AI receptionist for UK electricians: Checkatrade to the job

The UK card: four things it has to answer from your notes

A receptionist, human or software, can only answer what's on the card, and UK callers ask UK questions. Four lines cover most of it.

Registered with whom. "Are you registered?" is the first thing a careful homeowner asks, because Electrical Safety First tells them to use only a registered electrician and lists NICEIC, NAPIT and BFC for England and Wales, with Select in Scotland. Your scheme and your registration number go on the card, and the receptionist reads them out. It doesn't decide whether the job needs a certificate. That's yours, on the callback.

Which postcodes. The area you cover, as a list of postcode districts, not "local". A caller from the wrong side of the motorway gets a polite no and a suggestion to try the next profile, which costs you nothing and saves a wasted callback.

Landlord work. Whether you do EICRs, and whether you do them for letting agents. In England, landlords must have the electrics checked at least every five years by a properly qualified person, and an agent with a book of a hundred flats rings the number that answers. If that's work you want, the card says so, and question five catches the agent's name.

Hours and out-of-hours. What you'll come out for tonight, if anything, and that there's a premium. Fantastic Services puts an emergency call-out at £120 to £350 against £60 to £120 in hours. A caller who's warned pays it. A caller who hears it first on the invoice argues.

Recording, UK GDPR, and saying it's an AI

A phone receptionist that transcribes the call is processing personal data, so two things need doing before it goes live. This is also the paragraph where I tell you to check with your own advisor, because I'm a plumber.

The first is recording. The Lawful Business Practice Regulations 2000 let a business record calls for listed purposes, including keeping a record of its transactions, on the condition that it "has made all reasonable efforts to inform every person who may use the telecommunication system" that calls may be recorded. In practice that's one sentence at the start of the call and a line in the privacy notice on your website. Mine says it in the greeting, and the transcript goes to you and nowhere else.

The second is telling the caller it's software. I couldn't find a UK rule that forces it the way Article 50 of the EU AI Act does inside the EU. Mine says it anyway, in its first sentence, because a caller who works it out halfway through hangs up and tells the neighbour. Honesty is cheaper than a clever voice.

The maths for a sole trader, in pounds

Say Checkatrade, Google and word of mouth between them make your phone ring sixteen times a week, and say you miss five of them because you were on the tools. Treat one in four of those as a job you'd have won, which is the same cautious rate the calculator uses. That's twenty missed calls a month and five jobs.

Call it £200 for the average job, which sits between a call-out with the fault found and fixed and a small EICR on the guides above. Five jobs × £200 is £1,000 a month, £12,000 a year, and none of it is on an invoice you sent.

Now add what the source box cost. If four of those twenty were Checkatrade leads at the £37.50 a lead one electrician was quoted, that's £150 a month you paid for the phone to ring, and it rang out.

Against that, three ways to catch the call. A person: a part-timer on the phone twenty hours a week at the £12.71 living wage from April 2026 is about £13,200 a year before anything else, and they still can't answer at eight at night. A human answering service: Answer.co.uk's May 2026 guide puts a local trade's expected spend at £40 to £160 a month. An AI receptionist: off-the-shelf plans are priced in dollars, and I walked the three price layers in the cost post. A done-for-you build like mine starts at $4,500, plus a monthly for the line, the minutes and my monitoring, quoted in writing before I touch your phone. In year one it's the dearest option on this page, and I'd rather write that than have you find out.

One more honest line. My first live client is a plumbing company, going live in October 2026. I don't have an electrician live yet, so the numbers above are the guides' figures and worked examples, not my results. Put your own numbers through the calculator. Give it your turnover and it caps the answer at a quarter of it, so a scary number you don't believe never makes it to the screen.

When not to buy, and what to do this week

Two honest cases for keeping your money. If your phone rings twice a day and you answer both, you don't have a phone problem. And if you're booked solid, like the 75% of tradespeople who told a Screwfix survey in 2024 they had work planned for the next six months, the receptionist's job changes. It's not there to win the job. It's there to take the name, say when you could look, and catch the letting agent whose forty EICRs are due in March. That's still worth having. It's a different card.

This week, in order:

1. Go through your last twenty jobs and write next to each where it came from. Checkatrade, Google, a name. Now you know which source box pays the mortgage.
2. Open your phone's call log and count the missed calls with no voicemail for seven days. That number is the leak.
3. Set divert on no answer. BT Business lists the codes: 61 for calls not answered after fifteen seconds, 67 when engaged, 62 when the phone is off, and double hash 002 hash to clear the lot. Point it at whatever will answer, even a mate's office for now.
4. Write the UK card. Scheme and number, postcode districts, EICRs yes or no, out-of-hours yes or no, and the one recording sentence.
5. Ring your own number from another phone while you're in the van. If you hear your own voicemail greeting, it isn't done.

If the count in step two is zero, keep the card and keep your money. If it's five a week, you've found the £12,000 above, and the fix starts with a divert code. If you want a second pair of eyes on the card before you spend anything, book a growth call. Thirty minutes, free, and if the answer is a divert and a laminated card, that's what I'll say. What I'd build for an electrical business is on the electricians page.