Never miss a call

You're on a ladder, or under a sink, or halfway through a customer's question, and the phone goes. You let it ring. Most of the time it was nothing. Some of the time it was the biggest job of the month — and they rang the next name on the list.

That's not a phone problem. It's a question about what a call is made of, and once you can see that, the fix is obvious.

What a call is actually made of

Chapter 2 of The AI Manager breaks any piece of work into five stages, and a phone call runs through all five in under two minutes.

1. Gather. Who's calling, what they want, where they are, when they need it.
2. Notice what's missing. They said "a leak". They didn't say whether the water's still running.
3. Judge. Is this a job you want, at a price you'd take, on a day you've got?
4. Put it together. A time, a price range, a next step.
5. Land it. Say it back so they feel heard, and put it in the diary.

Now look at which of those you were doing on the ladder. You were doing none of them, because the phone was ringing in the van.

Here is the honest count. A machine already does the gathering better than you, because it never forgets to ask the postcode. It does the landing well, because it's patient and it doesn't sigh. It can notice half of what's missing, because "is the water still running" is a question you can write down once. What it can't do is judge. It doesn't know that you've already got two jobs on that street, or that this caller has owed you money since March. That half lives in your head, and the lesson is to get it out.

The rules you write once

The way you get judgement into a machine is the way you'd hand it to a new receptionist on their first morning. You don't explain your whole business. You give them rules.

Write these down, on paper, before you do anything else. Five lines is plenty.

• What we do and what we don't. "Bathrooms and kitchens. Not roofs, not electrics."
• The three questions on every call. Where, when, and what's already been tried.
• What to promise and what never to promise. A call-back time, yes. A price, never.
• When to interrupt me. Water running, a customer in the shop, a word you've told it means trouble.
• How I sound. Short, friendly, no exclamation marks.

That last one matters more than it looks. Chapter 4 calls it identity, and says it's the single biggest lever in any instruction and the one almost nobody pulls. A receptionist who sounds like a call centre loses you the regulars who ring because they like you.

What you'll hear back

Put those rules in front of an AI receptionist, give it your diary, and the next missed call becomes a message like this: Mrs Patel, 14 Elm Road. Kitchen tap dripping, not urgent. Free Thursday morning. Said yes to a call-back before 6. That's the gathering, the noticing and the landing done, with your judgement still to come.

You read it in ten seconds and make the one decision that was ever yours. Thursday, or not.

The part I won't pretend about

It'll get a call wrong. It'll book a Tuesday you'd blocked out, or it'll take a message from somebody you'd have recognised as a time-waster by the second sentence. The rule in chapter 12 is that nothing in these tools reminds you to check, and the day it's wrong looks exactly like the day it's right.

So check. For the first fortnight, read every message before you act on it, and every time it gets one wrong, add a line to your rules. By the third week you'll have a page that knows your business better than the last three people you hired, and you wrote it in five-minute pieces on the days it mattered.

From chapter 2 of The AI Manager, What You Are Actually Paid For. Free to read.