It is a set of automatic follow-up messages — text, email, and sometimes a missed-call callback — that fire when a new inquiry comes in after hours, when a tech leaves a quote that has not closed, or when a past customer is overdue for seasonal service. The dispatcher and CSR still own every live conversation. The automation handles the first touch and the persistence, so the 11pm burst-pipe call gets a text back inside a few minutes instead of waiting until 7am, and the $4,800 water heater quote does not go cold just because Friday got busy.

We design the autopilot to sit alongside the field service software your team already runs, rather than replace it. The exact depth of the connection depends on the platform and the plan you are on — sometimes we read and write through the official API, sometimes we sit on top through an existing communication add-on, and sometimes we use a thin reporting layer that watches your daily schedule and quote list. We confirm what is reachable in the first conversation before quoting, so there are no surprises. The customer record stays in your field service software; the automation reads from it and writes the conversation history back where the platform supports it.

After-hours emergencies are the highest-leverage piece of the system. A missed call after hours triggers an automatic SMS within a few minutes — written in your company's voice — acknowledging the call, asking a couple of short triage questions (active leak, no heat, no power, scheduling question), and either routing the genuine emergency to your on-call number or booking a first-thing-tomorrow slot for the situation that can wait. The homeowner sees a response in minutes instead of voicemail dead air, and they are far less likely to have dialed the next plumber on the search results by the time you call in the morning.

The follow-up sequence runs automatically the moment a tech marks a quote as sent. The homeowner gets a same-day recap with the proposal attached and a short note in your company's voice. A few days later, a soft check-in goes out asking if they have questions. A week or so after that, a final low-pressure touch. The dispatcher does not have to remember which quote was sent on Tuesday and is still warm on Friday — the system already worked it. Hot leads still get a real call from a real person; the automation is what keeps the rest from quietly going to zero. ServiceTitan's research shows this is where a meaningful 11-15% slice of contractor revenue actually lives.

Two things, mostly. First, a reactivation flow wakes dormant customers before the season hits — heating tune-up reminders going out in late summer, AC checks in early spring, drain cleanings before holiday cooking, roof checks before storm season. Second, the off-season capacity gets channeled into maintenance plan enrollment, so a slice of revenue keeps coming in even when the weather is mild. Neither is a magic flattening of demand, but together they tend to smooth the worst troughs and put a baseline of recurring revenue underneath the seasonal swing.

No. The dispatcher and CSR still own live booking, dispatch, and any homeowner who replies. What changes is what they are doing on Monday morning — instead of triaging a stack of weekend voicemails and trying to remember which quotes are still warm, they walk in to a list of already-acknowledged inquiries, a quote-follow-up sequence that has already worked itself, and a waitlist of reactivation responses ready to be booked. Most owners we talk to find that the dispatcher gets a few hours a day back from repetitive work — hours that go straight to booking the calls coming in live and following up on the warm quotes.

Pricing scales with the size of the operation (single-truck plumber versus 20-truck HVAC company), the field service software in use, and how many of the three flows — after-hours capture, quote follow-up, seasonal reactivation — go live in the first phase. Most single-location contractors run a fixed-scope first phase in the low four figures of setup with a monthly run rate after, and go live in 2 to 4 weeks. There are no per-message fees that scale with call volume. Scope and pricing get confirmed on a 15-minute call before any work starts.

The system is tuned to defer, not guess. Pricing on non-standard work, diagnosis of an active emergency, and anything outside the playbook get routed to a human — either booked for a callback or escalated to your on-call line, depending on how urgent the message reads. We watch the transcripts weekly in the first month and tighten the guardrails. The goal is for the autopilot to do the boring 80% reliably — the missed-call acknowledgement, the quote check-in, the seasonal nudge — and hand the ambiguous 20% to your team, not to play hero on judgment calls.