An after-hours plumbing job that turned into a $23k+ job
Water still running. It talked the homeowner to the shutoff, took the address and carrier, flagged a real emergency, and had the on-call tech moving.
digital employee for plumbers & restoration contractors
Every Call Answered. Even At 2am.
Three quarters of callers who reach your voicemail just hang up and dial the next plumber. We answer in under two rings, day or night, qualify the job, and book it — and only wake you for a genuine emergency.
- No credit card
- Live in 7–10 days
- Cancel anytime
Non-invasive: you keep your number, your office staff, and your workflow. We only catch what's already falling through.
- Never goes to voicemail — 24/7, including 2am on a holiday weekend
- Qualifies the job itself; only rings you for a true emergency like a burst pipe
- Triages name, address, issue and status straight into your CRM
- Books the non-urgent work automatically and closes the loop
Real calls. Real bookings. Real talk.
Hear our digital employee in action.
Booking an appointment, start to finish
Not an emergency, so nobody got woken up. Booked Thursday off the live calendar, confirmed by text, wrote it into the CRM.
A call that turned into a 1-hour, $6k job
Caller was ringing round for whoever answered first. Picked up on the third ring, quoted the range, booked it same morning.
Try it on your own line
Free 14-day trial. We build it on your business, point your after-hours line at it, and you listen to what it catches. No card, no contract, and if it catches nothing you owe nothing.
- Live on your after-hours line in 7–10 days
- No card, no contract, cancel by replying to an email
- You keep every recording and record if you walk away
Rather just hear it? Call the demo line: (425) 671-5768
The two calls you're already losing
Nothing here is a sales metaphor. These are the two failure points we measure on real contractor phone lines before we ever pitch anybody.
The call at 2:14am
Your site says 24/7. Your Google profile says open 24 hours. We call the advertised line at 2:14am and get voicemail after six rings. That's not a closed business — it's a promise you're actively making and missing, and the homeowner with a flooded basement dials the next name on the list.
The call at 2:14pm
Same line, business hours. Crews are in the field and the 'office' is one person who's also dispatching. Voicemail again. Now it's not after-hours — it's the primary channel failing while you're paying for the lead that just rang it.
- 78%
- of customers buy from the company that responds firstLead Response Management / InsideSales benchmark
- 7×
- more likely to qualify a lead when you answer within the hour — and the average company takes 42 hoursHarvard Business Review audit of 2,241 companies, 2011
- 21×
- more likely to qualify a lead answered in 5 minutes than one answered in 30MIT / InsideSales Lead Response Management study (Oldroyd, 2007) — 15,000+ leads, 100,000+ call attempts. Frequently miscredited to Harvard Business Review.
- < 2 rings
- how fast your line gets answered once we're liveMeasured on our own deployments
- 24/7/365
- coverage, including the 2am flood callNo shifts, no queue, no hold music
The math nobody runs on their own phone line
Every figure below is somebody else's published number, and the trail is printed underneath it. We didn't measure these — we're showing you where they come from so you can weigh them yourself.
- 30–40%
- of inbound calls the average plumbing business missesSource: Levi Lewis, via Bland.ai
- 62%
- of emergency plumbing calls arrive outside business hoursSource: AgentZap plumbing phone statistics, via Bland.ai
- 75%
- of callers hang up the moment they reach voicemailSource: Sophiie AI, via Bland.ai
- 3 rings
- is all most callers give you before they hang up and dial someone elseSource: Bland.ai
The number that isn't hypothetical: you already paid for that call
Forget lost opportunity. Opportunity is arguable — a receipt isn't. If you run Google Local Services Ads, you were charged the moment that phone rang, before anyone picked up or didn't.
- Google LSA charges plumbing contractors roughly $40–$90 per lead depending on the market. In a metro like Seattle you're at the upper end of that.
- That charge lands when the call connects. Not when you answer it. Not when you win the job. It is already spent.
- So a missed LSA call isn't a maybe-job you'll never know about. It's $40–$90 you've paid to send a ready-to-buy homeowner to whoever picks up next.
- Check it yourself in ninety seconds: open your LSA dashboard, filter to unanswered leads, and multiply. That figure is yours, it's already billed, and you don't need to trust us for it.
- Then dispute them. Google will refund unanswered and out-of-area LSA leads if you flag them — most contractors never do, which means the real number is usually recoverable as well as verifiable.
You'll see "$100,000–$200,000 a year in lost revenue" on competitor sites. We looked for a primary source for that range and couldn't find one. We're not printing a number we can't stand behind — the per-lead cost above is published by Google, visible in your own account, and small enough to be believable, which is exactly why it's the more useful number.
Sources: Google LSA cost-per-lead benchmarks by industry · Local Services Ads cost-per-lead data, 11 industries
Bring your LSA dashboard to the demo and we'll go through it together.What this actually is
A 24/7 after-hours voice agent that sits behind your existing setup
Not a replacement for your office. Not a phone system migration. It answers the calls your current setup drops — after hours, on weekends, and when everyone is already on another line — and it hands you finished work instead of a message to return.
A digital employee is software that answers your business line in a natural spoken conversation — no menus, no hold queue — collects what a dispatcher would collect, books the appointment, and writes the record into your CRM. Unlike an answering service it runs 24/7 with no queue and no per-call human cost; unlike a phone tree, the caller just talks. Cornerstone Voice Studio builds these for plumbing, restoration and emergency home-service contractors in the Seattle metro, and runs them behind your existing setup rather than in place of it.
Non-invasive by design
- You keep your phone number. Nothing changes on your trucks, signs, or Google profile.
- You keep your office staff and your hours. We take the overflow and the after-hours, not the daytime desk.
- Start with after-hours only. Widen it later if you want to, or don't.
- If it ever fails, the call falls back to exactly what happens today — your existing voicemail. It cannot make your line worse.
How it solves each piece
It doesn't go to voicemail after hours
The single thing that costs the most, fixed first. At 2am the phone is answered in under two rings by something that can actually hold a conversation — not a recording, not a queue, not a callback promise. Three quarters of callers who reach voicemail hang up; none of them reach one here.
Full closed loop into your CRM
It collects name, service address, the actual issue, and current status, then writes all of it into your CRM as a structured record — not a voicemail transcript someone has to re-key at 7am. The loop closes on the call. Nothing sits in an inbox waiting to be turned into a job.
Automatic qualification — you only get woken for real emergencies
The agent decides urgency against rules you set once. A burst pipe with water running rings your phone immediately. A dripping faucet, a quote request, a 'when can someone come look at my water heater' does not. This is the part that makes 24/7 coverage survivable: you stop being paged for everything, so you start trusting the pages you do get.
Callback routing that respects whether you're available
You set your status. On call, off, or asleep-unless-it's-serious. Depending on that, the agent either connects the caller to you live, promises a callback and schedules it, or handles it end to end and leaves you a summary. The caller always gets a definite answer — never a maybe.
Appointments booked end to end, fully automated
For anything that isn't an emergency, it offers real slots from your live calendar, books one, confirms by text, and writes the job to your CRM. No human touches it. You wake up to a booked day rather than a list of people to call back — and the caller got an answer at 2am instead of a promise at 9am.
What it actually does
Six things, all running on one phone line.
24/7 AI Answering
A receptionist that never sleeps, never quits, and never puts a flood on hold
It answers as your company, in your name, with your service area and your pricing rules. Not a phone tree, not an offshore answering service reading a card — a conversation. If it doesn't know something, it says so and gets a human, instead of inventing an answer.
- Answers in under two rings, 24/7/365
- Speaks as your company, not as a bot brand
- Says "I'll get someone who knows" instead of guessing
- Every call transcribed and summarized to your inbox
Speed-to-Lead Callback
Your web-form leads get a phone call in under 60 seconds
Nobody fills out a form while the basement floods — but the ones who do are shopping right now, and they're gone in ten minutes. The second a form, text, or chat message lands, the line calls them back, qualifies the job, and books it. Forms, SMS, and chat all land in the same place as the phone.
- Web form, SMS, and chat trigger an outbound call, not an email
- Under 60 seconds from submit to ringing
- One thread per customer, no matter which channel they used
- Nothing sits in an inbox overnight
Emergency Intake & Triage
It asks the questions your dispatcher would ask
A generic digital employee takes a name and a number. That's a message service. Ours runs restoration intake: what's the water source, is it still running, is the power off, how deep is standing water, which rooms, clean/gray/black water, insurance carrier and claim number. Your tech rolls with the truck already loaded correctly.
- Water source, active or stopped, power status, standing depth
- Rooms affected, water category, contents at risk
- Insurance carrier, claim number, deductible awareness
- Flags a true emergency and escalates immediately
Booking + CRM Writeback
The job lands in the software you already use
The call ends and the record is already written: contact, address, intake answers, transcript, and the booked slot — in ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, or your calendar. No copying from a message pad. No lead living only in someone's texts.
- ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, Cal.com, Google Calendar
- Full transcript + structured intake fields on the record
- Confirmation text to the homeowner
- Human sign-off on anything irreversible — dispatch and pricing
Missed-Call Text Back
If a call ever does slip, a text goes out before they dial your competitor
Belt and suspenders. Any call that doesn't connect gets an instant text — "Sorry we missed you, this is Cornerstone at [your company], what's going on?" — and the conversation continues over SMS. A missed call stops being a lost job and becomes a thread you can still win.
- Instant SMS on every unconnected call
- Replies come back into the same AI conversation
- Works for the calls you miss on your cell, too
- Costs you nothing when it never fires
On-Call Escalation & Dispatch
Real emergencies wake up a human. Everything else waits until morning.
You set the rules once: what counts as an emergency, who's on call tonight, how long before it rolls to the next person. Category-three water at 3am rings your phone and your on-call tech's. A quote request for carpet cleaning shows up in your morning summary. You stop being paged for nothing.
- Your escalation rules, your on-call rotation
- SMS + call to owner and on-call tech
- Rolls to the next person if nobody picks up
- Non-urgent calls batched into one morning digest
What working with us looks like
Three touchpoints. You are not going to be managing this.
-
Demo call 20 minutes
It's a sales call, we just didn't want to scare you. We play a recording of your line failing, then call the same number after we've fixed it. If it's not obviously worth it in twenty minutes, we'll say so and you've lost twenty minutes.
-
We build your line 7–10 days
You fill out one onboarding form — service area, pricing rules, on-call rotation, what counts as an emergency. We build the agent on your knowledge, wire it to your CRM and calendar, and test it against real intake scenarios before it ever takes a live call.
-
Launch call 25 minutes
We walk you and your dispatcher through it, forward your line, and watch the first week together. First-week tuning is included — that's when the agent actually gets good.
Built for restoration first — works for anyone who gets emergency calls
We started in water, fire, and mold because that's where a missed call costs the most. The same system runs for any trade whose phone rings at inconvenient hours.
Restoration (where we specialize)
- Water Damage Restoration
- Fire & Smoke Damage
- Mold Remediation
- Sewage & Biohazard Cleanup
- Storm & Flood Response
- Structural Drying
- Contents & Pack-Out
- Reconstruction
Also running for
- Plumbing
- HVAC
- Roofing
- Electrical
- Septic & Drain
- Garage Doors
- Locksmiths
- Pest Control
- Carpet & Upholstery Cleaning
- Pressure Washing
- Painting
- Flooring
- Handyman
- Landscaping
- Tree Service
- Junk Removal
- Moving Companies
- General Contractors
Why we're "totally unique"… like every other agency claims, right?
Four honest reasons, not twelve invented ones.
Restoration intake, not generic reception
Most digital employees take a name and a number. Ours runs a category-and-source triage built with restoration dispatch in mind. That's the whole difference between a message and a dispatchable job.
Human-in-the-loop on anything irreversible
The AI books, texts, and writes records. It does not roll a truck or quote a price without a human. Automation is leverage on the back end and a liability on the front end, and we build like we believe that.
Omnichannel, not phone-only
The cheap end of this market answers phones and stops there. Phone, web form, SMS, and chat all feed one dispatch spine here — because you're losing leads on all four.
No contracts, and you own your number
Month to month. If it stops earning its keep, leave — your number, your recordings, and your CRM data go with you. We'd rather keep you for ten years than trap you for ten weeks.
Numbers we can defend
We won't put a made-up "$47,000 you're losing" on a slide. We show you your own call log, your own review complaints, and the industry benchmarks — cited — and let you do the math.
We test before we pitch
Before we ever contact a company, we call the line they advertise and submit a real inquiry under a real name. If your phone is fine, we'll tell you that and go away.
The stack under the hood
No mystery box. This is what your line actually runs on.
- ElevenLabsconversational voice
- Twiliotelephony & SMS
- Anthropic Claudereasoning & summarization
- n8norchestration & dispatch logic
- Airtablecall & lead records
- Cal.combooking
- ServiceTitanCRM writeback
- Housecall ProCRM writeback
- JobberCRM writeback
Frequently asked questions
The questions contractors actually ask on the demo call.
Will my customers know it's an AI?
It sounds like a competent receptionist, and most callers treat it as one. We do not pretend it's a specific human being, and if a caller asks directly whether they're talking to a person, it tells them the truth and offers to get someone. Lying to a homeowner in an emergency is not a feature.
What happens when it doesn't know the answer?
It says it doesn't know, takes the detail, and routes to a human — immediately for anything urgent, or into your morning digest if it isn't. It's built to refuse to guess. An AI that invents a price or a same-day arrival window costs you more than a voicemail would have.
How is this different from an answering service?
An answering service takes a message and pages you. Ours runs the intake — water source, whether it's still running, standing depth, water category, insurance carrier — then books the slot and writes the record into your CRM. You get a dispatchable job, not a pink slip with a phone number, and it never has a hold queue at 2am.
How long until it's live?
Seven to ten days from onboarding form to launch call. The build isn't the slow part — waiting on your service area, pricing rules, and on-call rotation is. Get us those on day one and it's closer to seven.
Do I have to change my phone number?
No. You keep your number and forward it, so your Google profile, truck wraps, and yard signs stay exactly as they are. You can also route only after-hours and overflow calls to us at first and keep daytime calls in the office.
Which CRMs and calendars do you connect to?
ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, Jobber, Cal.com, and Google Calendar out of the box. Anything with an API can be wired up during the build — ask on the demo call and we'll tell you straight whether it's a week or a month.
Are calls recorded, and is that legal in Washington?
Washington is a two-party consent state, so recording is opt-in per client and, when it's on, the call announces it at the start. Transcripts and structured summaries are on by default — those are generated from a live call, and the announcement covers them the same way.
What does it cost me if it misses something?
Every call is transcribed and summarized, and the first month includes a weekly review where we read the calls with you and tune it. Where it's wrong, it gets fixed that week. If it's still not answering calls you were previously missing after 30 days, you don't pay the monthly.
I get most of my work from referrals. Why do I need this?
Because referrals still call you. When a plumber refers a homeowner at 9pm and your line goes to voicemail, you didn't just lose the job — you burned the referral, and that plumber sends the next one elsewhere. This protects the channel you already rely on.
Can I try it before I buy it?
Call the demo line. It answers as a restoration company and you can throw whatever you want at it — an active leak, a mold question, a price you're not going to get out of it. No form, no signup, no salesperson on the other end.
Want to schedule a time to talk?
Twenty minutes. We'll show you what your line does today and what it does after. If it isn't worth it, we'll tell you and you're out twenty minutes.
Our AI answers 24/7/365. Humans: Mon–Fri, 8am–6pm PT.