AI answering service for HVAC companies

The first ninety seconds of a no-heat call

Before anything else, handlo establishes whether anyone in the house is vulnerable to the cold. An elderly resident or a newborn changes where the ticket sits in the queue, and nothing else on the call outranks it. Address, system type and what the thermostat is showing come next.

Then it asks the two questions your tech would ask on arrival anyway: when it last ran properly, and whether anything was serviced recently. Those answers travel with the job, so the van leaves loaded for an ignition fault instead of turning around for a part.

What HVAC owners raise before they try it

• “Half my calls are existing maintenance-plan members.” It asks whether the caller is on a plan and captures the name the agreement is under, so members are visible in the queue rather than buried among new work.
• “Only my techs can triage.” It does not triage a system. It records symptoms and applies the rule you wrote for what counts as an emergency, and where your rule is silent it escalates rather than deciding.
• “In a cold snap I get sixty calls in an hour.” Concurrency is the part software is genuinely better at. All sixty are answered simultaneously and arrive written down, ordered by the urgency flag you defined.
• “I do not want to lose the relationship with regulars.” Regulars get answered instead of getting voicemail, and their history rides along in the summary. The callback is still yours to make.

Deliberate limits

• No remote diagnosis. It will not tell a caller the heat exchanger is cracked, and it will not talk anyone through relighting a pilot.
• No equipment pricing. It captures home size, current equipment and timeline so you can quote — it does not quote for you.
• No refrigerant, permit or code questions. Those are flagged and go to a person.

Where it sits in your existing setup

Most HVAC shops already have a dispatch board and an on-call rotation. handlo feeds them rather than replacing them.

• Route the main line to it full-time, or only outside business hours and when every line is busy.
• Urgent jobs page the on-call tech within seconds; routine ones queue as written leads for the morning.
• Connect a calendar and seasonal tune-ups book themselves into open service windows.