FirstCall by Accelra · An answering service for local businesses
A missed call can mean a missed opportunity.
When your crews are out working, you can't always answer the phone. FirstCall helps you capture the details you need to follow up.
FirstCall answers on the number you already have, asks what you'd have asked, and sends you a summary by email. You choose when to forward your unanswered calls.
Two numbers, one either side of the border, both running a pressure washing company. Call the one that's local to you. Talk over it. Ask what it costs. Give it a bad address. Judge it the way your next customer will.
Canadian mobile plans usually bill US calls separately, and the other way round, so it's worth dialling the one nearest you. Both are demo lines: Accelra doesn't wash driveways, so nobody gets dispatched anywhere.
Companies doing well enough that the phone has become the ceiling. Crews out, work booked, more coming in than anyone can pick up. The next size needs systems, not longer days.
If your phone rarely rings, this isn't for you. It fixes one thing: work you had the crew to do, lost because nobody picked up.
Pressure washing, plumbing, electrical, heating and cooling, garage doors, roofing, general contracting, moving, restoration. Property managers too, where the after-hours call is a tenant standing in water.
It picks up under your company name and says it's automated in the first sentence. Nobody is misled. They stay on anyway, because an honest answer beats a fourth ring.
A burst pipe and a bathroom quote are the same missed call at nine on a Sunday, and voicemail won't tell you which. It establishes whether this is happening now and whether anyone is unsafe, and that travels with the lead. What reaches you already says how fast to move.
Surface, size, condition, access, timing. Enough to quote without phoning back twice for details the caller already had ready.
You receive the caller's details and a summary by email. If the caller agreed on the call, they get a text with what was taken down and can reply to fix it. Tell us if you need a custom connection to your business software.
A generic answering service takes a message. That's voicemail with better diction, and someone on your team still has to phone back to find out what the job is. These are the questions each version actually asks, written from how that trade quotes work. If your trade is on the list, you'll know at a glance whether we got it right.
Handyman, painting, landscaping, fencing, appliance repair and window cleaning work the same way. If yours isn't listed, we write the questions on a call with you, from how you actually quote a job.
Switching sounds like a project. A new number to reprint, a system to teach the crew, a week of wondering whether calls are getting through. None of it happens here. You change two settings and everything else stays where it is.
The number on your trucks, your Google listing and your invoices keeps ringing as it does now. Getting started needs no port: forwarding does the whole job. If you'd rather we hold the number itself later, we can.
Forward when nobody answers. Forward when the line is already busy. That's the install, and it's the same on cell, landline or VoIP.
You receive an email with the caller's details and a conversation summary. If you want it connected to your job software, tell us what you use. Integrations are scoped as custom work.
Pick up and FirstCall never hears the call. It only takes what was headed for voicemail. Switch the forwarding off from your handset and you're back where you started that minute.
It sits behind FirstCall, untouched. Callers just stop landing on a beep, which is where you were losing them.
Calls work the same afternoon. Texts to your callers switch on once carrier registration clears, usually about a week, in your business name.
Call details and summaries arrive by email. If you want them in your job software, tell us which system you use. We'll assess what can connect and agree on the scope of any custom integration before building it.
Growing past that is where most companies stall. The customer list, the job history, the quotes and the photos end up in four places and nobody trusts any of them. That's what we build: your software, holding your customers, on the web and on your crew's phones.
Accelra builds software for a living, not as a sideline. PokerInk is ours: a website, a phone app and everything behind them, live and shipping updates most days of the week. Answering your phone is where we start with a home-service business. It isn't the limit.
See what we've builtYour name is on this line. Here's how it behaves when you're not listening.
Call the demo line. If you wouldn't put that on your own phone, don't. If you would, we set yours up in about ten minutes: your trade, your number, answering the same afternoon.
No contract. No port. No new number. Switch the forwarding off from your handset and it's over that minute.
Or email support@accelra.io with your trade and what you run the business on. FirstCall is built by Accelra.