WhatsApp for trades

Water through a ceiling is not the same as a dripping tap

Every call is treated as urgent by the person making it, and almost none of them are. Sorting that out is what costs a tradesperson their evenings.

What they actually ask

Water is coming through the ceiling, can someone come now?
What do you charge for a callout at the weekend?
My boiler isn't firing — is that urgent?
Do you do landlord gas safety certificates?
How soon could you look at a consumer unit?

What makes this different from any other business

The customer cannot tell you how urgent it is

Someone with a dripping tap and someone with a burst pipe both message saying it is urgent, because to them it is. Written properly, the agent asks the two or three questions that separate them — is water still flowing, can you reach the stopcock, is there any smell of gas — and only the genuine ones reach a phone at night.

Callout rates differ by hour and day, and nobody publishes them

A weekday rate, an evening rate, a weekend rate and a bank holiday rate. Customers ask before they commit, and a tradesperson who has to be rung to answer it loses the job to whoever put it in writing. It takes ten minutes to write down once.

Gas and electrical safety questions must never be answered casually

A smell of gas, a burning smell from a consumer unit, or carbon monoxide symptoms are not questions for an agent. These should trigger an immediate instruction to call the national emergency number and a hard escalation, not a conversational reply. This is the first rule to configure in this trade.

Setting it up

1
Write the emergency questions, in the customer's wordsIs water still flowing. Can you reach the stopcock. Any smell of gas. These separate the genuine ones in two messages.
2
Publish your callout rates by hour and dayWeekday, evening, weekend, bank holiday. Whoever writes it down gets the job.
3
Hard-escalate gas and electrical safetyGas smell, burning smell, carbon monoxide symptoms. The agent should point at the emergency number and stop.

What it does not do

It cannot diagnose a fault or tell someone whether something is safe
It does not dispatch or check where your van is
It quotes from your published rates, not from a survey of the job

Questions

How does it decide what is a real emergency?: By asking the questions you would ask. Whether water is still flowing, whether they can reach the stopcock, whether there is any smell of gas. You write those rules once, and anything matching them reaches you immediately.
What about a gas leak?: That should never be handled conversationally. Configure it to give the national gas emergency number and escalate immediately. Same for burning smells and carbon monoxide symptoms.
Can it quote a job?: It gives your published callout rates and typical pricing. An actual quote needs eyes on the job, so it collects the details and hands over.

Where the rules come from

WhatsApp Cloud API documentationMeta's own reference for how business messaging and the 24-hour window work.

Other businesses like yours

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