For locksmiths
Locked out is the shortest fuse in any trade.
They are standing on their own doorstep in the cold. You have about ninety seconds before they call the next number.
- Price
- $50 a month, no contract.
- Your number
- Stays exactly as it is.
- Setup
- Two minutes. We do it.
- Reply time
- Seconds, not this evening.
01 The moment
Why locksmiths miss calls
Not because you are careless with the phone. Because of where your hands are.
You are on your knees at a shopfront rekeying a mortice with the barrel out. Stopping means leaving a door unsecured on a main street. The phone rings and you cannot take it, and the person ringing is standing outside their house at 7pm with a kid in the car.
02 What they get
The text that goes out
Within seconds of the call dropping, in your words, with your name on it.
Your business
It’s Tom from Southside Locksmiths — I’m on a job and can’t pick up. If you’re locked out right now, text me your address and I’ll ring you straight back. Otherwise tell me what you need and I’ll come back shortly.
The caller, a minute later
Locked out of the house, keys inside. 14 Marsden St, Wembley. Standing out front now.
That reply is the job written down. You ring back knowing what it is, where it is and whether it is worth stopping for.
03 What changes
What it changes for locksmiths
- 01
The reply lands before they dial the next number
The text goes out within seconds of the call dropping. In a trade decided in the first two minutes, that is the entire difference between getting the job and never knowing it existed.
- 02
Lockouts flag themselves
A lockout and a quote to rekey an office are worth very different amounts of urgency. The message asks them outright, so the emergency rises to the top of your callbacks automatically.
- 03
You get the address first
For a lockout the only question that matters is where. Having the address in the first reply means your callback is “I’m fifteen minutes away”, which usually ends the search right there.
04 Questions
What locksmiths ask
The questions that come up on the phone, answered the way we'd answer them there.
If they’re locked out, do they even read a text?
They are holding the phone they just rang you on. A text that arrives while they are still deciding who to call next is one of the few messages anyone reads instantly.
Most of my calls are after hours.
Then set an after-hours message with your call-out terms in it. It answers the price question that most late-night callers open with, and it does it while you are asleep or on another job.
I also do commercial and master key systems.
Those callers are the least urgent and the most valuable, and they are the ones most likely to be lost in a pile of lockout calls. A written enquiry keeps them separate instead of buried in your call log.
Can it tell them my call-out fee?
It can say whatever you want it to. Putting the call-out in the message filters the shoppers before you ring, which in this trade saves a lot of pointless callbacks.
See what you’re missing before you pay anything.
The audit counts the calls to your business that went unanswered last month, from your own records. It costs nothing and nothing changes on your line.
05 Read next
Related
- Trade Mobile mechanics Your callers are usually stuck. Stuck people ring the next number within about a minute.
- Trade Electricians Electrical work is the one trade where stopping to take a call is genuinely unsafe. So you don’t. And the call goes somewhere else.
- Trade Pest control Pest calls are driven by something the caller wants gone today. That urgency is the whole reason they will not sit on your voicemail.
- Explainer How missed-call text-back works The mechanism, plainly, including what it does not do.