Every furnace in town quits the same night.
The first cold snap and the first heat wave are your busiest days, and you spend them in basements and on rooftops. AlloPlace answers in English or French, books the tune-ups and quotes, and sends the no-heat calls to whoever's on call.
The calls you get
HVAC calls follow the weather. A mild week brings maintenance bookings and heat pump questions. The first cold night brings "my furnace won't start" from a good part of your customer list, and the first heat wave does the same for air conditioners. In between come thermostat questions, quotes for a new system and people asking about rebates.
Those are the days the phone goes unanswered. In one study of 70+ million calls to home-services businesses, only about half reached a person.¹
What it does for you
Takes the rush without a busy signal. Several calls at once, so the fifth caller on a freezing night gets an answer too.
Puts no-heat and no-cooling calls through. You decide what's urgent and when. "No heat" in January goes to the on-call tech. "Making a noise" in May gets booked.
Fills the tune-up calendar. Fall furnace checks and spring AC checks have a fixed length, so they're easy to book from your Google Calendar, with a reminder text if the caller wants one.
Answers heat pump questions from your notes. Brands, ductless, how quotes work. If you haven't written anything about rebates, it says it doesn't know and takes a message.
A typical call
It's a hot afternoon in July in Gatineau. A caller says her mother's air conditioner stopped and the apartment is getting very warm. Your greeting is in English, she answers in French, and AlloPlace switches to French. Your rules say a no-cooling call with an older person in the home goes straight through, so it tells her it's transferring and puts her through to your on-call tech. The summary is on the tech's phone as they pick up.
TBD: replace with a real call once a customer agrees.
Rules you might write
- "From November to March, if someone says no heat, transfer to the on-call number."
- "During a heat wave, if there's an older person or a baby in the home and the AC is out, transfer right away."
- "If a carbon monoxide alarm is going off or someone smells gas, tell them to get out and call 911."
- "New system quotes are free and done in person. Book them on weekdays."
Good to know
- Calendar or software: books into Google Calendar only. If you dispatch from ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro or Jobber, there's no direct connection yet. Talk to us first.
- Maintenance plans: it can't see who's on a plan in your other software. Write a rule for how to treat callers who say they're on one.
- French: it speaks French and English and switches when the caller does. More on that
What it costs
Starter is US$30 a month for 150 minutes. Cold snaps are when you'll use extra minutes, at US$0.20 each on Starter, so set a spending cap if you want a ceiling. Full pricing
¹ Invoca, 2026 study of 70+ million calls to home-services businesses. Vendor data.