast enough that you can quote the same day — and if the quoting itself is the bottleneck, that is a separate and much cheaper product: quoting and invoicing starts at R80 a month with no setup fee, and turns an accepted quote into an invoice without retyping it.
Three trades get the message. One of them answers within the minute. That is usually the whole competition, and it has very little to do with who is better at the job.
Does it work if I do not have a website?
The chatbot needs somewhere to live, so you need a page at minimum. If you have a Facebook page and nothing else, a simple site is the first spend, not the bot — our website design builds start at R2 000 once-off with R250 a month hosting, and the chatbot goes on afterwards. Building the bot first would be putting a phone in an empty room.
What should I do this week?
Count the enquiries you did not reply to in the last fortnight. Not the ones you turned down — the ones you never got back to. Multiply by your average job. If the answer is a number that annoys you, this is the fix, and there is a free trial so you can watch it handle your own customers before paying anything.
Where we do this
The same build runs for businesses in Centurion, Witbank and Kimberley, and the city pages set out what changes locally — the languages, the trading hours and the sectors that dominate. Everything is deployed and supported remotely from Vanderbijlpark.