An AI receptionist for plumbers.

The jobs that decide a plumbing firm's month arrive at 9pm on a Sunday, or while you're under a floor with both hands on a compression fitting. A firm with one to ten engineers has nobody whose actual job is answering enquiries. Daytime, everyone is on the tools and calls go to voicemail. Evenings and weekends — exactly when homeowners search "emergency plumber near me" or finally write that bathroom-refit enquiry — the office is dark.

The two failure modes are different. Emergencies are loud: someone with water coming through the kitchen ceiling does not leave a voicemail and wait politely. They work down the search results until a firm answers — every unanswered emergency enquiry is a callout for the next name on the list.

Quote requests fail quietly. A homeowner planning a bathroom or a boiler swap typically shops the job around, and whoever replies first with sensible questions tends to get shortlisted. If your reply lands on Tuesday and a competitor's landed on Sunday night, you are quoting from behind.

Underneath both sits the repeat-question tax: "Do you cover my postcode?", "Are you Gas Safe registered?", "What does a boiler service involve?" — the same answers, on repeat.

An AI receptionist, in the form Adoomi builds, is a chat assistant that sits on your own website and answers as your firm — you can see how it is set up for plumbing and heating businesses specifically. It is trained on your website, FAQs and service pages, and answers only from that approved content. Ask it something outside what you have published and it says so, handing the conversation to a human rather than improvising. It works around the clock and replies in the customer's own language.

The practical wins are specific: enquiries captured while engineers are on the job or off the clock, repeat questions like boiler-service basics answered from your own published pages via the website chatbot, and the voicemail nobody returned becomes a structured, quote-ready lead.

Triage is sorting, not counselling: recognise what is urgent, apply your rules, and move to a human fast when it matters. An illustrative flow for a small firm:

Two rules matter more than the flow itself. First, anything gas-related is a hard handover — more below. Second, sensitive enquiries — a vulnerable customer, a complaint, an insurance job — should route to a named person, not a general inbox. Adoomi supports exactly this shape: emergency-versus-non-urgent triage, with sensitive matters routed to someone specific.

The emergency instructions themselves need no software. If your website has none, paste something like this onto your contact page first — it costs nothing, works tonight, and is exactly the published content an assistant later surfaces.

Most incoming quote requests are unquotable as sent. "How much to move a radiator?" arrives with no address, no photos, no timeline. The point of lead capture is that the assistant asks the boring questions before your team spends a minute on the enquiry, then attaches contact details, the customer's need and the relevant context to one structured enquiry.

• Name and best contact mobile for WhatsApp, plus email.
• The job in the customer's own words "leak under the bath" tells you more than any dropdown.
• Postcode is it your patch, and what is the travel time?
• Urgency emergency now, this week, or planning ahead.
• Property and access house or flat, owner or tenant, when someone is home.
• Photos best gathered over WhatsApp after handoff: once the customer continues with your team there, pictures of the boiler, the leak or the bathroom land in the same thread.

The chat window does not need to do everything; the enquiry just needs to arrive so an engineer can glance at it for thirty seconds and know roughly what it is — say, a £90 washer swap or a £9,000 bathroom.

Capture only helps if the handoff is clean. With Adoomi the customer can continue with your team on WhatsApp, and the original question plus every captured detail travels too — nobody types "hi, what's the problem?" at someone who has explained it twice. Email alerts route each enquiry to the right teammate: quote requests to whoever prices jobs, everything else to the office inbox.

The customer asked at 9.40pm on a Tuesday and woke to a WhatsApp message from a plumber who already knew the job. You got a lead with job description, postcode and urgency attached, instead of "missed call, 21:40".

This section matters most, because a receptionist that overreaches is worse than voicemail.

• No Gas Safe-regulated advice. None. Anything that amounts to guidance on gas work — suspected leaks, flues, boiler fault diagnosis — is a hard handover to a qualified human. Your published emergency guidance should already cover the gas-leak basics (the template above is a start); the assistant's job is to surface those published instructions and get out of the way, not to have opinions about gas.
• No invented prices. Adoomi's plumber setup follows a blunt rule: never a price without a site visit, unless the figure comes from your own published price list. An assistant that guesses "probably about £300" creates a dispute, not a lead.
• Nothing beyond your approved content. The assistant answers from what you have published and reviewed — you decide what it is allowed to say — and when it is unsure, it hands off rather than winging it.
• It will not answer your actual phone line today. Said once already, but it is the honest limit that matters most in this trade.

Some plumbing work is phone-first. A chat window does not change that. Adoomi answers on your website, not on your phone line, so a firm whose jobs arrive almost entirely as calls also needs a call-answering team. A chat assistant only reaches people who already reach your site, so search traffic has to be there first. Where it is, Adoomi covers the other queue outright. The customer who read your page on a Sunday night and typed a question gets an answer that night, and nobody in the van has to pick up.

Choose an AI receptionist if a decent share of enquiries already arrives through search and your site, and repeat questions are eating human hours. On cost, run your own numbers rather than trusting anyone's brochure:

1. Count last month's misses. Pull the phone log, count the calls that went unanswered in evenings and weekends, and add website enquiries that waited a day or more for a reply.
2. Price the phone side. If you pay an answering service, multiply those calls by your per-call rate — services bill per call or per minute, and your tariff sheet will say which.
3. Price the website side. Set that against a flat £8/month (Adoomi's Local plan, 200 message credits), remembering the two cover different channels: the answering service catches people who ring, the assistant catches people who found you through search and never rang.

Whatever share of step one arrived through the website is the part £8 a month covers. Those customers get an answer straight away, and the questions you answer ten times a week get answered without you. Plenty of firms run both: the on-call engineer on the line, the assistant on the site.

Setup takes about ten minutes: connect your website, review the answers the assistant will give, and add one line to your website. The review step is where the value sits for a plumbing firm — check the emergency wording, the gas handover line and the no-prices rule before anything goes live.

Pricing is flat and small-firm-shaped: a Free plan at £0 with 50 message credits a month, then paid plans from £8/month (Local, 200 credits), £20/month (Growth, 500) and £75/month (Scale, 4,000) — the full plan comparison has the detail. Hosting is EU-based, with GDPR data export and deletion built in and no tracking cookies in the chat window.