Built on AI. Maintained by humans. Tuned to your rules.
After hours, overflow, or full-time. Your AI receptionist answers missed calls, qualifies emergencies, books jobs, transfers urgent calls, and texts your team the summary — every time, without fail.
The phone is still the front door of a service business. Customers in distress — a busted water heater, a freezing house, a jammed garage door — pick up the phone. They don't fill out a form. And when no one answers, they don't leave a message. They call the next company. Most owners don't realize how much revenue is walking out the door this way until they actually count.
The phone rings. You can't answer. The caller hangs up and dials someone else. By the time you get back to your truck, you've already lost the job.
Emergencies don't keep business hours. Your competitors with after-hours coverage win the call. You wake up to a voicemail from a customer who's already booked someone else.
One person can't answer two lines. During peak season, calls overflow to voicemail and stay there. Most never get returned.
They take a name and number. They can't qualify the caller, triage emergencies, or book into your dispatch system. By the time the message reaches you, the urgency is gone.
Most “AI receptionist” companies hand you a dashboard and tell you to configure your own agent. We don't. We design your system around how your business actually operates — your services, your dispatch logic, your emergency protocols, your customers. We build it. We test it. We launch it. And then we maintain it for as long as you keep us on, listening to calls every week and tuning the system as your business evolves.
Ninety-minute call to understand your services, hours, dispatch rules, emergencies, and what counts as a qualified lead.
We craft the agent, the knowledge base, the call flows, and the integrations. Provision a dedicated number for your AI line.
We run the system through realistic scenarios — emergencies, after-hours, weird edge cases — until it handles them the way you would.
You set up call forwarding on your existing line. We start with after-hours only, then expand as confidence grows.
Weekly QA. Monthly tuning. New services, new staff, new flows. The system evolves with your business.
A complete service, not a toolbox. Here's what every Phonewright client gets, day one, before we even talk about expansion.
Built around your business: your services, your prices, your service area, your tone of voice. Sounds professional. Discloses it's automated. Hands off to a human when it should.
Provisioned and managed by us. Your published number stays exactly the same. Calls forward to ours when you can't pick up.
We walk you through call forwarding on your cell, RingCentral, Nextiva, or whatever you use. After-hours, no-answer, busy. Your choice.
Jobber, Housecall Pro, HubSpot, GoHighLevel, ServiceTitan, Google Sheets, or just clean email summaries if you don't use a CRM.
Burst pipe, no heat, gas smell. The agent identifies urgency and transfers the caller to your on-call line immediately, with full context.
Every call generates a structured summary delivered to you within seconds. Caller name, number, what they wanted, what was booked, recording link.
We listen to a sample of calls every week. We catch failures, fix prompts, update your knowledge base. The system gets better the longer you use it.
Calls answered, leads captured, appointments booked, recovered revenue, where the system shined, where it can be improved next month.
If a customer calls our shop and gets a robot, won't they think we've stopped caring? That we got too big, or too cheap, to staff it ourselves?
Your name is on the truck. Your reputation is the business. So of course this is the question you ask first, and it's exactly the right reason to look honestly at what's happening on your phones right now, when nobody's picking up.
The instinct is to compare an AI receptionist to your best receptionist on their best day — warm, knowledgeable, calm under pressure, available. But that's the wrong comparison, because that isn't what the AI is replacing.
Those calls aren't going to your best receptionist. They're going to silence. Voicemail nobody hears. The seventh ring nobody answers. The on-hold loop that ends in a hang-up. The line that rolls to your cell while you're under a sink.
A well-built receptionist that picks up on the second ring, knows your business, qualifies the caller, books the appointment, and texts you the summary doesn't damage your reputation versus voicemail. It improves it. The only callers who experience it are the callers who would otherwise have experienced silence. And they remember the company that picked up.
Here's what most owners miss about that 100× cliff: from the caller's side, voicemail doesn't feel like a response. It feels like nobody picked up, and they keep dialing. Their search only ends when they get something real: a booked appointment, a confirmed callback time, a person who heard them out. Once they have that in hand, they stop calling. A well-built AI receptionist that answers at 9pm and books the visit for Tuesday morning has ended that search. For you. Your competitor never gets the next dial.
Compared to what? Not AI vs. ideal human. AI vs. silence.
The agent always discloses it's automated within the first sentence, because honesty is the right default, and because some states require it. Customers respect knowing what they're talking to. What loses them isn't the AI. It's the call that never gets answered.
Phonewright is priced as a managed phone workflow: setup, dispatch logic, emergency reliability, integrations, human QA, and ongoing tuning. Minutes are included, but they're not the product.
$750 one-time for after-hours/no-answer forwarding, emergency triage, live transfer, SMS/email summaries, and an end-of-pilot report showing calls captured, leads saved, emergencies transferred, and estimated revenue exposure. Credited toward setup if you continue.
Shipwright builds the system. Playwright writes what the AI actually says. The reason most AI receptionists sound robotic isn't the voice synthesis. It's that nobody wrote them anything worth saying.
The -wright suffix has always belonged to craftspeople who make a specific thing and make it well. Shipwright. Wheelwright. Millwright. We picked the name on purpose.
The phone is the front door of a service business. It's where money comes in. It deserves to be built that way.
Before you commit to anything, we'll run a missed-call audit. Send us your last 30 days of call logs, or forward your after-hours line to a number we provision for one week.
We tell you exactly how many calls were missed, how many looked bookable, and the revenue exposure. No commitment, no pitch deck.
Prefer a 30-minute consultation instead? Email us. No deck, no high-pressure sales — just a look at whether what we do fits what you need.
We try to be careful with numbers. Here's where the figures on this page came from, and what they do — and don't — claim about your specific business.
Industry compilations of business call statistics consistently report that the majority of after-hours calls go to voicemail and that most unanswered callers do not call back. Underlying figures include a 411 Locals 30-day study (37.8% answered, 37.8% to voicemail, 24.3% no response) and PATLive's finding that 85% of unanswered callers do not try again.
The Lead Response Management Study, conducted by Dr. James B. Oldroyd (then Faculty Fellow at MIT Sloan) using InsideSales.com data across three years, six companies, 15,000+ web leads, and 100,000+ call attempts. Later summarized for general business audiences in Harvard Business Review (2011).
Figures vary widely by trade, geography, and study window. The industry toggle pulls from cost and customer-value sources for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, roofing, restoration, garage doors, and pest control. The linked sources are shown directly under the trade-specific dollar stats.