Friday Fives: your AI Receptionist will soon make calls
Coming soon: AI Receptionist calls to confirm jobs and reach on-call engineers. Plus CRM contact syncing, calculated job durations and invoice costing.
What's in this week's edition
Your AI Concierge Receptionist already answers incoming calls. Soon, it will make calls for you too: confirming upcoming jobs with customers and calling the on-call engineer when an emergency comes in overnight.
That means fewer routine calls for your team to make, with customers and engineers getting the information they need.
This week’s other three automations tackle more everyday admin: syncing new CRM contacts, calculating job durations from labour hours and adding supplier invoice costs to the right job.
Your AI Concierge Receptionist calls customers to confirm jobs
Launching soon
Ahead of an upcoming job, your AI Receptionist will call the customer to confirm it directly. You choose when the call happens. It will confirm the time, address and reason for the visit, then listen and respond to the customer.
Confirmation texts can sit unread, leaving engineers arriving when a customer has forgotten the job. Your team can spend hours calling customers one by one just to find out whether the visit is still going ahead.
- Confirmed jobs will be updated automatically, giving your team more certainty in the diary.
- Requests to rearrange will be flagged straight to your team to rebook.
- No one on your team will need to make the call or listen back to find out what was said.
An emergency call, not just a text, when it matters
Launching soon
When an emergency comes in out of hours, your AI Receptionist will be able to call the on-call engineer directly instead of relying on a text being seen. The engineer will get the important details, including what’s happened and where. Once the call ends, what was discussed and agreed will be captured automatically against the job.
An urgent message can still sit unread. Your team is left waiting for a response or repeatedly chasing to find out whether someone has picked it up.
- The on-call engineer will receive a call with the information they need.
- What was discussed and agreed will be recorded against the job.
- Your team will have the call details without having to write them up manually.
New CRM contacts, synced automatically
Using a separate CRM alongside your job management system? Build Concierge can keep the two connected. When a new contact comes through your CRM, it extracts the company name, contact name, postcode and phone number, then checks your job management system for an existing match.
If a match exists, it uses it. If not, a new record is created. Anything that can’t be confidently matched is flagged to your team rather than guessed.
Without that connection, leads can sit in your CRM but remain missing from your job management system. Manually entering, checking and reconciling the same details takes time and can leave you with duplicate customer records.
- Sales and operations work from the same customer information.
- Nobody has to copy and paste new contact details between the two systems.
- A new lead can become a usable contact in minutes.
Labour hours, calculated automatically
When an instruction comes in by email, Build Concierge can read the required labour hours, calculate the correct job duration and apply your working day rules automatically. In this workflow, hours are converted into minutes and capped at a standard eight-hour working day before the job is created.
Done manually, planners have to calculate the duration from each instruction. Different people can apply different rules, and jobs can end up scheduled for longer than a working day.
- Jobs enter the diary with the right duration from the start.
- Planners get a more accurate view of capacity without checking every instruction manually.
- The same working day rules are applied consistently in this workflow.
Purchase invoices, costed straight to the job
Not every purchasing process starts with a purchase order. For project work where materials are purchased as the work progresses, Build Concierge can read the supplier invoice when it arrives, identify the relevant job and add the individual line items and costs directly to the record. No purchase order needs to be created first.
When invoices have to be entered by hand, recorded costs can fall behind actual spend. Project work can appear profitable until outstanding invoices are finally reconciled.
- Job costs stay up to date as supplier invoices arrive.
- Your team gets a more accurate picture of spend without re-entering invoice line items.
- Materials can keep being purchased the way they are now, without creating a purchase order first.
See these automations running in your operations
Whether you're already on Build Concierge or just exploring what it can do, we'll show you exactly how any of these five would work for your business.
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About the author
Simon leads operations at Build Concierge and writes Friday Fives, a weekly look at five real automations businesses are using to save time and cut costs.
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Website orders in. Invoice-ready jobs out.
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Sensitive site issues, sent straight to the right people
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