Setting up a missed-call text-back is less work than many HVAC owners expect. There's no new phone, no app for your techs, and your customers keep calling the number they already have. The main thing to plan around is timing: decide your hours and wording before the busy season starts.
Set it up before the season turns
If you're going to try it, the time to do it is a few weeks before the first cold snap or heat wave, not the morning of. That gives you a quiet week to test it and adjust the wording before the phone gets busy.
The setup, step by step
- Pick the line to cover. For many shops that's the number on the trucks and the Google Business Profile. If you have an office line and a separate after-hours cell, decide whether you want both covered.
- Set your hours. Tell us when you're open, so callers get your daytime text during those hours and your after-hours text outside them.
- Write the texts. One for business hours, one for after hours. Short, in your own words, with one question the caller can answer quickly.
- Choose where replies go. Replies can come to a Client Hub inbox you read on your phone, as a text to your cell, by email, or a mix.
- Get the texting line ready. We set up the text-back line for you, so there's nothing to install on your end.
- Turn on call forwarding. Unanswered calls forward from your business number to the text-back line. On a cell, that's a short dial code; on an office phone system, it's a setting in your provider's portal. Setup covers the steps for your line.
- Test it. Call your business number from a different phone and let it ring out. You should get the text, and the reply should land where you chose.
What to expect afterward
Your phone still rings the way it always has. You answer the calls you can. The ones you can't answer forward after they ring out, and the caller gets your text a few seconds later.
Replies will come in when you're busy, and that's the point. When you get a spare minute between calls, you'll see who wrote back and what they need. Someone saying "furnace short cycling, two-story colonial in Royal Oak" is a much easier callback than a voicemail with no details.
You can turn forwarding off at any time with a dial code or the same portal setting, and your line goes back to normal. The service is month to month, so if it doesn't earn its place after a season, you can cancel.
A few practical tips
- Tell your office staff it's on, so nobody is surprised when a customer says "I got your text."
- Revisit the wording when the season changes. A text that mentions AC in January reads oddly.
- Call back replies in the order that makes sense for the job, not only the order they arrived.
The full details, including what setup asks for, are on the Missed-Call Text-Back page.
Related reading
Missed-Call Text-Back is a text-back tool: it replies to the calls you can't pick up, and it doesn't answer calls for you. It's $89/mo list, or $49/mo at the founding rate while founding spots last, billed monthly with no contract. If it sounds like a fit, see how Missed-Call Text-Back works.