Name, number, address, what the work is and how urgent. On your mobile before you have put the tools down.
We sell the phone line, not just the thing that answers it
Most of this market is software sitting on top of a phone account somebody else sold you. That is invisible on a good day and it is the whole game on a bad one.
9:41
Monday, 31 August9:41
She has the same summary on her phone, so nobody is waiting to find out whether the message got through.
The line is ours, which is why we can fix it
We hold a direct commercial relationship with the carrier our numbers ride on. Numbers are provisioned on our own account and the routing is ours to change.
One bill
A real business phone service
Local numbers, seats for the people who work for you, published per-minute rates, and the agent already sitting on it. One number, one bill, and nobody in the middle to blame.
Three in the morning
The difference on a bad night
When something breaks on the line at three in the morning, this is the difference between us fixing it and us logging a ticket with whoever can. Nobody notices that difference until the night it matters.
You still keep your own number. Nothing is ported and nothing moves onto our phone system unless you ask for it. Most people simply divert their existing number to us and turn that divert off again from their own handset whenever they want.
Your calls stay in your own country
New Zealand numbers are +64 and those calls are handled in New Zealand data centres. Australian numbers are +61 and those calls are handled in Australia. Neither crosses the Tasman to be answered.
It matters for two reasons. The obvious one is where your customers' details end up sitting. The less obvious one is the line quality on a bad mobile signal, which gets worse with every extra hop between the caller and whatever answers.
Voices from here
New Zealand calls get a New Zealand voice and Australian calls get an Australian one. Your customer is not left working out where in the world they have got through to. You listen to yours and sign it off before it answers a single customer, and if you do not like it you pick another.
Both ends of the call get told what happened
The measure of an answering service is not whether it picked up. It is what has reached your phone, and the caller's phone, by the time the call ends.
Your phone
An urgent job is texted to your mobile within seconds of the call ending, with the name, the number, the address, what the work is and how urgent it was judged to be. If you have said it should ring you instead, it rings, and it can keep ringing down a roster until somebody actually picks up.
Their phone
The caller gets a text confirming what was taken and what happens next. That single text is the reason people stop ringing three other numbers while they wait, and it is the thing almost nobody else in this market does.
Your system
The job is written into whatever you already run, on the right customer, with the site address and the notes on it. There is nothing to re-key when you get back to the ute.
Your pocket
There are iPhone and Android apps, so the whole job and the call it came from can be read and the customer rung back from the phone you are already holding. Nothing has to be installed on the van for the service to work.
Every connector is ours, written one at a time
Every system named on this website has a connector we wrote and can point at in code. That is a short list on purpose.
Nothing gets named until it exists
It is a hard internal rule. Our list of job systems is shorter than some of the lists you will see, and every name on ours is real. Where a system genuinely cannot do something, the page says so. Tradify is a one way email connection, so it cannot recognise your callers or read your diary. iTrade requests a visit rather than confirming a time. Those limits are on the trade pages in writing.
If we have not built yours
There is a documented REST API, webhooks and Zapier for anything with a hook on it, and every call can post into Slack or Microsoft Teams. Beyond that: tell us what you use and we will quote the integration work rather than pretend it is already there.
The detail sits with the trade it belongs to. The plumbers page is the deepest on Fergus, the heat pumps page covers the commercial servicing side, and the handyman page is where the diary sizing lives.
No diary, no customer list, no problem
Plenty of good trade businesses run on a notebook on the dash and a phone full of numbers with no surnames. Nothing here assumes otherwise.
If you have no calendar at all, we keep one for you and the agent books into it. It is genuinely free and it is a real diary, not a waiting list, so a time offered to a caller is a time you actually have.
The customer list fills itself from the calls. Every caller is recorded with their number, their address and what they rang about, so after a few months you have the thing you never got around to building, without having typed any of it in.
Nothing to install
No app on the van, no tablet in the ute, no new phone system on the wall. It is a divert and a text. That is the whole change to your day.
Who you are actually handing your phone number to
It is a fair question and it is not asked often enough. Most of this market arrived in the last eighteen months. Everybody starts somewhere, but you should know which one you are dealing with.
This service has been answering business calls since 2024. The studio behind it has been building software for over twelve years with developers on staff, and was doing voice, telephony and phone system integration work before any of this had a name. Large systems, real integrations, other people's phone infrastructure.
Standing up something that answers a phone is genuinely easy now. A weekend and a landing page will get you a demo that sounds impressive. The hard part starts afterwards: the caller with a thick accent on a bad line, the number that has to move without dropping a call, the booking that must land in the software you actually run, and the two in the morning failure that needs somebody who understands phone systems rather than somebody who understands prompts.
Operated by Talkify and built by D3V Services Limited in Christchurch. Support is answered by the people who wrote it, in your timezone, which is the practical advantage of buying from a studio rather than from a sales funnel.
Where we draw the lines
The limits are worth as much as the features. If a page will not tell you what something does not do, it is not telling you what it does either.
It is reception, not a tradesperson
It does not quote a job it has not seen, it does not diagnose down the phone, and it does not give trade advice. It takes the call, works out how urgent it is, writes the job down properly and gets it to you.
It does not promise your time
A time is only offered where it can read your real diary, and where it cannot, the caller is told plainly that you will ring back to confirm. Nobody sits at home waiting on an appointment that was never actually booked.
Card details are never read out
Not over the phone, not to the agent, not into a call recording. Where a payment is needed, a link goes to the customer instead.
Your details are not sold
Not yours and not your customers'. No lists, no data broking, and nothing handed to anyone outside the business for their own use. It is written down plainly on the privacy page.
It says what it is
It sounds like a person and it answers in your business name, and if a caller asks whether they are talking to a person it says it is an assistant. We are not interested in the version of this that pretends.
We have no testimonials to show you
There are no reviews, logos or metrics on this website because we have not collected any we could stand behind. Inventing them is the easiest thing on this list to do and the fastest way to deserve nothing.
The rest of it is trade by trade
The calls are not the same and neither are the questions worth asking.
Plumbers
The toby, the ceiling and the nine at night call that pays for the month.
Electricians
Switchboard age, half the house dead, and the burning smell that changes everything.
Builders
No emergencies, long lead times, and a quote call you only get one shot at.
Roofers
Eleven calls in the storm hour, every one of them answered at once.
Carpenters
Decks, doors and fit-outs, sized on the call rather than priced blind.
Heat pumps
Heat pumps here, air conditioning across the Tasman, and the same rush both ways.
Landscapers
Eleven calls on the first warm Saturday, and a maintenance round that repeats.
Handyman
Nine little jobs on one list, sized into a half day rather than an hour.
Hear it before you decide
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.