- Electricians, plumbers, builders and other trades
- Allied health: physio, chiro, osteo, podiatry
- Salons, spas and beauty clinics
- Veterinary practices
- Any service business losing leads to voicemail after hours
AI Front Desk is an after-hours and overflow receptionist for Australian service businesses. It answers customer enquiries on your website, SMS and email, books appointments straight into your existing calendar, sends reminders, and escalates anything tricky to a human. $1,500 AUD to set up, $199 AUD/month to run, live in 7–10 working days.
The problem we’re solving
If you run a trade, a clinic, a salon, or a vet, here’s what your week looks like.
Tuesday at 7:43pm. Someone Googles “emergency plumber Brunswick”, lands on your site, and has a leaking pipe under the kitchen sink. You’re on the couch. They call. They get voicemail. They hit back, click the next result, and that plumber gets the job.
Wednesday at 6:15am. Someone tries to book a physio appointment because they tweaked their back overnight. Your phones don’t pick up until 8:30am. By 7:30am they’ve booked with the practice across the road who answered an automated chat.
Every Australian service business above ~$300k revenue is leaking 20–40% of after-hours enquiries to whoever picks up first. The maths is brutal: if you spend $2k a month on Google Ads to drive enquiries, and 30% of them arrive after hours, you’re paying full price for leads that never land.
AI Front Desk fixes that without you hiring a graveyard-shift receptionist.
What it does
The agent lives in three places: your website (a small chat embed), your SMS (replies to your business number after hours), and your email (drafts polite responses to enquiry-form submissions). It uses one Claude-powered brain across all three so the experience is consistent.
It can:
- Answer service questions accurately, your service list, your hours, your suburbs, your standard call-out or appointment costs.
- Book appointments, straight into Cal.com, Calendly, NOOKAL, Cliniko, ServiceM8, or whatever calendar you already use.
- Send confirmations + reminders, SMS or email, 24h and 2h before appointment.
- Run automated no-show follow-up, “Sorry we missed you. Want to rebook?”, with a one-click rebook link.
- Escalate when unsure, captures the customer’s contact, what they need, and pings a human via your chosen channel.
What it can’t and won’t do: take payment, discuss specific medical advice, impersonate a human, or invent a service you don’t offer.
What’s in the $199 AUD/month
The same shape as our other productised services, you pay for hosting, API costs, monitoring and tweaks:
- API costs, Claude conversations. A typical small trade running this through after-hours hits us for about $25 in API spend a month; a high-volume clinic might hit $50. We absorb that.
- Hosting, orchestration server, uptime monitoring, SMS gateway.
- Knowledge base updates, your service list changes, your prices update, your hours shift for school holidays. Bundled.
- Conversation log review + tuning, every two weeks we glance at the logs and tune anything that’s not landing right. You can see them too.
Build week walkthrough
| Day | What we do |
|---|---|
| 1 | Kick-off call. We capture your services, hours, suburbs, FAQs. Calendar access. |
| 2–3 | Knowledge base build. First version of the agent talks to us, not your customers. |
| 4 | You stress-test it. Throw weird customer questions at it. We tune. |
| 5–6 | Embed on a hidden URL or staging site. Friends-and-family test. |
| 7 | Goes live. SMS + email + website. |
| Week 2–4 | We review logs every 3 days. Tune for false escalations + missed-intent issues. |
What good escalation looks like
The trickiest part of any AI front-desk product is knowing when to stop and hand over. We built escalation around five hard triggers:
- The customer says they want to speak to a human.
- The customer mentions an emergency, an injury, a flood, a fire, or anything urgent.
- The agent’s confidence in its own answer is below threshold.
- The customer is asking about a service we don’t have data for.
- The conversation has gone more than 6 turns without resolution.
When any of those fire, the agent says something like “Let me get one of the team to follow up, what’s the best number to reach you on?”, captures it, and pings you. No bluffing. No bullshit.
Best for
- Trades doing $300k+ revenue with significant call-volume after 5pm.
- Allied health practices that miss appointments because the phones aren’t staffed at peak booking times (6–8am, 5–7pm).
- Vet clinics fielding “is this an emergency?” questions outside hours.
- Salons + spas where the booking calendar is the bottleneck, not the service capacity.
If you’re a solo operator under $200k revenue with maybe 5 enquiries a week, this is overkill, start with a Quick Start build at $497.
What about hallucination?
This is the #1 thing clients ask. Won’t the AI just make things up?
Two things keep this on rails. First, the system prompt forces the agent to answer only from your business knowledge base, anything outside that triggers an escalation. Second, we deliberately don’t expose the agent to your full website content or every form on the internet; it only sees what we put in front of it. After three months running this for several clients, the false-information rate is well under 1%, and almost always cosmetic (e.g. quoting an old service name we forgot to remove).
Pricing in plain English
- $1,500 AUD setup, one-off, full build, knowledge base, embed, calendar wiring, tuning week.
- $199 AUD/month, ongoing, hosting, API, SMS gateway, monitoring, bundled tweaks. Cancel any time.
GST added at invoicing. No lock-in. First month is included in the setup fee.