After-Hours Answering for HVAC Contractors: What to Check Before You Sign
By Right On Call ·
For an HVAC contractor, after-hours answering has to do four things: recognise no-heat and no-cooling as urgent, avoid promising an arrival time, handle Canadian addresses properly, and tell you plainly where call data goes. A note on scope first: we serve Ontario only. If your shop is elsewhere in Canada, use the checklist below with the vendors you are weighing, and skip ours for now.
No heat and no cooling should be urgent, not special
The urgent signals in our setup are an active leak, spoiling food, no heat in cold weather and no cooling in hot weather. An urgent call is offered the soonest slot the calendar really has, and your on-call number is texted with the details.
Urgent does not mean an arrival time. The receptionist cannot promise a technician within the hour. If you set a minimum lead time for a job type, urgency does not shorten it. It books the earliest allowed slot and texts the shop to call the customer if you can get there sooner. Ask every vendor whether it will promise a time it cannot keep.
Gas, smoke and sparks need a bounded script
A gas smell, sparking, smoke or a burning smell stops normal booking. The receptionist tells the caller to stop using the equipment and, if they smell gas and it is safe, to leave and call the gas utility or 911 from outside. It takes a callback number and flags the call for an immediate human callback. It gives no other safety advice and does not diagnose.
Canadian details
Ask whether the service reads the address back and checks it against your service area. Ours does both on the call. Ask also whether it can run in English and French. The agent mirrors the caller, though this website is English only.
Ask about currency and tax. Our prices are in CAD plus HST.
Where the data goes
Telephony, the live voice pipeline, the language model, the call log database and hosting are run by named vendors, several of them US-based. We list them on the security page. We are PIPEDA-aligned. We are not SOC 2 certified, and we do not claim HIPAA or PHIPA compliance. If your procurement needs a certificate, ask for it from any vendor and have your counsel check what it covers.
What it costs
Essential is $199 CAD a month with 200 minutes included, $699 CAD setup, and $0.70 CAD a minute past the included minutes. Managed is $449 CAD a month with $1,299 CAD setup and includes one integration adapter. A build beyond that adapter is quoted separately before we start. A 30-day money-back guarantee runs from go-live.
Winter is when this gets tested. A shop that decides in September has time to run test calls on a private line before the first cold snap. The free missed-call audit works from your own call logs and shows how many after-hours calls you lose today.
Where this applies
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