The 7pm Call — Agents for Your Business
It is 7:10 on a Tuesday. You are kneeling at a customer's equipment pad with a wrench in one hand, and the phone in the truck is ringing. You call back at nine and get voicemail. By Thursday that caller has booked whoever picked up.
The same six questions
Most of what rings in is not hard.
- Do you cover my area.
- What does a basic visit run.
- How soon can you get out here.
- Do you handle warranty work.
- Are you licensed.
- Can I get a quote.
You answer that list every day, and none of it is the part of the job you are actually good at. The skill is what happens after the appointment lands on the calendar.
An agent is where you put the list. You write the answers once, in your own words, and you upload the documents you already have: the service-area map, the price sheet, the warranty terms. It answers from what you selected.
Five you can ask right now
Listed on the NetShow marketplace today: Prestige Pool Services, doing pool service, repair, remodeling and construction across Mission Viejo and South Orange County. Rose's Sugar Shack Cafe, family-owned in San Clemente, breakfast and lunch since 1987. SunRay Solar Pool Pumps, hybrid AC/DC solar pool pumps engineered in Dana Point. West Coast Inspection Services, Orange County home inspection, inspected by a 25-year licensed builder. Matala USA in Laguna Hills, pond filtration, aeration and water care.
Every one of them is free to try. Open the web agents tab and ask one of them something a real customer of yours would ask. The Prestige Pool Services use door will hold a trial conversation with you before you sign up for anything.
What keeps it honest
An agent that takes customer questions is correctable. That word is carrying weight, so here is what it buys you.
What it knows is what you selected: the documents you put in front of it. You authorize what it draws on, and you can see what that is. When it says something wrong, you fix the document it drew from rather than arguing with a black box.
Access you grant is revocable and the changes you make are reversible. And the agent's full instruction set stays private, served by reference only: the public profile carries its name, its role and its description, while the instructions you wrote for it are not printed on the page for a competitor to read.
Where it answers, by plan
Channels arrive with the plan, and it is worth being exact.
Web chat is on every plan, including Free at $0 — one agent, 50 conversations a month, five knowledge documents. Starter, $9/mo or $89/yr, adds the share channel. Creator, $29/mo or $289/yr, is where phone and SMS switch on, with 30 voice minutes a month. Professional, $79/mo or $789/yr, adds WhatsApp and email. Business, $149/mo or $1,489/yr, adds embed.
Voice begins at Creator. Free and Starter carry zero voice minutes — an agent on those plans reads and types, it does not talk. The whole ladder, with real checkout, is on the plans page.
One file, two lines
Embed is the version your own website wears, and the embed channel arrives with Business at $149 a month. The kit hands you one package file, a .alive.json, and two lines to paste where you want the agent to appear.
$0/min, $0/sec — the avatar has no meter. The presence layer adds no per-minute cost on top of your plan. You can preflight your package through the real gate before you ship it, at the embed kit.
What it will not do
It does not replace the person who does the work. It will not clean a filter, walk a roof, cook a breakfast, or size a pump for a well nobody has looked at yet. From Creator up it can take the 7pm call — thirty minutes a month of it, enough to learn whether a voice changes the outcome before you buy more; on every plan it answers the six questions in chat, and leaves you a customer who is still warm on Wednesday morning. The visit is still yours. So is the judgment call about what that job really costs.
Start where it is cheapest to be skeptical. Open the marketplace, pick the business closest to your own, and ask its agent the hardest question you get all week.