How to stop customers calling to ask where you are

You are under a sink with both hands full and the phone goes. It is the two o'clock customer asking whether you are still coming. You wipe your hands, dig the phone out, say yes, and go back to work. Ten minutes later it goes again and it is the four o'clock.

Most contractors treat this as an annoying fact of the job. It is worth being precise about what it costs, because the fix is small and the cost is not.

What the calls actually cost

The call itself is ninety seconds. The interruption is not. You have to stop, clean up, find the phone, answer, remember where you were, and start again. Do that four times in a day and the day is meaningfully shorter, which pushes you later, which produces more calls the next day.

Then there is the version where you do not answer because you are on a roof. Now the customer has called and been ignored. They were mildly curious a moment ago and are now genuinely annoyed, and it took no action from you at all.

Why they call

Almost nobody calls to check up on you. They call because they need to make a decision and you are the missing input.

• Can I run to the shop or will I miss you?
• Do I need to be back before school pickup?
• Should I keep the dog inside?
• Is this still happening at all, because I took the afternoon off for it?

Every one of those is answered by a time. Give them the time and the call never gets made.

The one minute version of the fix

You do not need software to cut most of these. You need two texts.

The confirmation kills the "is this still happening" call. The departure text kills the "how long" call. What is left is a small number of people who would have called regardless, and those are usually worth talking to anyway.

What breaks this

Doing it by hand works until the day it matters most. The days you forget to send anything are your worst days, when the schedule has already fallen apart, which is precisely when your customers most need to hear from you. The habit fails under exactly the conditions it exists for.

That is the argument for automating it rather than the argument that texting is hard. Anything that only works on calm days is not really a system.

What not to automate

Cancellations and reschedules should still come from you. A person moving their day around deserves better than a template, and it is the one message where the human voice earns its keep. Automate the routine updates. Keep the difficult conversations.