Agents & knowledge
Setting your service area and call-out fee
These two are the questions almost every first-time caller asks, and they are the two your agent will refuse to guess at. Neither is a settings field — both live in your knowledge base, and the agent will only say what it can read there.
Your service area. Write it the way you would say it out loud, and be specific: the towns you cover, the counties, the postcode or ZIP prefixes, or a distance from where you are based. If you charge extra past a certain point, say so and say how much. If there are places you will not go, say that too — a caller told "no" in ten seconds is a better outcome for both of you than a visit that gets cancelled.
Your call-out fee. Write the number exactly as you charge it, and say what it covers and whether it comes off the job if the customer goes ahead. Do the same for a diagnostic fee or a minimum charge, and for any different rate for evenings, weekends or emergencies.
Two rules the agent follows, so that what you write is what callers hear:
- It quotes your fee exactly as written, or not at all. It will not round it, average it, or turn it into a range. If your knowledge base doesn't state it, the agent says it doesn't have that to hand and offers to have somebody ring back — because a wrong number quoted on the phone is a number you then have to argue about on the doorstep.
- It never prices the job itself. However much the caller presses, the answer is that the technician will price it before any work starts. That sentence is the whole answer; the agent is instructed not to soften it with a guess.
The fastest way to get all of this in is to crawl your website under Knowledge base — the research pass specifically looks for your service area, your call-out fee, your emergency and after-hours arrangements, your licensing and insurance, the brands you service, and your hours. Anything your site doesn't state, add as a written entry. When your prices change, update it: stale knowledge is the most common cause of a wrong answer.