A receptionist for the call you can't take in a roof cavity

A realistic call, the way Giday runs it:

Giday: Giday, you've reached Northside Pest — Verity speaking, on a recorded line. How can I help you?

Caller: We've got termites in the back deck, I think. Can someone come and look?

Giday: Yes — a termite inspection is about an hour and a half. Tomorrow at 10 or Wednesday at 2?

Caller: Tomorrow at ten.

Giday: Tomorrow at 10. Your name, the address and best mobile for a confirmation? And is the deck timber or composite, so the tech knows what to bring?

What happened: An inspection booked, the detail the tech needs on the booking, a text to the customer, a text to the business. No price was invented for a job nobody's looked at yet.

Pest work starts with a look, and the receptionist books the look: an inspection at the length you set, in the suburbs you nominate, with the questions you'd ask written on the booking. Standard jobs with a standard price — a general spray, an annual termite inspection — can be quoted from your list on the Busy plan and up, hedged as an estimate confirmed on site.

A caller who wants to know what's biting them gets a booking, not a diagnosis. The receptionist never identifies a pest or recommends a chemical.

• Overflow. You keep answering; Giday picks up what rings out while you're with a job.
• Before open and after close. Divert at close, divert back at open. The 7:50am rebook is in the calendar before you've unlocked.
• All the time. The one-person business with no front desk.

Bookings land in your calendar through a subscription feed any calendar app reads, and by text. On the Busy plan and up they can go into ServiceM8 too. There's no link into other salon, grooming or job software yet; if you run one, bookings reach you by calendar and by text, not inside it.

Every plan answers 24/7, books into your calendar and takes messages. The difference is minutes and machinery: Starter $49 for a solo pest controller with a handful of calls a day, Steady $99 to read your live calendar and keep transcripts, Busy $199 to quote from your price list and link ServiceM8, Flat Out $399 for custom call flows and the on-call roster. All AUD with GST, month to month, no setup fee. The full table is on the pricing page.

Sixty minutes of call time on us, for a week. Card up front, nothing charged, and the clock doesn't start until your receptionist answers its first call. Setup takes minutes: your business name, what you do, your hours, your services with how long each takes, and your receptionist is live on its own Australian number. Divert is one dial code.