Automation for trades businesses
The phone rings at 2am. We are building what answers it.
Atum is the office side of a trades business: the calls, the quotes, the follow-ups, the website, and the record of what each one earned. It is in making and testing, and building for your company starts the day you come on. Nights and weekends are the easiest place to start.
- Plumbing
- Electrical
- HVAC
- Refrigeration
- Roofing
- Industrial maintenance
01 Start here
What is costing you money right now?
Pick the one that sounds most like your week. Under each one is the part of Atum we are building for it.
Atum is built to answer it.
- A real conversation, on the second ring. Not a voicemail, not a menu, not a beep.
- It finds out what has happened, where, and how bad it is.
- If it is an emergency it wakes the person on call and tells them what they are walking into.
- If it can wait until morning, it books it and lets everybody sleep.
Atum is built to chase it.
- Two days later, a message. A week later, another one, worded differently.
- If they reply, it answers the easy questions and passes the hard ones to you.
- If they have gone, it says so and closes the quote off, instead of leaving it open forever.
- Either way you find out what happened, which is more than most quotes ever tell you.
Atum is built not to forget.
- Every conversation ends with a next step and a date on it.
- When the date arrives, the message goes out. Nobody has to remember.
- Some work comes round again: a service, a filter, an annual check. It is diaried the day the job finishes.
- Nothing sits in somebody's head or on a note stuck to the dashboard of a van.
We build it, and we keep it right.
- Pages that load fast on a phone with one bar of signal, because that is where your customers are standing.
- It says what you do, where you work, and how to reach you tonight.
- When your hours, your area or your services change, you say it once and the site changes.
- Every enquiry from the site lands in the same place as every phone call.
Atum is built to keep the receipt.
- Every call, message and web form is logged, with the time it came in and where it came from.
- When one turns into a job, the job is tied back to it.
- When the job is invoiced, the amount is tied back too.
- At the end of the month you get one list, and you can open any line and read the original conversation.
Atum is built to answer them.
- Are you open. Do you cover my area. How soon can somebody come. Do you do this kind of work. Where is my technician.
- Answered on the phone, on the website, by email and by text, without anybody stopping what they are doing.
- Anything it cannot answer goes to a person, with everything that has already been said attached to it.
- It is the same conversation across every channel. Your customer never has to start again.
02 How it fits together
One system, not six tools.
Atum is an old Egyptian word built on a root that means completeness: one thing that holds all the others inside it. That is not a decoration on this website, it is the design. Every part below is the same system looking at the same customer, so nothing gets dropped in the gap between two products that were never meant to talk to each other.
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They find you
Website
Built by us, kept current by us, fast on a phone.
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They get through
Calls
Answered at any hour, triaged against your rules.
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They get an answer
Communications
Confirmations, updates and the everyday questions.
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They get a price
Quoting
Written from the call, sent the same day, your prices.
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They are chased
Follow-ups
Twice, differently, then an honest answer either way.
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You see what it earned
Reporting
Which call became which job, and what it billed.
03 The way in
Start with the nights.
You do not have to hand over the whole business on day one. Start with the hours nobody is in the office. Evenings, nights, weekends, the week between Christmas and New Year. It is the smallest change you can make and the easiest one to check, because you can listen to every single call.
An example night. This is how the system is built to behave, not a customer's story
02:14
The phone rings.
A café owner. There is water coming through the ceiling and she has no idea where it is coming from. Your office closed eight hours ago.
02:14
It is answered.
On the second ring. Not a voicemail, not a menu, not a beep. Someone says your company's name and asks what has happened.
02:16
It finds out what is actually going on.
Where. What kind of building. What is leaking and how fast. Whether anything has been turned off. Whether there is anything electrical near the water. The questions your best dispatcher would ask, in the order they would ask them.
02:17
It decides: tonight, or the morning.
Using your rules, written down once. Which postcodes. Which customers have a contract. Which kinds of job are worth getting somebody out of bed for. When it is not sure, it wakes somebody. That way round, always.
02:18
Your technician's phone goes.
With the address, the problem, how to get in, and the customer's mobile number. Not "call the office". There is nobody in the office.
02:19
The caller is told what happens next.
A name, roughly when he will be there, and a number that reaches a person. Now she can go and find the stopcock instead of ringing the next company on the list.
07:30
You read it over coffee.
One page. What came in overnight, what was sent out, what is still open, and what each of them is worth. Nothing to type up, because it was written down as it happened.
04 What we watch it on
Every conversation, on one screen, with a person behind it.
Nothing goes out to your customer without being written down: which script answered, at what hour, how long it took, and whether a person had to step in. Early on we read the replies before they send. Later you choose how much of that supervision to keep.
The night, as it happened
Ten conversations between 18:42 and 07:06. Every one carries the channel it came in on, how long the customer waited for a first reply, and the state it is in now. The companies in this capture are invented.
How much rope it gets
Four settings, set separately for each kind of conversation: draft everything and send nothing, hold each reply for a person, send and flag for review, or run on its own. One button puts all of it back to holding.
05 Money
Two parts, and one of them only pays when you do.
Part one
A monthly fee
Pays for the system existing and being kept working: your nights covered, your website current, your messages going out, your reporting arriving.
Part two
A share of what it brings in
A percentage of the work that came through the system and would otherwise have been missed. If it brings in nothing, this part costs nothing.
Both numbers are worked out with you on the call, from the size of your company and what your own phone log shows. They are agreed in writing before anything is switched on.
Why we can charge that way honestly
A share only works if we both agree which jobs the system produced. That is why every call is logged and tied to the job it became, and why you get the list. If a job is not on the list, it is not billed.
What the share is calculated on is agreed in writing before anything starts. There is no version of this where the number is a surprise.
Twenty minutes, and you will know.
Tell us what happens to your phone after six o'clock today. We will tell you what Atum would do differently and roughly what it would cost. If it is not worth it for your company, we will say so on the call rather than three months into a contract.