Water is coming through the ceiling and you are under a sink
The one call you can't afford to miss arrives while both your hands are wet. GreetKeeper answers it, finds out whether the stop tap is off, and puts the job on your board.
Caller
“There's water coming through the kitchen ceiling from the bathroom above. I don't know where the stopcock is.”
What happened next
- Read out the stopcock locations for a 1970s semi, caller confirmed water off
- Booked Saturday 10:30am, escalation rate quoted at the door
- Sent Mike the ZIP code and a note that the ceiling is already down
Every hour of delay is another foot of damaged ceiling
Leaks don't queue politely. A caller watching water spread across a plasterboard ceiling gives you about thirty seconds before they try somebody else.
Your day is spent in crawl spaces, under sinks and inside boilers. You can't answer while soldering, and by the time you've wiped your hands and played the voicemail, your caller has booked a competitor who picked up on ring two.
The worst part is that your emergency call is the one that pays. A blocked trap is thirty minutes of work, and a burst feed in a ceiling void is a half-day plus an insurance job. Those arrive at eight on a Saturday morning while your phone sits in the van.
GreetKeeper answers and does the first useful thing before you ever hear about it: it asks whether the supply is isolated, and tells your caller where to look if they don't know.
The first question is always about the stop tap
Damage stops when the water stops. You write what it says, and this is the shape most plumbers pick.
Get the water off
It asks whether the supply is isolated, then reads your own guidance on where a stopcock usually hides: under the kitchen sink, in the airing cupboard, or at the boundary. That instruction is yours, word for word.
Find out what kind of water
Clean feed, waste, or heating. A soil stack backing up needs a different van load and a different arrival time from a pinhole on a copper feed, and you want to know which before you drive.
Say the callout charge out loud
Your weekend rate and your minimum charge, stated as fixed numbers. Nobody argues about a figure they agreed to on the phone, and your transcript proves they heard it.
Book or escalate
Same-day slots for anything still leaking. Everything else goes into your next open window, and a caller wanting a bathroom refit quote gets taken as a message with the details on it.
Where the job actually lands
You're probably running a mix of a paper calendar, a shared calendar and job software. Only two of these take a direct write.
| Tool | How it connects | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Google Calendar | Writes directly | Direct write. The slot appears on the shared van calendar immediately. |
| Outlook Calendar | Writes directly | Direct write, identical behavior. |
| Jobber | Through Zapier | Through Zapier, fed by our webhook, so budget for a paid Zapier plan. Client and request fields carry across; the visit is scheduled by you. Needs Jobber's Connect or Grow plan. |
| Housecall Pro | Through Zapier | Through Zapier, as a customer record only. The job itself is created by your office. |
| ServiceTitan | Through Zapier | Through Zapier. The record arrives; a human turns it into a work order. Its Zapier app is a beta that needs tenant registration. |
| SimPRO | Not yet | No verified path. The call is captured and entered by hand. |
One recovered emergency pays for the year
Work out what one Saturday burst-pipe job is worth to you, then look at the annual figure.
| Plan | Monthly | Calls included | After that |
|---|---|---|---|
| StarterFor a single location taking calls one line at a time. | $49 | 200 | $0.45 per call |
| ProfessionalBooking, routing and transfers included, not an add-on. | $149 | 750 | $0.35 per call |
| ScaleFor busy phones and longer opening hours. | $349 | 2,000 | $0.25 per call |
Starter is $49 a month covering 200 answered calls, then 45 cents each. If you're one van forwarding evenings and weekends, you'll almost never leave that band. Three vans and a shop number usually means Professional at $149 for 750 calls, then 35 cents.
Smith.ai charges per call and around $150 for its Pro tier as of September 2026, with real humans behind it, which is genuinely a different product. If you want a person taking your calls, that's the honest comparison rather than this page.
It does not put its hand in the water
Questions from the van
Can it tell someone how to turn the water off?
It reads exactly the guidance you wrote during setup, usually the two or three places a stopcock lives in your local housing stock. It doesn't invent instructions, and it hands over the moment the question goes past what you gave it.
Will it take calls only at weekends?
Yes. Forward your line on Friday evening and take it back Monday, or run it permanently on no-answer after five rings. That rule is yours and you'll change it from your phone.
Does it quote for a bathroom installation?
No. Quotable work goes down as a message with the details, because a refit price depends on things you can't settle on a call. Your emergency callout rates are fixed numbers, so those it will state.
How fast do I find out about an emergency?
A text lands on your phone while the caller is still on the line, with the ZIP code and the fault. Your full transcript follows when the call ends.
Can two people ring at once?
Yes, calls are answered in parallel rather than queued. On a freeze weekend that's the difference between six transcripts and one voicemail.
Trades with the same phone problem
Hear it handle a burst pipe
Your weekend rate, your stopcock script, two minutes.