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Automations · AI Receptionist

AI Receptionist for HVAC

The call you don’t answer becomes somebody else’s job. Usually within four minutes.

You’re under a house. You’re driving. It’s 8:40 on a Sunday night.

The phone rings and it’s a homeowner with no heat.

If it goes to voicemail, that person is not leaving a message and waiting for you. They’re calling the next name on the list. You never knew the call happened, so it never enters your mind as a lost job — it just quietly doesn’t exist.

That’s the problem this fixes. Not with a call center reading a script badly, and not with a voicemail greeting. With something that picks up, sounds normal, works out what’s wrong and how urgent it is, and either books it or gets you the details.

What it does

The three jobs it does

01

Catches the calls you’re not there for

After hours, weekends, mid-job, or when your line is already busy. In this trade a meaningful share of calls land outside 9 to 5, and emergencies don’t schedule themselves for business hours.

02

Makes “Open 24 hours” true

This is the part most contractors miss, and it’s worth real money. Being open at the time somebody searches is one of the top factors in whether you show up in the map pack — and it’s the cheapest win available. But you can only set those hours honestly if the phone is genuinely answered.

The agent is what makes the setting true instead of a misrepresentation. The agent makes the hours true, and the hours move the ranking. That’s the join, and it’s why this sits underneath your SEO rather than beside it.

03

Screens the junk

Roughly 7% of inbound calls to a business are spam or robocalls. Solicitors, warranty scams, and agencies cold-calling you about marketing. The agent handles those before they reach you.

Worth saying plainly on a sales call: this stops people like us from interrupting your day.

On the phone

What it actually does on a call

  • Answers on ring-no-answer, outside business hours, and when your line is busy
  • Asks what’s wrong, gets the address, checks it’s inside your service area
  • Triages urgency — no heat in January is not the same as a maintenance question
  • Escalates genuine emergencies to whoever’s on call, immediately, not into a queue
  • Books the appointment or captures a callback with the details
  • Screens spam and solicitors out
  • Sends you a transcript and a recording of every call

And if the call is missed entirely, an automatic text goes out within seconds so the customer has something in their hand before they dial your competitor.

Ads

Why this protects your ad spend too

If you’re running Local Services Ads, speed to lead is a scored ranking factor.

Miss calls and your position in that block drops, which means fewer leads, which means every job costs more. A missed call doesn’t just lose that job — it makes all your future leads more expensive.

It’s the reason we won’t run LSA for a shop with no after-hours coverage. Great ad, unanswered phone, and the ads get blamed.

The honest version

The honest limits

We’d rather set these now than have you find them in month two.

It will never claim to be human. If a caller asks directly, it says what it is. That’s non-negotiable and it’s the right call — being caught pretending costs more than the call was worth.

It does intake, not diagnosis. It gathers what’s wrong and how urgent. It does not tell anyone what’s wrong with their system or what it’ll cost.

Emergency triage is deliberately conservative. Anything that could be a gas smell, carbon monoxide, or no heat in a freeze escalates to a human immediately. We would rather over-escalate than have an AI make a judgment call on a safety issue.

24/7 hours only work if you can actually dispatch. Answering calls all night and never servicing them generates bad reviews, and those cost more than the ranking gained. If you can’t cover it, we’ll set honest hours instead and use the agent for overflow.

The service

What’s included

  • Agent setup, voice and greeting configured to your business
  • Qualification script — service needed, address, service-area check, urgency
  • Emergency routing to your on-call person
  • Spam and solicitor screening
  • Booking or callback capture into whatever system you use
  • Missed-call text-back
  • Call recordings and transcripts on everything
  • Ongoing tuning as you hear calls and want changes
Proof

How you’ll know it’s working

This is the easiest thing in the stack to verify, because you can listen to it.

You get every recording and transcript. Month one you’ll see how many calls arrived outside your hours — most owners are surprised, because those calls were previously invisible to them. Then how many were spam, how many booked, and how many became jobs.

We record your current missed-call volume before turning it on, so the number has a before.

Why Talos

Five reasons

One client per market

One HVAC company per market. We fight your competition, not build it.

We’ll tell you when 24/7 hours are a bad idea

If you can’t dispatch overnight, we won’t set hours that generate complaints.

It never pretends to be a person

Everything is recorded

You can audit every call it handled rather than trust a summary.

60 days, or your money back

If we haven’t earned our fee, ask and you get it back.

FAQ

Straight answers

Some will. It won’t lie about it if asked. In practice people care far less about that than about being answered at all rather than reaching voicemail at 9pm.

Yes, where your system allows it. Otherwise it captures the details and gets them to you immediately.

It escalates to your on-call person right away. Anything ambiguous escalates too — we tune it to be conservative, not clever.

No. It covers the hours and the moments they can’t — after hours, weekends, and when the line’s already busy.

No, and you shouldn’t unless you can genuinely dispatch. The agent is worth having for overflow either way.

You’ll hear it, because you get every recording. We tune it. That’s the ongoing part of the service.

Call your own business at 8pm tonight and listen to what a customer with no heat hears

We’ll send you a free audit including what your after-hours coverage actually looks like, what your profile hours say, and what that gap is likely costing you. Yours either way.