How to get job details texted to you after every call

The problem is never that you don't want the details. It's that the call lands while your hands are full, and by the time you can write anything down the caller is a missed-call notification with no name, no suburb and no idea what they wanted.

Around 85% of callers who can't get through never call back, and roughly 62% ring a competitor instead (industry research, BIA/Kelsey). So the detail you lose isn't admin — it's the job.

What should actually be in that text

A text that says "missed call from 0412…" tells you nothing you didn't know. What you want is one message you can read at a glance on a ladder:

• Name and the number to ring back — so you're not guessing at caller ID
• Suburb — the difference between a 10-minute drive and a write-off
• What they need, in their words, not a category
• How urgent it is — a burst pipe tonight is not a quote request
• When they're available, if they said

The four ways to do it

The split that matters is the last column: the first three only ever describe the calls you didn't take. An answering layer describes every call, including the ones you answered and forgot by smoko.

Setting it up so the text arrives automatically

This is the Service AI version, start to finish. It's five steps, and only one of them is yours.

1. Claim a founding spot and tell us your services, your hours, your suburbs and your prices. That's the material the receptionist answers from.
2. Tell us what counts as urgent for your trade — no hot water, gas smell, power out, lockout — and how you want to be reached when it happens.
3. Pick the voice. Male or female, Australian or British accent.
4. Forward your business number to the line we give you. Your number stays exactly as it is on the van, the cards and your Google listing, and there's no app to install.
5. Go live and check the first few texts. Anything worded wrong, tell us and we adjust it.

From then on every call produces a text and a transcript, whether you were near the phone or not.

What the text looks like

A real example of the format, from a 9:47pm call to a plumber. The caller's hot water had died mid-shower — the kind of call that goes to a competitor by 9:55 if nobody picks up.

Both send within a minute or two of the caller hanging up. The second is the half people forget: the caller stops ringing around because somebody has already answered them. The email that follows carries the full transcript, so if a summary is ever ambiguous you can read exactly what was said.

Where this breaks — honestly

• A caller who won't give a name leaves you a number and a job description. The receptionist doesn't invent the rest.
• Spam and robocalls still ring through. They stop being your problem — the AI works out there's no job there and you see it in the summary instead of climbing off a roof — but they don't disappear.
• It doesn't write into your job management software. Calendar sync (Google or Outlook) is included; pushing jobs into ServiceM8, Tradify or simPRO is not part of the standard setup. Tell us what you run and we'll tell you honestly what's possible.
• If your number can't be forwarded, none of this works. Nearly every Australian business line can, but check first.

Best for…

• Write it down yourself — a one-person business with few calls, mostly office hours.
• Missed-call text-back — you answer most calls and just want the ones you dropped to stop vanishing. Cheapest real improvement; our Missed-Call Rescue Kit has the templates free.
• AI receptionist with summaries — you miss calls after hours or while you're already on one, and the job value makes a single recovered call worth more than the month. Work out whether that's you with the missed-call calculator.
• Voicemail — nobody. It is the one option that reliably loses the detail you're trying to capture.

What it costs

AI Receptionist is $199 a month at the founding rate (normally $249), with $0 setup — setup is normally $249 — and the first 14 days free from the day you go live. That includes 80 answered calls a month, about 400 minutes; calls past that are $2 each. Ten founding spots are open Australia-wide, in exchange for honest feedback and a review.

If you also want the website, the bookings and the follow-up handled, Full Front Desk is $349 a month founding (normally $449) with 120 calls included. Both prices are GST inclusive, and pricing can change on 30 days' written notice — the founding rate is a discount, not a held rate.