Pillar 1 — Watch the Money
Every call answered. Under 60 seconds. Booked into your CRM.
The Receptionist is the first agent in your Maximus team. It answers every call — day, night, weekends, holidays — qualifies the caller, books the job into your CRM, and confirms by text. No voicemail. No “we’ll call you back.” No revenue walking next door.
THE PROBLEM YOU INHERITED
78%¹of callers won’t leave voicemail. They call the next contractor.
Home-services customers don’t shop. They have a leak, a dead AC, a panel that’s tripping breakers — they need someone right now. They call you. Your receptionist is on another line, at lunch, sick, or it’s after 5pm. Voicemail picks up. They hang up and dial the next name on the list.
The math you’re not running: a $500K–$5M home-services shop bleeds $45,000 to $120,000² a yearto unanswered calls. Not in theory. In your books, right now, every month you don’t fix this.
The Receptionist exists because this is the cheapest, most provable revenue leak in your business — and the one a human receptionist will never plug, no matter how good they are.
WHAT HAPPENS ON A CALL
Under 60 seconds from answer to booked. Then the data goes to your CRM.
The Receptionist runs the same four steps on every call — emergency, after-hours, peak-time overflow, or the routine “do you have an opening Tuesday?” call. The order doesn’t change. The output is always the same: the right caller, qualified, in your CRM, with a confirmation text on its way.
- 1
Answers in under 60 seconds. 24/7.
No voicemail. No “we’ll call you back.” Whether it’s 2 PM Tuesday or 11 PM Saturday or Christmas morning, the call gets answered. The caller hears a real-feeling conversation, not a “press 1 for service” tree.
- 2
Triages: emergency, standard service, or out-of-scope.
If it’s a no-cool with a baby in the house, it’s flagged emergency and your on-call tech gets notified immediately. If it’s a routine “I need a furnace tune-up,” it goes into standard intake. If it’s outside your service area or scope (commercial when you only do residential), it gets routed for human review — never auto-booked.
- 3
Captures intake: name, address, service requested, time preference.
The Receptionist asks the questions you’d want your best receptionist to ask — clearly, without robotic scripting. It listens for the details that matter: equipment age, system brand, urgency, customer history if they’re a callback. Notes go into the CRM record.
- 4
Books into your CRM. Sends confirmation. Logs the call.
Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, GoHighLevel — the booking lands in whatever you use. Customer gets a confirmation text. The call recording + transcript + outcome get logged for your morning briefing review. By the time you wake up, the work is on the schedule.
THE PROOF
Zero missed calls in 90 days. 40% booking rate climbed to 91.7%.
Temperature Pros Orlando deployed The Receptionist as the first agent in their Maximus team. Before deployment, the booking rate from inbound calls was around 40% — the rest were either missed entirely (after-hours, peak-time overflow) or dropped because the caller wouldn’t leave a voicemail.
90 days later: zero missed calls. 91.7% of inbound calls converted to a booked job. $4,472 in revenue recovered specifically from after-hours bookings — the calls that previously went straight to voicemail and never came back.
0
missed calls / 90 days
40% → 91.7%
booking rate
$4,472
recovered / after-hours bookings
WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE
A real cold call. After 9 PM on a Tuesday.
The hardest call to handle is the new-customer cold call — no history, no context, urgent need. The Receptionist runs intake from scratch and gets the job booked into Jobber in under a minute. Here’s what it sounds like.
Customer (9:37 PM):“Hi, my AC just stopped working and it’s still 86 degrees. Can someone come tomorrow?”
Receptionist:“I can help with that. We’ve got availability tomorrow morning between 8 and 10. Mike or James will come out — both are EPA-certified. The diagnostic fee is $129 and applies to the repair if you proceed. Can I grab your name and address to lock it in?”
Customer:“Yeah, Sarah Chen, 4408 Maple Drive.”
Receptionist:“Got it. You’re booked, Sarah — Mike at 8 AM tomorrow, 4408 Maple Drive. You’ll get a text from him 30 minutes before he arrives. We’ll see you in the morning.”
[Booking entered into Jobber. Confirmation text sent. Total time: 47 seconds.]
That call previously went to voicemail. Sarah would have called the next contractor.
THE BOUNDARIES
Calls. Bookings. CRM intake. The hard parts go to a human.
The Receptionist isn’t trying to be a human salesperson or a customer-success agent. It’s a specialist for one job done at scale: every call answered, qualified, and booked. Anything that needs human judgment escalates immediately.
✓Receptionist handles
- Standard service calls (routine intake, recurring customers, reschedules)
- After-hours bookings (nights, weekends, holidays)
- Peak-time overflow (when your front desk is on another line)
- Basic FAQ (“are you open Sunday?” “do you do residential?”)
- CRM data entry (Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, GoHighLevel)
- Confirmation texts + reminder cadence
→Maximus flags for human approval
- Complex sales objections (when a quote needs a real conversation)
- Irate customers (anything that needs human-to-human de-escalation)
- Commercial accounts with custom terms (not auto-booked)
- Service requests outside your trained area or scope
- Anything outside the standard intake script (escalates with full context)
- Major schedule changes affecting other booked jobs
Most AI receptionists pretend they can do everything. The Receptionist does the calls that don’t need you, and tells you fast about the calls that do.
Who you’re buying from
Nirav DoshiOwner, Temperature Pros Orlando · CDP partner since 2012
The Receptionist was the first agent in my Maximus team. It answered the Temperature Pros service line for 90 days before any other shop saw it — long enough to prove every metric on this page came from my own QuickBooks. The 0 missed calls, the 40% → 91.7% booking lift, the $4,472 recovered from after-hours bookings — all of it from my shop, my calls, my month-end reconciliation.
You’re not buying a one-man-show. Maximus is built and operated by Complete Data Products — a 35-year-old technology company my brother and I bought in 2012. We’ve shipped AI and data systems for Fortune 500 clients since long before AI was a buzzword. Tech lead Jason Darling has been at CDP for 22 years — predates my ownership; institutional memory you can’t buy. Operations lead Kait Kluz joined 8 years ago when we rebuilt around AI; she’s the person making sure the team ships what we sell. Founding 20 customers get me directly on application and during onboarding; the org is here for everything after.
Frequently asked
Questions contractors ask about The Receptionist.
Does it sound like a robot?
What if a caller needs a human?
Does it work with my current phone number?
What CRMs does it integrate with?
How does it know my pricing, services, and standards?
When the calls are getting through.
Every call answered. Booked into your CRM. While you sleep.
The Receptionist is included in every Maximus subscription — Founding 20 ($497/mo or 8% recovered, whichever’s higher) or Standard ($697/mo or 10%). The math has to work or you don’t pay. 90-day money-back guarantee on the entire team.
Founding 20 — limited·$497/mo or 8% recovered·90-day money-back·48-hour deploy
No more voicemail. No more “we’ll call you back.” No more revenue walking next door.
Footnotes
- ¹ 78% of callers won’t leave voicemail. Aggregated from BrightLocal local consumer survey research and similar industry studies on caller behavior in service-business contexts. Range varies by industry and time-of-day; 78% reflects a commonly-cited midpoint for home services.
- ² $45,000–$120,000/year leak from missed calls. Calculation: 3–10 missed calls per day × $287 average ticket value (industry average across HVAC, plumbing, electrical) × 312 working days/year. Low end (3 missed/day) ≈ $45K; high end (10 missed/day) ≈ $120K. Per-shop number varies with call volume, ticket size, and after-hours coverage gaps.