Appliance repair is two calls on one phone line, and the quote starts with the price of turning up
An appliance tech’s evening is tomorrow’s route. After the last kitchen you are ordering the parts the day turned up, matching model numbers to diagrams, chasing the control board that is a week out, writing up the jobs you finished, and fitting the calls that came in while your hands were inside a washer into the streets you will already be on. The call that would have filled the gap at two o’clock is the one you never got back to: the fridge was warm, she rang whoever Google showed first, and she booked whoever answered.
The second call has been coming for a fortnight. The machine is eleven years old, it has been making a noise since spring, and what she actually wants to know is whether this is worth fixing at all or whether she is buying a new one. That question is not a form’s to answer, and pretending otherwise is how this trade gets a bad name. NapkinPrice™ runs it the way the trade actually works: a flat fee for the visit, named on your website before anybody rings, and the repair quoted in a band around it — and anything sealed-system, built-in or commercial goes down a third path that never guesses a number at all.
The form also asks whether she has a photo of the model and serial plate; the lead says so, and you ask for it when you ring back, because the model number decides which part rides out on the van. Carrying the photo itself on the lead is on the roadmap, so it has no tick above.
A missed appliance call is not one lost job. It is a hole in tomorrow’s route.
Letting the phone ring is not rudeness here; it is what the work demands. Your hands are inside a machine that is pulled out into the middle of somebody’s kitchen with its back off, or you are under a counter with a dishwasher half out on its hoses, and you cannot walk away from either of those to take a call. This trade does not lose one big job a week, it loses a call at a time, six or eight days running, and each one was a slot on a route that was going past her street anyway.
| What a missed appliance call is worth | On the demo account |
|---|---|
| A service call: a tech out, the fault found, the repair priced before anything comes apart | $89 – $96 |
| A five-year-old washer that will not drain, down a basement stair | $284 – $409 |
| The same visit with two more machines seen while the van is already outside | $537 – $772 |
| One recovered turnover visit pays for | 2 months of the bundle |
Once texting is switched on, CallMitt™ replies to the call you missed by text, the first text she gets from you names your company, and her answer lands on the thread with the quote she filled in. The message is picked by the hour and the day — the demo shop’s phone runs 8am to 6pm, so the call at twenty past six gets the after-hours version, which says when you actually start and tells her to shut the valve behind the machine rather than pretending somebody is about to pick up. That hour is the one this trade lives on, and it is the one the rules serve best: it is after your day and still inside the window texting is allowed in. Waiting for you at six the next morning:
Tomorrow’s route, call by call
Each missed call you log goes into one list with who rang, the number, the time and what was written back. A Tuesday’s calls read in order, which is how you build the next day’s route, not from a phone of names with no times on them.
Why a reply stayed in the outbox
A reply a rule stopped is saved as blocked, with the reason in plain words: quiet hours where the caller is, an opt-out, a suppressed number. The eleven o’clock warm fridge shows exactly why it heard nothing back.
The warm fridge, on one thread
Her phone number joins the form she filled in about the warm fridge at nine last night to the call she made at ten past six this morning, and the two read as one conversation.
Counts that are customers only
Each send carries where it came from, and the sends you made to yourself while setting up are left out of the dashboard count, so the number you see is people with a broken machine.
Where texting is today, put simply. There is no SMS gateway on our side yet, so nothing we compose reaches a phone today: you log the missed call, and the reply is written, checked against the rules and held in your outbox where you can read it. Everything else is built and running: the five messages, the hours for each day of the week, the weekend, holiday and vacation rules, the quiet hours, the opt-outs, and the thread her reply joins beside the quote. Two rules stay put. Texts go to a caller only from 8am to 9pm where she is, judged by her area code, so the warm fridge at eleven at night is recorded as blocked with the reason, not held over, and nothing re-sends it at eight. And when sending switches on, a reply that has sat for more than an hour is retired, never delivered, because “sorry we missed your call” the day after she bought a new fridge does nothing for anyone. The code that takes a forwarded call and texts the caller back is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks; it is short only of a phone number to answer on, which is paperwork, not programming.
On the example appliance company, put the clock on a late evening and the same rules mark the call blocked — try it on the demo (opens in a new tab) — or open the example account’s own dashboard without signing up, choose CallMitt in the left menu, and read the company’s five messages and its hours.
How CallMitt Works Run Your Own NumbersThe eight things that set an appliance number
Which machine it is
A microwave, a dryer, a washer, a dishwasher, a range or wall oven, an ice maker, a fridge or freezer. The machine she picks brings its own dollars — $0, $20, $35, $40, $55, $60 and $70 on the demo — added once for the visit. A second machine is a separate question below, because a pick-one never multiplies.
What it is doing
The most load-bearing question on the account, because the symptom is what predicts the part and the part is most of the money. A door or gasket, will not start, leaking, will not drain or spin, an error code, a noise, not cooling or not heating — $85 to $185 on the demo, priced once for the job. It is also the question that sorts your morning: anything with a burning smell in it goes to the front of the list.
How old it is
Under three years, three to seven, eight to twelve, over twelve. This is a percentage on the whole job rather than a line item, because age changes everything together — clips snap when you undo them, gaskets have gone hard, and more parts are discontinued and have to come from a rebuilder. Zero, 6, 12 and 18 percent on the demo.
Any other machine on the same trip
The one genuinely per-unit line on this service — your rate for a second machine multiplied by however many she names, $135 each on the demo. On zero this line charges nothing at all: no rate, no flat amount, no percentage. That is the behaviour you want, because zero is the normal answer and a form that charged for a machine she does not have would be lying.
How hard it is to get at
Most of a repair is reaching the back of the machine. Open floor, down a stair, stacked in a closet or under a counter, or built into cabinetry behind a panel-ready front — $0, $45, $75 and $140 on the demo, priced once for the visit, because a stacked pair has to come out and go back in whatever you end up replacing.
What make it is
This is about the parts channel, not the badge. Mainstream parts are on the van or at a counter across town the same day; European and premium built-in parts are ordered, cost more and sometimes take a week. That is why it is a percentage on the whole job rather than a fee — zero, 8, 16 and 28 percent on the demo.
How soon she needs somebody
Urgency is something the customer declares, so it is a dropdown with a percentage on it — nothing for the next opening, nothing for tomorrow, 22 percent for today. A same-day slot costs the tech their next two appointments, and that is a percentage of the job rather than a flat call-out fee: a flat is added first and is then multiplied by every percentage and by the travel zone, so the figure you typed stops being the figure she gets.
Travel zone
Zones of ZIPs, whole or by first three digits, each with a flat trip charge, a percentage or both; the ZIP she types is matched to the most specific zone first. Mark the far ZIPs as outside your area and she gets a polite note that it cannot be priced online, while her details still come to you. A job minimum sits under it, so a small repair forty minutes off the route still pays for the drive.
A real repair flow, start to finish
Eight questions, the kind she can answer standing in front of the machine. They run in this order on our appliance repair demo account, and the total at the bottom is what the live engine returns for these answers, not a figure written into the page.
| # | What she is asked | What she picks | What it does to the price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Which appliance is it? | Washer | The option carries the money: $35, once for the job |
| 2 | What is it doing? | Will not drain, or will not spin | $135 — the symptom is what predicts the part |
| 3 | How old is it? | 3 to 7 years | A percent on the whole job: +6% |
| 4 | Any OTHER appliance you want repaired while we are there? | None | Nothing at all. A zero fires no rule — not the $135 per extra machine, not a flat, not a percent |
| 5 | Where is it, and how hard is it to get at? | Down a stair — basement or second floor | $45, once for the visit however long it takes |
| 6 | What make is it? | Samsung or LG | A percent on the whole job: +8% |
| 7 | How soon do you need us? | Next opening, usually within two business days | Nothing. Today is the answer that carries a percentage |
| 8 | Got a photo of the model and serial plate? | Offered | Nothing. A photo never moves the price |
| The arithmetic, in the order the engine runs it | The $89 service call is the base rather than an extra, so $89 + $35 + $135 + $45 = $304, then the two percentage answers pool and apply once to all of it: +14% → $346.56 | ||
| She sees | $284 – $409 | ||
| What lands in your inbox, the second she submits | Name, mobile, ZIP, all eight answers, and the photo flag | ||
The symptom prices, the access charges and the percentages above are the demo account’s, not a Tailgate Office™ price list. Every one is yours to set in the dashboard, and when a control board goes up in price you change it there, not on your website. The total is the engine’s own: $284 to $409 for those eight answers, which the demo gives back in about a minute.
Rather try it yourself? Our example appliance repair company’s website runs NapkinPrice, the same engine pricing live on a site that is not ours. Enter those eight answers and the same band comes back.
Try the live demo site (opens in a new tab)Three services, and only two of them ever show a price
A washer that will not drain, a second opinion before she buys a new fridge, and a sealed-system fault on a panel-ready column are three different conversations. Running them through one form is how you end up quoting a compressor like a door switch.
Repair visit, diagnosed and fixed on the same trip — quotes instantly
The $89 service call is the base of this number rather than an extra at the door, so it is inside every figure the form prints and it is charged once however many machines you open. Underneath it is a job minimum of $149 on the demo, and the low end of the band pins to that floor rather than sitting 18% below the midpoint: a microwave door latch works out at a $174 midpoint and comes back $149 to $205, flattened at the bottom by the floor instead of sliding under it. Past $720 on the demo it stops pricing and sends you the lead, because at that number the real conversation is whether to repair the machine at all. The ceiling is tested on the midpoint before the band is drawn, so a job that clears it can still print a top end above it — a turnover visit with three machines on it has a midpoint under $720 and still publishes $537 to $772.
Service call, the fault found and the repair priced — quotes instantly
This is the honest answer to a trade whose average job is not worth a five-minute form. The fee is a real number, not a range — $89 on the demo, and it buys the van, the tech and the meter. Decline the repair at the door and $89 is all you pay; go ahead on the same visit and it comes off. Because the fee lives in the service base fee it is added once however many machines he looks at, so a second opinion on the dryer while he is standing in front of the washer comes back $123 to $145, not another $89. There is a ceiling here too, at $400, past which it is a property survey booked with the office.
Sealed-system, built-in and commercial — site visit, never priced
Site-visit mode captures the whole spec and shows no number at all, which is the right answer for refrigeration work that needs recovery and a certificate, a panel-ready column that has to come out of its cabinetry and go back square, or a restaurant that loses service while you are in it. The service still asks the unit type, how many are on site, whether something is down right now and whether you can work on it in normal hours — that last one moves no money, it just tells you whether this is a 6am job. She is told plainly that this one is seen before it is priced; you get the unit, the count and whether it is down, which is what you need to plan the visit.
A priced service cannot go live without a real base fee or a real minimum, by design. Without either it could quote a homeowner $0, and one bad number on your website costs more than a day of setup.
A tech you can send out alone is the whole ceiling on this business
The screening, not a licence check, is where you find out whether he meters a component or swaps parts until something works, and you want to know that before the third house rather than after it. On this account sealed-system work routes to a site visit instead of being quoted, so the demo job asks about metering rather than about certificates.
Put “Now hiring — text CREW to your texting number” on the van and the parts counter. CrewFunnel™ asks seven short questions: is he 18 or older, is he up for six to eight houses a day in other people’s kitchens pulling machines out and putting them back, has he metered a component against the wiring diagram to find a fault rather than swapping parts until it works, how many years has he repaired appliances, how far out does he live, can he start inside two weeks, and what was the last job he worked on. Three answers end it (under 18, not up for the shape of the day, or living past your distance), and the rest come back as a weighted fit score, with the metering question scored rather than knocked out because a good parts-changer is trainable and an unwilling one is not.
Two choices on the demo job are worth copying. Distance knocks out and never weighs, because a number answer scores higher the bigger it is, so weighted miles would rank the tech furthest from your route first. The last-job box carries no weight, since any answer at all scores full marks and weighting it would lift everyone who wrote a word. Every question on the demo job has a Spanish translation too.
Until your texting number is live, a tech answers the seven questions on your screening page rather than by text, with the same knockouts, scoring and pool. The keyword on the van begins working when your carrier registration clears.
See how CrewFunnel works
A dryer that runs again gets its review the same afternoon, or never
The dryer is running again by mid-afternoon, the van is already on its way to the next kitchen, and she is standing in the laundry room with a load tumbling that has sat wet since Tuesday. That is the hour she would write you a review: the machine works, the tech was in and out in under an hour, and the relief has not worn off yet. By the time that load is folded she is on to dinner, and by Thursday the dryer is just the dryer again. The outfit with sixty reviews is not sixty times better than you; somebody there asks every customer, before the next load is folded.
HurraBell™ does the asking. Once review requests are switched on, you mark the job done — from the inbox, from your phone, or from your job software through Zapier — and the customer gets one request in your words, with your own Google review link, after a delay you pick: an hour, unless you change it. Three days later, one email reminder, unless the link has been opened or the customer has since texted you, messaged you from your website or had a call logged on her thread.
Review requests aren’t switched on for new accounts yet. When they are, the request goes by email once your Google review link is saved on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page. A text goes as well where the customer ticked the box on your quote form or visit booking agreeing to a review-request text, and only once your carrier registration clears, the same wait as every text on this site; until then it is email only.
See how HurraBell worksOne recovered turnover visit covers 2 months
And in a trade that loses a call at a time rather than a job at a time, three recovered service calls in a month cover the month they happened in. This is not a close arithmetic.
The Tailgate Office Bundle
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Appliance repair questions we get asked
No. They keep ringing the number they have; it rings your phone as it does now, and nothing is ported. What is added is a texting number in your name, a local number in your area code registered to your business. The design is that you dial one forwarding code from the setup guide, and a call that goes about twenty seconds without an answer moves on to that number, where a short greeting in place of your voicemail tells her a text is coming. She rings one number and hears back from another, so the first text she gets from you names the company. A call you or the office pick up never forwards, and an answering service can still have the hours you give it, because an unanswered call goes to one place at a time and a second code turns the forwarding off. Until your texting number is live, you log the missed call and CallMitt picks the message for the hour and day, checks your hours, the quiet hours, your opt-outs and your suppression list, and keeps the reply in your outbox to read. The code that will catch a forwarded call by itself is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks, and waits on a phone number.
Until texting is switched on for your account nothing is sent at any hour, and the rule for those two is the same either way: both are recorded as blocked, with the reason, and go no further. A text reaches a caller only between 8am and 9pm where she is, judged by her area code, and nothing on our side bends that, so neither the eleven o’clock reply nor the seven o’clock one is ever queued. Neither is tried again at eight; a blocked reply stays blocked on purpose. And a reply that did queue but sat over an hour is retired, not delivered, because "sorry we missed your call" the next afternoon is worse than nothing. The hour this trade actually lives on is the one between those two — she gets home at half six to a warm fridge, which is after your day and inside the window texting is allowed in, so that one is composed rather than blocked. For the eleven o’clock and the seven o’clock, what you have at six in the morning is the list: who rang, at what time, and why nothing went out, so you ring them back before they have finished ringing round.
It stops there and the lead comes to you. Every instant service carries a ceiling, and on the demo the repair service is set at $720 — a twelve-year-old built-in Sub-Zero that is not cooling, wanted today, goes straight past it and she gets a plain "this one is bigger than we can price online" note and your disclaimer instead of a number. That is the right place to stop in this trade: past that figure the honest conversation is whether to repair the machine at all, and no form should be having it. The engine tests the ceiling on the midpoint before any band is drawn, so it is a judgment on the job and not on the top of a range. Put yours where you would stop quoting a repair over the phone.
Because the form is not selling the repair, it is selling the visit — and the visit has a real price. On the demo the service call is $89: a tech out, the fault found, the repair priced before anything comes apart, and the fee comes off if she goes ahead on the same trip. That is a number she can act on at nine at night, which is more than the shop she rang before you gave her. Two things about it are worth setting up properly. It lives in the service base fee, so it is charged once however many machines he looks at — a second opinion on the dryer while he is in front of the washer comes back $123 to $145, not another $89 — and because it is the base of every repair figure too, the fee is inside the number rather than sprung at the door. The repair service then prices the machine she actually rang about, which is the conversation you want to be having second, not first.
Yes, and the demo does. Its service call disclaimer says that if she goes ahead on the same visit the fee comes off the repair, and that if she decides the machine is not worth it, she pays the fee and nothing else. The disclaimer under each service’s number is yours to write, so say exactly what your shop does, in your own words, and she reads it before she submits.
Not by itself, but it gets you most of the way. The lead carries every answer as she gave it: the machine, what it is doing, its age and make, how hard it is to get at, and whether she has a photo of the model and serial plate, which you ask her for when you ring back. The symptom is the question that predicts the part, which is why its options carry the largest flat amounts on the demo, $85 to $185.
Only as a range — and how wide that range is should be an argument rather than a habit. On the demo the repair service is set to plus or minus 18%, which is the widest band any of our demo accounts publishes, and it is set there on purpose. Take the washer in the table above: the two things that cause a five-year-old front-loader not to drain are, on the demo’s price list, a drain pump at about $95 and a main control board at about $220, and nobody knows which until the back is off. At the 10% most of the other demos run, the band would be $312 to $381 and the control board — the likelier of the two on a machine that age — would fall outside a number you had already published. At 30% it would be $243 to $451, which tells her nothing. Fitted to the two real outcomes it is $284 to $409, and the disclaimer under it says the price is confirmed before anything comes apart. The service call is the opposite case and runs at 8%, because sending a van is a known cost. The two numbers disagree because the two jobs disagree.
More than most, and this trade is the clearest case for it. The call that matters most here lands just after you finish — she has walked in the door, the fridge is warm and the food is on the clock — and that is exactly the hour a message picked by the hour and the day can tell the truth in: the after-hours version says when you actually start, tells her to shut the valve behind a leaking machine or keep the fridge door shut, and asks what the machine is and what it is doing, so tomorrow’s route is built before you open the laptop. Somebody who cannot tell when you open assumes you will not; somebody who gets a straight reply at half past six usually waits until eight.
On your side, about fifteen minutes for your five text-back messages and the hours you keep each day, a minute, once review requests are switched on for your account, to paste your Google review link on the HurraBell page and your mailing address on the Account page, and about an hour for the eight repair questions with your symptom prices, access charges, make percentages and travel zones. A priced service will not go live without a real base fee or a real minimum, on purpose. Two things are not on your side, and they are separate switches. Text messages do not leave our building yet, because there is no SMS gateway on our side — that is the carrier and paperwork half, and it is the half we are working on. And nothing notices a missed call for you yet either: the code that answers a forwarded call and runs the whole pipeline is written, deployed and tested over signed webhooks, and what it is waiting on is a purchased number to answer on. Those two land independently. There is no onboarding call, no setup fee and no contract, and $199 a month covers all four tools.
Also cover commercial kitchens, or run warranty work for a manufacturer? The trade pages list the rest, the compliance page sets out how texting callers works, and you can ask us what is not here.
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