01What a missed enquiry looks like on a job site
You are on a ladder, in a crawl space, or holding a pipe wrench with wet hands. A customer fills in the form on your site, sends an Instagram message or writes an email. The phone is in the van. By the time you wash up it is 6 pm, and the customer may have written to other firms as well. We have no figure for how many enquiries a contractor loses this way and we will not quote one. The pattern is one every tradesperson recognises. The fix is not a faster you. It is a first written reply that goes out straight away, and a weekly review of every conversation.
- Your hands are busy all day and enquiries arrive at any hour
- A short reply straight away beats a perfect call back late in the evening
- Nobody has a reliable number for lost enquiries, and that includes us
02The basics the first reply should collect
Nobody can price or schedule a job from 'hi, do you do bathrooms?'. A useful first reply is a short run of questions, asked one or two at a time: where the work is (town and area, because you do not drive everywhere), what kind of work it is (new, repair, replacement), whether it is a flat, a house or a commercial space, when the customer wants it, and how to reach them. Photos help most, and in the first week we would map which channel can take them instead of promising it up front. You set the questions. The assistant asks them, and the enquiry lands in the booking automation and CRM that come with AUTOMATE, with what is still missing noted.
- Location, type of work, type of building, timing and contact details
- Photos where the channel can take them, with a person looking at them
- The questions are yours: the message map is built from how your customers actually write
03Booking the site visit, and nothing past it
A contractor's real next step is a site visit, because the job cannot be priced from a message. That is the one thing the assistant should aim at. You decide the rules: which days and windows are open, which areas you cover, how long a visit takes. The assistant offers only those slots and books into them through the booking automation in AUTOMATE. For a request outside the rules, such as a town you do not serve or a job you do not do, it says so politely and either passes it to you or declines, as you set it. You see every conversation each week, marked answered, escalated or unanswered.
- Open visit windows and covered areas are set by you
- Requests outside the rules reach you, not a guess
- A weekly review of what was answered, escalated or left unanswered
04What must never be automated
Four things stay with a person. A quote or any price, even a rough one, because a figure given in a chat becomes the figure the customer holds you to. A safety judgement: whether a smell, a crack, a sparking socket or a leak is dangerous is for a qualified person who has looked at it, and a message that sounds urgent should reach you straight away, not get a cheerful reply. Accepting a job or promising a start date, which depend on your crew, your materials and your permits. And anything contractual. Our AI assistant page says it plainly: a channel where a wrong answer creates safety risk is not one to automate. The handoff is configured before launch and you choose what triggers it.
- No quotes or prices, rough or otherwise
- No safety advice: urgent and hazard messages go straight to you
- No accepting jobs and no promised start dates
- No contract terms
05Where PROOF48 is the wrong choice
AUTOMATE costs 2,997 EUR a month. For a three-person crew with a handful of enquiries a week that is the wrong spend: a form that sends you a notification and ten minutes of replies at lunch may be all you need. It is also the wrong choice if your jobs come by phone and WhatsApp, because AUTOMATE covers site chat, DM and email auto-responders, booking and CRM, not calls and not WhatsApp. A standalone WhatsApp or voice assistant is a custom build, priced on request, for a business that already has its own site. And if you have no website, that comes first: 500 to 2,500 EUR, built in 48 hours, paid for after you see the preview.
- A few enquiries a week: reply by hand
- Jobs arrive by phone or WhatsApp: a custom build priced on request, not AUTOMATE
- No website yet: the 48-hour site comes first, paid after the preview
No contractor yet, and the nearest build
We have not built an assistant for a contractor, and none of the eight builds we have written up is a trade business. The nearest is SCP Shine & Style, a beauty salon in Sector 3, Bucharest: a service business that takes bookings. We rebuilt its site and shipped a page per service and a booking flow pointing at the salon's live booking platform. That was a website rebuild, not an AI assistant, and we do not publish the salon's booking numbers because we do not measure them. What carries over is small: a visitor should reach one clear booking step.
See the build: SCP Shine & StyleQuestions, answered
Can an AI receptionist give a customer a price?
It should not. A quote depends on a person seeing the job, and a figure typed into a chat becomes the figure the customer expects. The assistant collects the basics and books the site visit, and the price stays with you.
Does it answer phone calls or WhatsApp?
Not inside AUTOMATE, which covers site chat, DM and email auto-responders, booking and CRM. A standalone WhatsApp or voice assistant is a custom build, priced on request, for a business that already has its own site.
What happens if a message sounds urgent or dangerous?
It goes to a person. The handoff is configured before launch and you choose what triggers it, such as the type of topic or the time of day. The assistant gives no safety advice of its own.
Do you have a live example with a contractor?
No. None of our eight written-up builds is a trade business. The AI that handles client communication for PROOF48 itself runs our own business, and we say so rather than claim a contractor result we do not have.
Where PROOF48 fits
For a contractor on site all day, an AI receptionist is a fast first written reply that collects the location, type of work and timing, and books a site visit in windows you set. It never quotes, judges safety or accepts a job. PROOF48's AUTOMATE plan covers it on your site, DMs and email at 2,997 EUR a month. Phone and WhatsApp are a separate custom build.
Cosmin Tiu · Founder, PROOF48
Cosmin has worked in online marketing and software development since 2018, and has built with AI every day since January 2023. He still writes code from scratch daily, in Python, React, Rust and C#. PROOF48 ships business websites in 48 hours and invoices afterwards, so every opinion on this blog was paid for in real builds, not in theory.