The answering service for electricians
An electrician answering service has one job that is not really about sales. A burning smell from a panel is not a call that can sit in a voicemail box until morning. Electrical work carries a category of call where the wrong response is a liability rather than a lost job, and where the right response is mostly about asking the correct three questions quickly. Answerley answers every call in your company's name and handles those three questions exactly the way you write them.
Type your business name and hear it answer a electrical call in your name. No card needed. It reads your website first, so it already knows your services and hours.
Ashfield Electrical, how can I help?
There's a burning smell coming from our fuse box. Sort of a hot plastic smell.
Thank you for calling straight away. Is there any smoke, or anything visibly glowing or sparking?
No smoke. Just the smell.
Okay. If it's safe to get to the panel without touching anything else, switch the main breaker off. If there's any smoke at all, or you're not sure, leave the house and call 911 instead — don't try.
No, I can reach it fine. Give me a second... okay, main's off.
Well done. Leave it off. What's the address there?
9 Bramwell Court.
9 Bramwell Court. Do you know roughly how old the panel is, or the make?
No idea, the house is from the sixties.
That's useful on its own. A burning smell at the panel is an emergency call for us, so I'm connecting you to our on-call electrician right now. Hold one moment.
Transferred to on-call electrician
Answerley’s real voice— the same one that answers live calls, not a voice actor. Only the agent is heard — the caller is an invented example, shown as text rather than voiced with a synthetic human.
The artifact
What lands in your inbox ninety seconds later
Every call ends as a structured summary, not a “someone called” voicemail. This is the same call as above, as the owner receives it — and the same fields arrive whether it was an emergency at 2am or a quote request at lunchtime.
New call — burning smell at panel, 9 Bramwell Court
Answerley ‹noreply@answerley.com› · Today, 8:23 PM
Neil Ashworth reported a hot-plastic burning smell coming from the consumer panel at 9 Bramwell Court. No smoke and nothing visibly sparking. He was able to reach the panel safely and shut the main breaker off, and was told to leave it off. Property dates from the 1960s. Transferred to the on-call electrician.
Why it is shaped like this
The labelled rows exist so the person picking the job up does not have to listen to a recording to find the address. The prose summary exists so you can triage it from a phone screen without opening anything.
If the caller corrects a detail halfway through — spells their name back, gives a different callback number — the correction wins and the summary is rewritten before it sends. The full transcript and the recording are both one click away in your dashboard.
The maths
Why the missed ones cost what they do
Electrical is one of the few trades where a category of inbound call is not a sales opportunity but a duty of care. “There is a burning smell coming from my panel” needs a response in the next minute, and the response is mostly a script: is there smoke, can you safely reach the breaker, call 911 if you are unsure. Getting that script said out loud at nine at night is worth more than any lead, and it is precisely what voicemail cannot do.
Meanwhile the growth work — panel upgrades, service changes, EV charger installs, commercial maintenance contracts — comes from people who call during working hours. Which are, exactly, the hours you spend inside somebody else’s wall with your phone in the truck. The emergency calls are the ones you feel guilty about; the daytime ones are the ones costing you money.
Routing
What gets you woken up — and what does not
The whole value of an after-hours line is that it tells the two apart. You write the list; it follows it exactly rather than exercising its own judgement.
How one electrical call gets decided
Call comes in
Ashfield Electrical, how can I help?
Urgent → on-call electrician
- Burning smell, smoke or sparking
- Exposed or damaged wiring
- Water in contact with electrics
- Outage with medical equipment on site
Everything else → appointment request
- Panel upgrades and service changes
- EV charger installs
- Lighting and socket work
- Inspections and quotes
The full escalation list for electrical
- Burning smell, smoke, or visible sparking
The caller is told to shut off the breaker only if it is safe to reach, and to call 911 if there is any smoke or fire. Then you are notified immediately.
- Exposed, damaged or downed wiring
Immediate. The caller is told to keep everyone clear.
- Water in contact with electrical equipment
Immediate, with the same do-not-touch instruction.
- A breaker tripping repeatedly and not holding
Same-night rather than same-week, by most electricians' rules.
- Total outage with medical equipment on site
Straight through, every time.
Panel upgrades, EV charger installs, lighting work, inspections and quote requests become an appointment request with the address, panel details and scope already captured.
Intake
What it asks on every electrical call
These are the details we configure it to capture, and every one is editable before you go live. They are what turn a message into a job someone can actually start.
- Burning smell, smoke, sparking or buzzing
Asked first on every call, before anything else, because the answer changes what happens next.
- Partial or total loss of power
A dead circuit and a dead house are different jobs and different urgency.
- Whether a breaker keeps tripping
A breaker that resets and holds is Tuesday. A breaker that trips again immediately is not.
- Whether the utility has confirmed supply to the property
Stops you driving out to a street-wide outage, which is the most annoying call-out there is.
- Panel type and approximate age
Federal Pacific, Zinsco, aluminium branch wiring — you want to know before you arrive, not after.
- Residential or commercial, and any medical equipment on site
Oxygen concentrators and home dialysis turn an outage into an emergency.
- Service address and access
Captured and read back, with any gate or key details.
Afterwards
What a night looks like afterwards
Every call lands in one list with what it was and what happened to it. Spam is recognized, ended politely and marked — and never counted against your allowance, which is not true of a service that bills you by the minute.
The objection
The objection worth answering
“I'm not comfortable with an AI giving electrical advice to my customers.”
Neither are we, and it does not. It reads the safety instruction you wrote, word for word — shut the breaker if it is safe, leave and call 911 if there is smoke, do not touch anything wet — and then it stops. It does not diagnose, it does not talk anyone through a repair, and it does not improvise. Everything beyond your script becomes "our electrician will go through that with you" and a transfer or a message. If it does not know something, it says so and takes the details.
Honestly
What you are actually choosing between
Four options, including the two that are sometimes the better answer than this one.
Free, and the reason you are reading this. Most callers with an urgent problem hang up rather than leave a message, so a voicemail box is not a record of your missed calls — it is a record of the patient minority.
Real people, typically $250–$700 a month for a small business, almost always billed per minute or per call — so your worst week is also your biggest invoice, and many bill you for robocalls too. Operators work from a script across dozens of unrelated businesses, which is why so many electricalcalls come back as “caller had a problem, please call back.”
The best answer if you have the call volume to justify it. It is also a salary, a schedule, holidays, and no cover at 2am — which is exactly when this trade’s most valuable calls arrive.
Answers instantly, every time, in your name, with your questions and your escalation rules. Flat monthly, no per-minute billing, spam not counted. The honest limitation is that it is not a person: it will not build a relationship with a repeat customer over eighteen months, and it will not talk anyone through a repair. If the calls you care about most need judgement rather than accurate intake and fast routing, a good human service is worth its price and you should buy one.
Setup
How it gets set up
Four steps, one of which is outside Answerley. There is no scripting to write and no onboarding call to sit through.
- 1
It reads your website
Type your business name and it finds your listing, pulls your site, and builds a draft profile — services, hours, service area, the questions your customers actually ask.
- 2
You correct it
Everything is editable, and it flags what it could not work out rather than inventing an answer. This is where you set the intake questions and the escalation list above.
- 3
You hear it before you pay
Talk to it in the browser, or have it call your phone, using your real profile. No card required to get this far.
- 4
You forward your line
All calls, after-hours only, or only when you do not pick up. That is the only step outside Answerley, and it takes a few minutes.
Pricing
What it costs
Flat monthly, from $49. Full pricing is on the plans page.
Traditional answering services bill per minute or per call, which means your busiest month — the freeze, the storm, the burst-pipe week — is also your most expensive one. Answerley charges the same either way, and spam and robocalls are never counted against your allowance.
Questions
Questions about Electrical answering
Do you offer an answering service for electrical contractors as well as sole electricians?
Both. A sole electrician usually configures one number; a contractor configures several and gives each a role, so an after-hours call reaches whoever covers emergencies rather than the office line.
What should an electrician phone answering service do about a burning smell?
Give your instruction first, before anything else. Most electricians configure the agent to tell the caller to leave the property and call 911 if there is any smoke, and to switch the main breaker off only if it is safe to reach. The agent relays exactly what you configured and never improvises safety advice.
Is this an electrician call answering service, or does it book work too?
It answers, triages and captures the job by default, and transfers a genuine emergency live. Connect a calendar and it can confirm a real appointment slot on the call as well.
Can I write the exact safety wording?
Yes, and you should. Whatever you put in your instructions is what callers hear, verbatim. It is not paraphrased.
What if it doesn't know the answer to something?
It says so plainly and offers to take a message rather than guessing. Every unanswered question is logged in your dashboard so you can add the answer once and never get asked again.
Does it work for commercial as well as residential?
Yes. It asks which on every call, because the routing and often the on-call person are different.
Can it book jobs into my calendar?
It captures appointment requests by default. Connect Google Calendar or Outlook and it can book a confirmed slot. Calendly connects too, but as a one-way sync: bookings made in Calendly appear in your dashboard, and the agent books into Google or Outlook.
What do I pay for a call that turns out to be a robocall?
Nothing. Spam is recognized, ended politely, and never counted against your allowance.
Can it tell a real emergency from someone who just reset a breaker?
That is what the opening questions are for — smoke, smell, sparking, and whether the breaker holds. Those answers decide the routing, using your rules rather than its own judgement.
Will it give out my call-out fee?
Only if you tell it to. Publish your diagnostic or emergency rate during setup and it quotes it consistently; leave it out and it says you will confirm pricing and takes the job details instead.
Before you choose
How electrical businesses use it
Other trades
Hear Answerley answer a electrical call in your own business's name.
Hear it answer your callsNo card needed to hear it. Flat monthly pricing from $49. Cancel in one click.