Hallway socket warm to touch. Caller reports the circuit is off.
Half the house is dead and they are ringing you now
An electrician answering service that sorts fault calls from quote calls, with the one that smells like burning pulled out of the pile first.
9:41
Monday, 31 August9:41
28 Kippenberger Avenue, Rangiora. Breakers with RCDs; house around 15 years old.
Urgent call rung through. You will call back; no arrival time promised.
One of these calls is not a job, it is a safety call
A hot socket or a burning smell is not something to write down and send you in the morning. It gets treated as what it is, and then you are rung.
Answers
Good evening, Rangiora Electrical. What is happening?
Caller
There is a smell like something burning near the hallway plug and it is warm to touch.
Answers
Stop there. Do not use that socket and do not pull the plug out of it. Can you get to your switchboard and turn off the switch for that part of the house?
Caller
Yes, I can see the board from here.
Answers
Do that now and leave it off. I am ringing Bevan straight away rather than putting this in a message. If the smell gets worse or you see any smoke, get everybody out and ring the fire service on one one one.
Where it stops
It will not tell anyone to open a switchboard, touch a wire, or reset anything they should not. It will not diagnose a fault and it will not give electrical advice down the phone. It makes the call safe, it makes it urgent, and it hands it to you. That is reception, not a sparkie.
What it asks before it lets the caller go
Half of a fault call is worked out before anyone gets in the van. These are the answers you would have rung back for anyway.
9:41
Monday, 31 August9:41
Hallway circuit is off. Caller reports a warm socket and burning smell.
Single-storey house, breakers with RCDs. Owner is home.
Duty electrician contacted under your rules. No arrival time promised.
How much is off
The whole house, one room, or just the one socket. And whether the neighbours have power too, because if the street is out it is not your job and the caller can be told so instead of waiting on you.
The board
Old ceramic fuses, or breakers with RCDs. Roughly how old the house is. It decides whether you are looking at a five minute fault or a switchboard that has been on borrowed time for a decade.
Has it been reset
Whether they have already flipped the RCD, and whether it held or went straight back out. A breaker that will not stay in is a different trip from one that has not been tried.
Heat or smell
Anything hot, discoloured, buzzing or smelling. One yes here moves the whole call to the front of the queue.
What it is feeding
A freezer full of stock, a home office, medical equipment, a chiller in a shop. It changes whether this waits until morning.
Who pays
Owner, tenant or property manager, and whether it is a residential or a commercial site. Taken on the call, not chased two days later.
The quote calls are the ones you are actually losing
The fault call rings back. Nobody rings a sparkie back about an EV charger. They ring the next one on the list and you never hear that it happened.
Charger installs, switchboard upgrades, a heat pump circuit, a rewire on a villa, a fit-out for a new build. All of them start with somebody ringing three numbers on a Tuesday morning while you are in a ceiling space with no signal. Every one of those gets answered, gets the site address and the scope written down, and gets to you the same day.
On the compliance side, nothing is promised on your behalf. No dates, no prices, and nothing said about what work is or is not allowed.
Sparkie or sparky
Your agent talks the way your customers do. New Zealand calls get a New Zealand voice, Australian calls get an Australian one, right down to which way that word is spelled in the notes it writes for you. You hear yours and approve it before it answers a single customer.
It plugs into the things you already use every day
No new system to learn and nothing to install. The work turns up where you already look for it.
Simpro
Match the caller to a customer and site, then capture the job details.
Explore the connection →
Fergus
Put new enquiries and customer details into the job workflow your team already uses.
Explore the connection →
Tradify
Send the enquiry into Tradify by email. No customer lookup or direct diary booking.
Explore the connection →
iTrade
Capture the details and request a visit. Your team confirms the schedule.
Explore the connection →Your job system comes first. Talkify also connects to calendars, accounting tools and CRMs. Actions vary by system; we confirm the exact workflow with you. See more connections →
Connect the tools you already run. No need to change job software.
Running something else? Tell us what you use and we will quote the integration work.
The fault is in Simpro before you are back in the van
Everyone in this market sells you the call being answered. What matters on a Monday morning is whether the work is already lodged against the right customer, with nothing for you to re-key.
Simpro
The one most electrical contractors of any size end up on, and the default across the Tasman. The caller is matched to the right customer and site, and the job is lodged against them with the fault detail in the notes rather than opened blind.
Fergus
Common on the New Zealand residential side. The job is created with the site address and the answers above written in, and where you have asked us to, a time is held in the real diary while the caller is still on the phone.
ServiceM8
Said plainly so you can compare. ServiceM8 sells a competing AI phone agent, it is live in New Zealand, and taking it up means moving your number onto their phone add-on. We never ask for your number. If ServiceM8 already runs your whole business, theirs is worth looking at on its own merits.
iTrade
A visit is requested against the customer. It is a request, not a confirmed time, because that is how iTrade works, and the caller is told exactly that. Nobody is left waiting in for an appointment that was never booked.
Tradify
One way, by email only. The enquiry lands in Tradify after the call. It cannot recognise your Tradify customers when they ring and it cannot read or book your Tradify diary. Tradify does not open that up to anybody, so treat any claim otherwise with suspicion.
Xero and MYOB
Whichever of the two you keep the books in, your customer list is what a caller is recognised by. The builder who gives you half your work is known by name the moment he rings, not treated as a fresh enquiry.
Running something else? Tell us what you use and we will quote the integration work.
Get set up
Give us the number and tell us what counts as urgent on your patch. We build it, you hear it, then it goes live.
Your number
You keep it. You divert your existing number to us and you can turn that divert off from your own handset whenever you want.
Set up
Your account opens straight away. Your agent is built and trained within 24 hours, and we walk you through it first.
Safety calls
You decide what gets escalated and who it gets escalated to, right down to who is on tonight.
Stop losing the fault call
Your account opens straight away and your agent is built within 24 hours. No card, and nothing answers your phone until you have heard it and said yes.