Builders to decorators, sparkies to landscapers — Rated People moves 75,000+ homeowner jobs a month, from emergency boilers to full extensions. The price of admission stings: £15–60+ per unlocked lead, three traders max per job, all racing. Alert lands mid-guttering, mid-cable-pull, mid-school-run — stop everything to ring, or lose to whoever did. Link the alerts to WhatsApp through Susan and outreach starts inside a minute: scope qualified, photos in, surveys booked — autopilot, while you're still working.
⚡ Key Takeaways
- Three-way race, one winner — usually whoever responds first and well. Susan does it in about 60 seconds, every time. Paid credits stop evaporating into voicemails and unread emails. Unknown numbers go unanswered; WhatsApps get opened ~98% and answered in about 90 seconds. Boiler models, fuse boards, walls, gardens — photographed before you quote or visit. And surveys book from live availability — Google, Outlook, Jobber, Tradify, ServiceM8 — no phone tag.
Ask anyone buying these leads about the pain and it's always the same film: money spent, voicemail menus, call-screening apps, homeowner already hired elsewhere. Three shifts in buyer behaviour drive it. The five-minute decay curve is brutal: instant contact converts eight times a thirty-minute reply, and past two hours four-fifths of the value is gone — competitor hired or homeowner back at work. The unknown-number wall: desks and school runs don't answer strangers (callbacks under 15%), while a polite branded WhatsApp reads in seconds. And the context gap: fifteen phone minutes establishing boiler make, leak position, and room sizes — unpriceable without photos, meaning an unpaid trip to find out.
So every unlock becomes a warm structured chat within the minute. The machinery: alert fires with name, number, postcode, job summary. Take "bathroom refit, Reading" — Susan messages inside the minute, under your business name, asks for suite photos, timeline, and whether materials wait on site. "Three photos attached — bath to walk-in shower, retiling walls, no materials yet, advice welcome" comes back in minutes. Receipt confirmed, photos logged, live diary checked, two survey windows offered. Zero touches from you.
Live in under ten minutes, no code:
Phone-and-voicemail versus in-app chat versus chat-run: replies took one to four hours missed mid-work, or thirty to ninety minutes after app login — now under a minute. Channel was unanswered calls and email, or low-open in-app messages — now native WhatsApp at ~98% opened. Qualification was unstructured phone interviews, or plain in-app text — now conversational triage that adapts. Photos were chased by email, or cramped in-app uploads — now direct in-chat images and documents. Booking was phone tag, or manual diary lookup — now live two-way sync. Payment was invoice-after-visit, or nothing in chat — now one-tap Stripe and Square links. Nights meant voicemail and lost jobs, or a dead app after hours — now fully active intake. Lead-to-survey ran ~18–25% by phone, ~25–32% in-app — now ~65–80% in conversation.
Past first contact it keeps working the thread. Emergency diagnostics and detailed surveys get deposit links before dispatch — no unpaid diaries. Everything — details, photos, descriptions, visits — syncs onward: Jobber, Tradify, ServiceM8, Xero, QuickBooks. And it speaks each trade — plumbing, electrical, cleaning, accounting, repairs, general building — tone and questions adjusted per vertical.
Related: TrustATrader, Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Bark — plumbers, electricians, cleaners, repair shops. Also worth a look: Checkatrade, Stripe links.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Compliant — with Rated People and with privacy law?
Yes. Homeowner posted publicly, lead bought legitimately, number shared for quotes. Prompt WhatsApp serves exactly that — GDPR-clean on explicit consent.
Nights and weekends?
Covered. Phone off, Sunday roast on the table — enquiries answered in seconds, details and photos banked, surveys slotted into working days.
Too far, too small?
Filtered free. Postcodes and minimums configured once; misses get a graceful no, zero minutes spent.
Our stack — diary, job software, accounts?
Calendar, Outlook, Jobber, Tradify, ServiceM8 — bookings, notes, locations, photos synced live, together.