An AI receptionist for roofing companies that books into a real CRM
Designed for the post-storm inspection request: take the address, find out whether a claim is open, book the inspection, and transfer an active leak.
- On the roadmap, not available today
- Will capture insurance status
- Consent gate part of the design
Roofing demand does not arrive evenly. It arrives in the four days after a hailstorm crosses a county, when every homeowner on three streets calls every roofer whose truck they have seen, and your office takes a month of calls in an afternoon. The agent described here is designed for that afternoon. It is a roadmap feature and answers nothing today.
The call a roofing company actually loses
A storm surge is a volume problem before it is a sales problem. Your two office staff cannot take two hundred calls in a day, so the overflow goes to voicemail, and by the time anyone calls back a canvasser from another company has already knocked on the door and got a signed inspection agreement.
The calls are also unusually similar to each other, which is the condition where a scripted agent works. Nearly every one needs the same four facts: the address, whether a claim is already filed, whether there is visible interior damage, and when someone can come out.
Whether a claim is open matters more than callers expect. A homeowner who has already filed and has an adjuster date is a different pipeline stage from one who has noticed missing shingles and has told nobody. Capturing that at the first call is what stops the claim pipeline from filling up with deals nobody can stage correctly.
The call flow it runs
What it will handle after a storm, in order. None of this ships today.
- 1
Confirm the property address
Read back and confirmed, because roofing leads are geographic. Which side of a hail swath a house sits on decides whether the inspection is worth sending a crew for.
- 2
Ask whether water is coming inside
The one question that changes urgency. Missing shingles is an inspection this week. Water through a ceiling is a tarp today, and the design transfers that call rather than booking it.
- 3
Establish insurance status
Whether a claim has been filed, whether an adjuster date is set, and which carrier. Three fields that decide the stage the deal enters.
- 4
Capture roof basics the caller knows
Approximate age, storey count, and whether the caller is the owner or a tenant. A tenant cannot authorise an inspection, and finding that out on site wastes a slot.
- 5
Book the inspection window
Real slots from your calendar rather than a promise of a callback. In storm weeks the design offers the next available inspection even if that is four days out, because a booked date beats a maybe.
- 6
Route what it should not touch
Anything about deductibles, what a carrier will approve, or whether you will waive anything ends the flow and goes to a person. Those answers carry real consequences.
What it will do, and what stays with a person
Insurance conversations are the part a scripted agent has no business handling.
| Situation | The planned agent | A person |
|---|---|---|
| Water coming through a ceiling now | None. Immediate transfer for an emergency tarp decision | Decides the tarp and the crew |
| Post-hail inspection request, no claim filed | Address, roof age, interior damage check, then books the inspection | Only if asked for |
| Claim already filed, adjuster date set | Captures carrier and adjuster date, books an estimator for the same day | Attends the adjuster meeting |
| "Will you cover my deductible?" | None. Declines the topic and transfers | Answers, because this has legal and carrier consequences |
| "How much for a new roof?" | Explains that a roof needs measuring and books the inspection | Quotes after the inspection |
| Caller is a tenant, not the owner | Captures owner contact details and creates a task | Contacts the owner |
| A commercial flat roof or an apartment block | Captures the site and transfers, since commercial estimating is a different motion | Scopes and prices the job |
Rows describe intended behaviour of a roadmap feature. Nothing here answers a call today.
Why a voice agent needs a CRM behind it
A receptionist that books into nothing is an answering machine with a nicer voice. In roofing the proof of that is what happens six weeks after the storm. The claim is the deal, and the deal has stages: inspection, adjuster meeting, approval, build. A call that produced a transcript and a calendar invite in some other tool has given you none of that.
There is a second reason specific to storm work. When two hundred calls arrive in one week, the only way to know which streets to keep canvassing is to have every one of those calls in a database with an address on it. Loose transcripts cannot be counted, mapped or joined against the crews you sent out.
So the pipeline, the calendar, the knowledge base and the approval queue are live first, and the voice agent will write into them. A booking that lands nowhere is the exact failure this order of building is meant to prevent.
Worth settling before it ships. Whether you must tell a caller they are speaking to an AI, and whether you may record the call, both depend on where the parties are. Some places also have rules about what a contractor discloses when soliciting storm work. Take those to your own counsel. This is not legal advice.
What roofing owners ask about this
- Will it sound like a robot?
- The voice itself is no longer the weak point on current platforms. Latency before the first word gives an agent away, and so do answers that miss the question. Storm callers are ringing four roofers in a row and comparing, so the design keeps replies fast and the script short.
- What happens when it cannot answer something?
- It refuses and hands over. Its facts come from your knowledge base: your service area, your inspection terms, the manufacturers you are certified with. Anything outside that list gets a scripted refusal and a transfer. Deductibles and carrier approvals are on that list deliberately, because a wrong answer there is a legal problem rather than a service one.
- Will it say it is an AI?
- Yes. Disclosure is designed in and we would not recommend switching it off. Several jurisdictions are moving toward requiring it, and homeowners comparing roofers after a storm are already primed to be suspicious. Confirm the specific requirement in your area with your own counsel. This is not legal advice.
- What will it cost per minute?
- No published figure. It depends on your voice provider, your model class and your call length, and a storm week's mix looks nothing like a quiet February. The components are a platform fee, the model, speech to text, text to speech and telephony, and our calculator page publishes the formula.
- Is it legal to record the calls?
- That varies by jurisdiction, and some places require consent from everyone on the call rather than just one party. A consent line at the start is part of the design for that reason. What applies to you depends on where you and your callers are located, so take it to your own counsel. This is not legal advice.
- Can it transfer to me?
- Transfer is the core of the design rather than a feature on the side. The triggers are literal: water inside the house, any deductible or carrier question, a commercial building, or a caller asking for a human. When one fires the agent stops and connects. During a storm surge, when every phone is busy, the fallback is a message and a task rather than a dropped call.
Get the claim pipeline running before the next storm
Inspection stages, adjuster tracking and quote cadences work today. The voice half will feed them.