You're in a truck, not an inbox: Celeste for home services

An HVAC tech on a rooftop is not answering email. Neither is a plumber under a sink or an electrician in a crawlspace. That is the whole staffing problem of a small trades business in one sentence: the person who knows the answers is billing hours with their hands, and the inbox fills up with work that will go to whoever answers first.

Celeste covers the email and website chat side of a trades business. Worth saying plainly: it does not answer your phone, and in this industry the phone is where the 2am burst pipe arrives. What the agent takes off you is everything that did not need to be a call, which is more of the queue than it feels like from inside it.

The questions that lose you jobs by waiting

Do you service my zip code. Roughly what does a water heater replacement run. Do you handle mini-splits. Are you licensed and insured. Can someone come Thursday. Each of these is a customer mid-shopping, and the contractor who responds in five minutes beats the one who responds at 7pm, at dinner, from the truck.

Load your service area, the services you do and do not offer, your license and insurance details, and honest pricing ranges, and the agent answers immediately from what you loaded. Ranges work fine: “most water heater replacements run between X and Y; exact quote after we see it” is a real answer that keeps a shopper engaged without committing you to a number. When a question is not covered, the agent says so, takes contact details, and logs the gap by name so you write that answer once, probably from the truck, probably in two sentences.

Intake that ends in an appointment

“My AC is blowing warm” starts an intake, not a shrug. The agent collects what dispatch needs: address, system type and age if the customer knows it, symptoms, photos, access notes, preferred times. Connect your scheduling system as a tool and the request becomes a booked slot or a drafted one. Writes follow the product’s one rule: you classify each tool action before the agent may execute it. Most shops start with bookings arriving as held drafts approved by one tap, then let routine scheduling run automatic once the drafts have proven clean.

Emergency words never get a bot reply

Put “gas smell,” “sparking,” “flooding,” “carbon monoxide,” “no heat” on the escalation keyword list and a message containing one is barred from an autonomous reply by code that runs after the AI. It is held and flagged with the word that tripped it, and for the true hazards the right reply is written by you, once, as policy: leave the house, call the gas company, call 911. The agent never gets to rate a gas smell as routine, because that judgment was never delegated.

Turned on from the road

The agent practices in shadow mode against your real messages while you skim the drafts between jobs. Service-area and pricing questions graduate first; scheduling when the held drafts look right; anything about warranty disputes or callbacks stays with you. Every topic has its own dial.

The economics are simple to check against your own week. Count the messages that waited past 5pm, and count the ones that never got answered at all. Those were jobs, and they went to whoever answered. An agent that replies in seconds while you are elbow-deep in a condenser is the cheapest employee a trades business can hire.

See how it works or the product. The trial starts silent, so it reads a week of your real inquiries before it ever answers one.