Want a brief like this on your phone tomorrow morning?
Cohort pricing closes when we hit ten signed pilots. Setup-only on the first 60 days, in exchange for a published case study at the end of it.
Apply for the cohortA two-truck plumbing shop in East Sacramento, four nights a week of overnight inbound, an owner who replied at 9am if at all. Here is what happened in the first 30 days on AfterHours.
Cedar runs out of a small office in East Sac with two service trucks, an apprentice who is two months in, and a part-time bookkeeper who handles the day inbox. The owner takes the truck out four mornings a week. Phones forward to a personal mobile after 5pm. Web form goes to the shared shop email that nobody reads at night.
Like most service shops, the bulk of overnight inquiries are not actual emergencies. They are tomorrow-morning bookings. The owner has been reading them at 6am, sometimes 9am, and the close rate on those leads has been roughly 20 percent. Most went to whoever replied first, which was usually not Cedar.
The owner has been quoted $850 a month for a live answering service that reads a script and takes a message. He does not want a script. He wants a booking.
For thirty days before going live, we logged Cedar's overnight inbound. The pattern was consistent and the leak was real.
Setup took longer than the actual call. The call was an hour. Mapping the form and pulling tone samples was another two.
The owner exported the last 200 customer emails from the shared inbox. Three patterns came out clean. He ends every reply with "appreciate the call". He prices in ranges, not exact numbers, and he never quotes overnight without seeing the job. The agent learned all three.
Form copy-recipient added to the website. SMS forwarded from the owner's mobile to a Twilio line we manage. Shared shop email delegated to our intake address. Calendar connected to Calendly with two service codes, "Drain" and "Install", each with two booking slots offered.
Every reply staged for owner approval before shipping. Day one the owner edited four of seven drafts, mostly to soften pricing language. Day two he edited one of nine. Day three none. We flipped to live mode on day four.
The owner started reading the brief on his phone before he got in the truck. The first week he replied to the brief three times to correct tone. By week two he stopped correcting and started replying with "thanks, fine" or nothing at all.
Same five inbound a night, same owner, same trucks. The difference is in the response time and the booking ratio.
Good morning. Here is the overnight log. I bumped Marcus to the top because he runs hot.
Reply to this email if anything reads wrong. Three more low-priority drains booked Wednesday afternoon, list at the bottom.
Cohort pricing closes when we hit ten signed pilots. Setup-only on the first 60 days, in exchange for a published case study at the end of it.
Apply for the cohort