Automation for trades businesses
The phone rings at 2am. Someone picks up.
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. The engine underneath it is built. Setting it up 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 What picks up
One engine, and every word in it is yours.
The phone, the chat on your website and the messages are front doors into the same engine. It reads what the customer wants, answers from a script your company signed off, stops and fetches a person the moment it is out of its depth, and writes down what happened twice. The detail is the product, so here it is in full.
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It cannot say a word you have not signed off.
Every sentence the system is able to send lives in a script library that belongs to your company. Each script is stored with a fingerprint of its own text and the name of the person who approved it. Change one word afterwards and the fingerprint stops matching, so the system refuses to send that script and puts it back in the approval queue instead. Sign-off is not a promise we make to you. It is a check that runs before every single message.
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The AI decides where a message goes. It never writes what your customer reads.
The model has one job: read an incoming message and return one label from a list you agreed, plus the facts it picked out, a name, an address, a postcode. It cannot return a sentence. The reply itself is rendered from your script. Prices, response times, dates and availability can only be filled in from your own settings, never from the model and never from what the caller said. A price you never wrote down cannot be spoken, because there is nowhere in the system for it to come from.
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It tells people it is not a person, and that cannot be edited out.
Disclosure is not a line at the top of a script that somebody could quietly delete. Every kind of conversation has to name the script that carries it, that script is marked as one that cannot be removed, and its fingerprint has to match its sign-off. If any of that is wrong, that kind of conversation does not start at all. There is no setting it can run at and no hour at which it slips through. You can reword the disclosure, because it is your brand and your voice. Rewording sends it back through approval. Deleting it is not one of the options.
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You set how much rope it gets, one kind of conversation at a time.
Four settings: draft everything and send nothing, hold every reply for a person, send immediately and flag it for review, or run on its own. It is set per kind of conversation, not per company, so an emergency can run on its own while quoting still waits for you. The setting is read fresh on every single reply, so you can pull one back at 3am without restarting anything and without ringing us. One button puts all of it back to holding. Every change is recorded: who moved it, when, which way, and why.
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Nobody is left in silence while your people sleep.
Holding every reply for a person has an obvious hole in it at 3am, which is that at 3am there is no person. So a held reply has a clock on it. If nobody releases it inside the time you set, an approved holding message goes out on its own, the customer knows they have been heard, and the drafted reply waits for the morning. Ten minutes, unless you tell us otherwise.
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It stops the moment it is out of its depth.
Handing over is the default, not the exception. It hands over on a word you flagged, on a complaint, on anything legal, on a voice note rather than guessing at what was said, on a message it is not confident enough about, on too many turns without getting anywhere, and on too many messages inside one hour. When it hands over it stops on that conversation for good, sends one approved holding line, and puts the whole thing in front of a person. It does not quietly take the conversation back.
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It cannot contact anybody who has not contacted you.
The function that sends a message has no field for a recipient. The number is read off a conversation, and a conversation exists only because somebody wrote to you or rang you first. There is no contact list in this system, no spreadsheet import, and no way to send one message to a thousand people. That is not a rule we follow. There is nowhere to put the list.
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Two records, and the one your invoice rests on can be checked.
The first keeps every message word for word, with the time and which script answered, and it is deleted on the schedule you choose. Ninety days, unless you tell us otherwise. The second holds no message text and no phone numbers at all, one line per conversation, kept for the life of the agreement and seven years after, because it is billing evidence rather than customer data. Every line carries a fingerprint of the line before it, so a line that was altered or removed breaks the chain, and you can walk that chain yourself. What we invoice is something you can audit rather than something you take on trust.
None of the above is a policy document. Each one is a check that has to pass before a message can leave, and the system stops rather than skipping one.
02 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 that handles it.
Atum answers 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.
03 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.
04 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.
Three example nights, in three different businesses. This is how the system is built to behave, not a customer's story
You fit and service cooling. It is 02:14 on a Saturday.
02:14
The phone rings.
A café owner has come back to lock up and found the walk-in fridge sitting at eleven degrees with the whole weekend's stock in it. She has your number because you put the unit in two years ago. It is Saturday night. Your office closed at five on Friday.
Today, on most trades numbers, this reaches a voicemail. She will not leave one.
02:14
It is answered on the second ring.
Your company's name, and a question: what has happened? No menu, no "press one for emergencies", no hold music. She starts talking immediately, which is what people do at two in the morning.
02:16
It finds out what is actually going on.
This is the part that decides whether the rest of the night goes well. It asks the same things your best dispatcher would ask, in the same order, and it does not move on until it has an answer.
02:17
It decides: tonight, or the morning.
Against your rules, written down once and changeable whenever you like. Which postcodes you will drive to at night. Which customers have a contract that says somebody comes. Which kinds of problem are worth waking a technician for, and which genuinely can wait eight hours.
When it is not sure, it wakes somebody. That way round, always. A technician who drives out for nothing is annoyed; a customer who was told to wait and lost a freezer full of stock is gone.
02:18
Your technician's phone goes.
The address. What is wrong, in one line. What has already been turned off. How to get in and who has the key. The customer's mobile number so he can ring on the way. Not "call the office". There is nobody in the office.
If he does not acknowledge it within a few minutes, the next person on the rota is called. Then you.
02:19
She is told what happens next.
A name, roughly when he will be there, and a number that reaches a person. She is also told the one useful thing she can do in the meantime, which tonight is keeping the door shut and moving nothing.
This is the moment the job stops being at risk. She has an answer, so she stops working down the list of the other four companies in the area.
07:30
You read it over coffee.
One page. What came in overnight, what was decided and why, who went, what is still open, and what each of it is worth. Nothing to type up afterwards, because it was written down while it was happening.
You let and look after villas. It is 23:50 on a Friday.
23:50
The phone rings.
A guest who landed this evening has let himself in with the code you sent and the air conditioning in two of the four bedrooms is blowing warm. Four people, a lot of luggage, and nobody at the property. Your office closed at six.
Today this reaches a mailbox nobody opens until morning. He will not wait for it. He will start writing the review instead.
23:50
It is answered on the second ring.
Your company's name, and a question: which property, and what is wrong? No menu, no hold music. He is tired and he starts talking, which is what people do at midnight after a flight.
23:52
It finds out what is actually going on.
Which villa, which rooms, whether the units are dead or only blowing warm, whether a breaker has gone, and whether the water and the pool are fine as well. The same things your manager would ask before deciding whether to send anybody out at midnight.
23:54
It decides: tonight, or the morning.
Against your rules, written down once and changeable whenever you like. Which properties have somebody who can attend at night. Which faults are worth waking a technician for and which are a fan and an apology until nine. Whether the guest has just arrived or is halfway through the stay, because those are not the same problem.
When it is not sure, it wakes somebody. That way round, always. A guest who was told to wait until morning puts that sentence in the review, and the review outlives the repair.
23:55
Your maintenance man's phone goes.
The property and the gate code. Which rooms. What the guest has already tried. The guest's own number so he can ring on the way, and the language the guest is speaking. Not "call the office". There is nobody in the office.
If he does not acknowledge it within a few minutes, the next person on the rota is called. Then you.
23:56
The guest is told what happens next.
A name, roughly when he will be there, and a number that reaches a person. He is also told the one useful thing he can do in the meantime, which tonight is putting everybody in the two rooms that are cold.
This is the moment the stay stops being at risk. He has an answer, so the night becomes a story about somebody turning up rather than about nobody picking up.
08:10
You read it over coffee.
One page. What came in overnight, which property, what was decided and why, who went, what is still open, and which owner needs telling before he hears it from somebody else. Nothing to type up afterwards, because it was written down while it was happening.
You manage buildings for the people who live in them. It is 01:40 on a Sunday.
01:40
The phone rings.
A resident on the fourth floor has water running down the wall of her hallway and it is not coming from her own flat. She has your number because it is the one on the notice board downstairs. It is Sunday. Your office closed at five on Friday.
Today this reaches a voicemail. Then she rings the chairman of the association at home, and by Monday the problem is you.
01:40
It is answered on the second ring.
Your company's name, and a question: which building, and what is happening? No menu, no "press one for emergencies", no hold music. She starts talking immediately, which is what people do at two in the morning.
01:42
It works out whose problem this is.
The address, the block, the floor and the unit. Then the question that decides the whole night: is the water inside a flat or in the common parts? That is what settles who pays, who has to authorise it, and which contractor is allowed to be called.
01:44
It decides: tonight, or the morning.
Against your rules, written down once per building and changeable whenever you like. Which buildings have a contract that says somebody comes. Which faults are always an emergency, whatever else is true: water, no light in a stairwell, somebody shut in a lift. And how far you may commit at night without asking the committee.
When it is not sure, it wakes somebody. That way round, always. A contractor called out for nothing is an invoice you can argue about; a leak left until Monday is a ceiling, and it is your contract at the next meeting.
01:45
The right contractor's phone goes.
Not any plumber. The one on that building's own list. The address, the block, the unit, which riser it is, what has already been shut off, who will be at the door, and the caretaker's number if the building has one.
If he does not acknowledge it within a few minutes, the next firm on that building's list is called. Then you.
01:47
She is told what happens next.
Which company is coming, roughly when, and a number that reaches a person. She is also told the one useful thing she can do in the meantime, which tonight is finding out whether anybody is home in the flat above her.
This is the moment it stops being a complaint. She has an answer, so on Monday it is a repair to report rather than a committee asking why nobody picked up.
07:00
You read it over coffee.
One page. What came in overnight, which buildings, what was decided and why, which contractor went, what is still open, and what has to go in the minutes. Nothing to type up afterwards, because it was written down while it was happening.
05 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.
06 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.