Missed Call Text Back for Tradies

Missed call text back is an automation that watches your business number and fires an SMS to any caller you don’t pick up. The moment a call ends unanswered — engaged, rung out, or diverted to voicemail — the caller’s mobile number triggers a text introducing your business and asking what they need. It’s not voicemail and it’s not a chatbot on your website. It’s a reply on the channel the customer is already holding in their hand, sent within seconds rather than whenever you next climb down off the roof. The point is simple: turn a dead-end missed call into an open conversation before the caller moves on to the next tradie in the search results.

Yes — you keep your number and your customers keep dialling it. Text back is driven by conditional call forwarding, which every Australian mobile network supports on the same GSM codes. Divert on no-answer is **61*number#, divert on busy is **67*number#, and divert everything is **21*number# — the same on Telstra, Optus and Vodafone, and reversible with ##61#, ##67# and ##21#. Calls you answer never touch the system. Calls you don’t, roll through to us and trigger the text. If you run a landline or a 1300 number, your provider’s overflow or diversion settings do the same job. Setup takes about two minutes from your phone keypad.

Within seconds of the call ending — that immediacy is the whole product. The window that matters is the first minute or two, while the customer is still looking at your name on their screen and deciding whether to scroll down to the next result. A text that lands two minutes later reaches someone who has already dialled your competitor; a text that lands before they’ve put the phone down reaches someone who’s still choosing. You can set the message differently for business hours, after hours, weekends and public holidays, so the 9pm caller gets a text that sets a realistic expectation rather than promising a callback in five minutes.

Yes — the first text is the opener, not the whole conversation. When the customer replies, the AI keeps texting: what needs doing, the site address, whether it’s urgent, and when suits for access. It asks for photos, which is where SMS beats a phone call outright — a picture of the meter box, the leaking valve or the fence line tells you more than five minutes of description. Photos come through as MMS or via an upload link, and everything lands as a job in ServiceM8, Tradify, Fergus, simPRO or AroFlo with the thread and images attached. You read a complete job at smoko instead of playing phone tag all afternoon.

Text back catches the callers you miss and moves them to SMS. Full AI call answering picks up the phone and talks to them. Text back is the lighter option — the caller does still hit voicemail first, and anyone who won’t text (older customers, hands-full callers, property managers) can slip through. Full answering handles the whole call live, triages a burst pipe from a dripping tap, and books the job into your calendar without you touching anything. Most tradies want both: the AI answers what it can and text back covers the overflow, the engaged signal and the calls that come in while you’re already on another one. Our plans include both.

They reply far more often than they leave voicemails, and for an obvious reason — they rang you because they want something fixed, so a text asking what they need is a welcome answer rather than an interruption. Three things lift replies: send it fast, name your business in the first few words so it doesn’t read as spam, and ask one specific question instead of a vague “how can we help?”. Under the Spam Act 2003 a commercial electronic message needs consent, clear sender identification and a working opt-out; someone who has just rung your business number is a textbook case of inferred consent, but if you later market to that number, check the current ACMA guidance on what that consent covers.