Never miss a call with the top plumbing answering service
Handle emergency calls and capture jobs 24/7 with Sona, OpenPhone's AI agent. Never miss another burst pipe call or lose a customer to competitors with the best phone system for growing plumbing businesses.
Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Smarter than voicemail, more effective than call centers for plumbing companies
Sona greets callers, answers questions, and captures messages at a fraction of the cost of traditional phone answering services.
Why Sona is a better answering service for your plumbing business
Here are three reasons why Sona outperforms traditional call answering services:
1. Integrated in your business phone
OpenPhone is a collaborative business phone system that helps businesses scale their customer communications. Plumbing businesses can use OpenPhone to make calls and send texts to their customers efficiently. Using a business number in OpenPhone you can easily see when incoming calls are work vs personal calls when using OpenPhone from your cell phone or computer. Sona works within OpenPhone, which saves you time when you handle customer conversations.
Sona’s call summaries and transcripts appear directly in your OpenPhone workspace so you can easily follow up via call or text. After a call ends, Sona automatically shows calls it handled within your existing customer conversation history (or suggests new contacts). Plus, you can automatically sync Sona’s calls to Jobber with our Jobber integration.
With a third-party answering service, you have to constantly have to fill in the blanks for your customer journeys because their conversations happen outside your business phone. It increases administrative work for your team, reducing their ability to focus on your customer’s needs.
2. More cost-effective
Save hundreds of dollars every month with Sona. Other plumbing answering service providers have plans that start at 5x-7x higher than Sona. These providers charge by the minute, and they also charge hefty setup fees to train and onboard their teams.
Sona charges you a flat fee per month for 50 calls, after which it bills you per call, not per minute. It’s designed to give you the most value from your answering service. Sona also doesn’t require onboarding fees because you can set it up in minutes.
Another benefit of Sona is calls that last less than 15 seconds are not billed to you, so your bills accurately reflect your Sona usage.
3. More consistent service
Train Sona to meet your business needs, no learning curve required. It references your policies, FAQ answers, and any other documentation you add to your Sona knowledge base. You can also test Sona before you go live and make adjustments based on how it performs during testing.
Sona gives you the flexibility to be there for new and existing customers at any time of day. Whether it’s a burst pipe or a flooded bathroom, Sona can handle emergency calls during business hours and after hours.
In contrast, live answering services are inconsistent compared to AI answering services. You never have full control over how they represent your business, and you have to constantly monitor them for quality. Staff turnover is common with live answering services; if a live agent assigned to your business leaves, their replacement has to be trained and brought up to speed.
An AI answering service like Sona always shows up for work and never has to take a day off.
Handle more calls with the virtual receptionist for plumbers
Train Sona in seconds. Assign Sona to your calls in minutes.
Add Sona to after-hours call flows
Don't worry about potential customers turning into missed opportunities. Simply drag and drop Sona into your existing call flows, both during and after business hours. Sona works alongside call routing features like ring order, phone menus, and call forwarding.
Train Sona to offer customer support
Upload your key policies and answers to FAQs so Sona can give the right information to callers. Once you’ve uploaded your company documents, Sona can become a 24/7 virtual receptionist for your team.
Instruct Sona to ask follow-up questions
Whether it’s a burst pipe, a faulty water heater, or a new fixture, Sona can take detailed messages for your team. Give instructions to Sona to ask follow-up questions based on specific keywords in a conversation so your team has the information they need.
View Sona’s call logs instantly
See Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages in your OpenPhone inbox after calls end. Unlike some answering services, you don’t have to wait for them to email you a summary before you can follow up.
Feature comparison
See how Sona compares to traditional call answering services.
Features
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Sona
Traditional answering services
Starting price per month
$49 for 50 calls, $0.99 per call for additional calls
~5x-7x the cost of Sona
Setup time
Instant
2-4 weeks
Brand voice and tone
Consistent
Highly variable
Monitoring
100% in OpenPhone
Custom solution or daily email summary
Integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, Jobber, and more
Limited integration options
How to set up Sona in four steps
It only takes four steps to get started with Sona:
- Start with a free trial.
- Try our free trial features, including calls and recordings.
- Configure your Sona settings and test Sona in OpenPhone’s call flow builder.
- Once you’ve confirmed it’s a good fit, activate your OpenPhone account and get the Sona add-on.
“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
Why thousands of businesses choose OpenPhone
See why OpenPhone is the #1 business phone provider by customer satisfaction on G2.
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Local or toll-free numbers for your team
Sign up for as many numbers as you need with OpenPhone. Choose between local US and Canadian phone numbers or North American toll-free numbers. Local numbers help you build trust with your customers in your service areas; toll-free numbers let you offer a dedicated customer support number that stands out from your competitors.
All OpenPhone plans include a phone number for every user who joins your workspace. Your plumbing technicians can have dedicated numbers and easily distinguish between work and personal calls. You can also share numbers for specific departments, like home service vs commercial service calls.
Need more phone numbers than your current team size? Additional numbers cost just $5 per number per month.
Call handling made easy
Automatically route calls to the right destination with OpenPhone. Set up custom call flows easily with our call flow builder. Adjust your call routes in seconds in our drag-and-drop visual canvas.
Choose how your team receives phone calls, simultaneously or in custom batches, with ring groups. Give your callers a self-serve navigation option with phone menus. Direct emergency phone calls to a secondary number with our call forwarding options.
Need to transfer customer calls to an on-call team lead or a team member in the field? Warm transfers help you share the right amount of context with your team when you transfer calls.
Seamless team collaboration
Work better together as a team in OpenPhone. Split responsibility for incoming calls and texts with shared numbers and cut down on your pickup and response times. See what your team is working on with a complete history of all your customer interactions with shared inboxes. If you manage a team, you can easily see who said what in specific conversations.
Tackle plumbing emergencies and urgent calls as a team. Tag team members and assign follow-up tasks next to a customer text or call recording in real time with internal threads. Track which team members have viewed interactions with inbox viewers.
Build customer relationships over text
Send the right text at the right time with OpenPhone’s texting features. Send both SMS and MMS messages to your customers. SMS messages are great for appointment scheduling or coordinating arrival at a customer’s location. MMS messages are great for showing proof of project progress and completion, especially for complex plumbing jobs, like equipment installations or replacements.
Put your texting on autopilot with our automated text messaging features. Automatically respond to customers during and after your office hours with SMS auto-replies. Schedule texts to reach customers based on their time zones with scheduled messages. Answer common customer questions quickly with pre-written text templates, also known as snippets.
You can also create automated text workflows to scale your texting capabilities. With our Zapier and Make integrations, you can automatically text prospective customers with appointment confirmations and reminders or send review requests to past customers.
Say goodbye to repetitive administrative tasks
Get rid of all the repetitive administrative tasks so your team can focus on your job list. With automatic call recording and AI-powered call summaries and transcriptions, your team can capture every customer detail without having to manually take notes during your calls.
Automatically log call and text data to your CRM with our third-party integrations. Use our HubSpot, Jobber, and Salesforce integrations, or connect to any CRM using Zapier, Make, or the OpenPhone API.
Review calls faster and gain business insights based on what customers are saying with AI call tags. You can use AI to analyze your phone calls and automatically label them so you don’t have to manually review and tag them yourself.
Plus, Sona is always available to handle AI phone calls for you. It’s your in-house plumber answering service and virtual receptionist that can answer questions and take messages on your behalf, giving you additional peace of mind that you’re not missing any important calls when you’re off the clock.
Call and text from anywhere
Whether you’re in the office, at a customer’s house, or on the go, you can take OpenPhone with you. Your team can use their preferred devices to make calls and send texts with OpenPhone. With our Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and web apps, we’re compatible with every device your team might use. You just need an internet connection to get started.
Find out how much you’re investing in your business phone solution upfront on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Resource Center.
An answering service is a solution that handles incoming calls on behalf of a business or an individual. An answering service can either function in-house in a company’s tools and existing team with an AI voice agent, or it can be outsourced to a third-party provider, like a live receptionist service. Most answering services answer common questions from callers or take down messages they pass along to the rest of the team.
The benefits of a professional answering service for plumbing companies are:
- Eliminate missed calls: A 24/7 answering service helps you attend to new and existing customers while you’re busy or unavailable and provides a better customer experience compared to routing them to voicemail.
- Capture high-quality leads: An AI answering service like Sona can capture detailed information from callers to give you high-quality leads. If a prospective customer calls inquiring about your products and services, Sona can follow up by asking about the service they’re looking for, their location, and their tentative availability.
- Answer common questions: If your team is busy handling complex customer projects, an AI receptionist can help you answer common questions from callers. Share information about your estimated prices, business hours, service policies, and more to set the right expectations with potential customers.
Live plumber answering services have a wide range of prices, from $49 to $600 per month plus additional per-minute calling fees, making them quite expensive.
On the other hand, Sona costs $49 per month for 50 calls; additional calls are $0.99 each. It’s a more cost-effective option because we bill you based on your calls instead of by the minute. We also don’t bill you for calls that last less than 15 seconds, which means your spam calls or wrong numbers won’t be added to your Sona bill or go toward the monthly allotment of 50 calls.
A call center is designed to handle full-service customer support over the phone.It’s intended for high call volumes common among large businesses and enterprise companies. Call centers can vary in terms of call quality because they’re outsourced to third parties instead of managed in-house. They also require a lot of effort to set up because call center reps have to be trained and evaluated on the company’s documentation.
Phone answering services aren’t designed to offer full-service customer support. They can answer common customer questions, take messages on behalf of businesses, and pass them along to teams. They’re intended for lower call volumes or to assist teams with managing spikes in call volumes, typically in small businesses or fast-growing companies.
We’re biased, but we believe that Sona is the best AI answering service for businesses in the plumbing industry. It’s easy to set up and use, communicates with callers just like a member of your team, and integrates directly in your OpenPhone workspace. Plus, it’s a fraction of the cost of traditional answering services.
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OpenPhone was issued a successful SOC 2 report and is actively monitored by Vanta.