Pick how much of your phone you want covered, we set it up with you in under an hour, and your line starts getting answered like your best CSR is on it. Below is every step in order — including what happens second by second on a real call, and the complete list of what you get.
This is your first and biggest choice, and it isn't permanent — it's a setting. Three shapes, and you can move between them any time.
Every call goes to SERVALO first — daytime, dinnertime, 2am, Sunday of a heat wave. Nothing rings in your office unless the caller asks for a person or the call needs one. Most shops start here, because the calls you can least afford to lose are the ones nobody is sitting at a desk for.
Best for: shops without a dedicated full-time CSR, or any shop tired of the after-hours answering service that just takes a message.
During your business hours the call rings your office exactly like it does today. Outside them, SERVALO answers. And if a daytime call rings out — busy, nobody picks up, phone system hiccup — that same live call is handed to SERVALO instead of dying, without the caller redialing.
Best for: shops with a CSR they like. Your hours and your daytime line are two fields in Settings; the handoff on a rung-out call is automatic.
Your phones ring first, exactly as they do now, and only the calls nobody answers roll to SERVALO. This one is set up at your phone carrier, not in our software — so on the setup call we detect your carrier and hand you the exact busy/no-answer forwarding codes to dial. If we can’t identify your carrier we give you honest generic steps rather than a guessed code.
Honest caveat: we usually talk shops out of this one. Mode 2 gives you the same team-first behavior, and every call still lands in your dashboard — under Mode 3 the calls your team answers are invisible to us, so your reporting has a hole in it.
Seven steps to live. You are responsible for three of them, and two of those take minutes. There is no self-serve signup here on purpose — a receptionist that answers your phone wrong is worse than no receptionist, so we configure and test it with you.
Pick a real time off a real calendar. You get a confirmed invite with a video link immediately — no “someone will reach out.”
We send one link: your services, hours, service area, techs, pricing, plans, the stuff you don’t do. Save and come back — it holds your place. It’s the difference between a setup call that configures your shop and one that interviews you.
A local number in your area code, on its own isolated phone account for your business alone. We register your business name for caller ID and wire the failure path — if anything on our end ever hiccups, the call still goes somewhere real instead of dropping.
Your hours, techs and their certifications, service area, service-call fee, maintenance plan tiers, warranty rules, what you decline, and your SOPs and FAQs — turned into the playbook the agent answers from. Most shops are configured in under an hour.
Appointment confirmations and review requests are texts, and US carriers require a registered business to send them. We drive that filing. You give us the business details once; the carrier’s verdict is the carrier’s — nobody at our end can type in an approval.
Live test calls before a single customer hears it: a normal booking end to end, a call for something you don’t service, an after-hours call, a “let me talk to a person” call — and the gas-smell safety drill, so you watch the emergency script and your team alert fire with your own ears. We do not skip that one.
Going live is you flipping the forward on — deliberately your action, not ours, because it means leaving is you flipping it off. Your published number never stops being yours. And we don’t take your word for it: the green “verified” badge in your dashboard only lights up when a real forwarded call actually arrives.
After you're live, your dashboard keeps a running setup checklist — company info, techs, hours, transfer number, your line, SOPs, texting registration — so nothing important sits half-finished without you knowing.
A real 9:40pm no-cool call, in the order it happens. The italic lines are the customer. Everything under them is the machinery.
(A homeowner dials your published number at 9:40pm.)
Your line forwards to SERVALO. Before any AI even starts, the call passes cheap guards: we know which shop was dialed, repeat-dialer and flood limits apply, and a daily spend ceiling routes to your cell rather than running up a bill. Then your coverage mode decides who answers.
“Hi — uh, is this the AC place?”
The agent answers in your business name and says up front that it’s an AI assistant. Then it gets out of the way. It listens the way a person does: “mm-hmm” doesn’t stop it, but a real interruption does — and if you talk over it, it only remembers the words you actually heard, so it never says “as I mentioned” about a sentence that got cut off.
“Yeah, it’s Dave over on Chestnut — I think we have a plan with you guys?”
It looks you up early, on the address rather than the name, because two Daves is common and two Daves at one address isn’t. If you’re a maintenance-plan member it says so, and it knows your real entitlement — visits included, visits used, when the last one was. If the match is at all ambiguous it treats you as a new customer and says nothing about a plan, rather than guessing at one.
“It’s been making this smell, kind of burny…”
This is the part that isn’t the AI’s call. Hazard handling is fixed in code: the model can raise an alarm and can never lower one. It reads your whole sentence in context, so “no gas smell or anything” and “my gas furnace won’t start” don’t trip anything, while a real gas smell gets the official utility-grade guidance word for word plus an immediate alert to your team. A burning smell like this one gets coached and booked as a priority visit — and a booking with a hazard on it never auto-confirms.
“The upstairs just isn’t cooling. Downstairs is fine.”
It classifies the job and characterizes it like a dispatcher would — about two questions, not an interrogation, and never re-asking something you already said. It runs the small handful of things genuinely worth checking on the phone (is the thermostat set to cool, is the breaker tripped) — and if that fixes it, it says so instead of selling you a truck roll.
“412 Chestnut — apartment B.”
It reads your name back the first time it uses it and asks you to spell an unusual one, because a name is the single most-misheard thing on a phone line. It reads the full address back once and always asks for the unit number. It checks the address against your service area — and if the address won’t resolve, it books you anyway with a note for the office instead of refusing a real customer over stale map data.
“Tomorrow works, earlier is better.”
It offers two real windows off your actual schedule, spread across the day — never an invented time, never a time your techs can’t cover. It knows your hours, your capacity, and what you don’t service: if you don’t do oil furnaces, there is simply no appointment to be found, no matter how the conversation goes.
“Let’s do the morning.”
One of two things happens, and the agent is required to tell you which. Either it’s booked — because the write to your calendar actually committed — or the window is held for your office to approve, and the caller hears “we’re holding that time for you,” never a promise you have to walk back. An evening hold survives to the morning instead of quietly expiring overnight.
“Great, thanks.”
It reads the whole thing back once — name, address, problem, window — and confirms by text. Everything lands in your dashboard as a transcribed call attached to the customer, with a service request and a booking behind it. If the caller had hung up mid-sentence at any point, they’d be in your callback queue with a text already sent, carrying everything captured so far.
This is where SERVALO stops being an answering service. The call was the beginning of a job, and the same system carries it to paid and reviewed.
Jobs route by skills, certifications, zone, working hours and real drive time — and every assignment shows its reasoning in plain English on the day lanes, calendar and live map. Refrigerant work steers toward EPA-608 certified techs. Your dispatcher can overrule the reasoning; what the system won’t let anyone do is double-book a truck or assign someone who’s off.
Today’s route with drive times, one tap to call, text or navigate. On my way → arrived → done, visible in the office live. Before / after / nameplate photos, and whatever finish requirements you set — summary, photos — enforced before a job can close.
The tech can send the invoice from the driveway, or the office can send it from the job record — same path either way, amount computed from your records rather than typed in, and a job can never be invoiced twice. Payment posts back automatically, and to QuickBooks if you’ve connected it.
A couple of hours after the job closes — fresh, but not while the tech is still in the driveway — the review request goes out on its own. You set the delay or turn it off per job. Your Google reviews sync back into the dashboard so nothing sits unanswered.
Members get billed on your schedule and their included visits get booked automatically as they come due. Price and billing cadence lock in at enrollment, so raising your plan prices never silently reprices the members you already have.
One price, all of it. Nothing on this list is an add-on, an upgrade tier, or a “coming soon” — if it's printed here, it's running today.
What the receptionist can actually do
Dispatch and the office
The technician’s phone
After the wrench comes down
That's a live line answered by the exact receptionist your customers would get. Tell it your AC died — it will ask what a real dispatcher would ask, check a real schedule, and book you like a real caller.
Yes, and it takes about ten seconds. Twenty-four-seven and team-first are one radio button in Settings — the change applies to the very next call. Shops routinely start after-hours-only to get comfortable and move to 24/7 within a month, usually the first time they see what the 7pm calls were worth.
No, and this is the part worth understanding. You keep your published number forever. We give you a second number, and you forward yours to it — the same forwarding your phone company has offered for thirty years. Going live is turning that forward on. Leaving is turning it off, and your calls ring your office again the same minute. We hold nothing hostage.
Days, not weeks — the setup call is the long pole, and it’s under an hour. The one thing that can run longer is business-text registration, which sits in a carrier queue we don’t control. Voice answering doesn’t wait on it; texted confirmations turn on when it clears.
One pre-call form, one hour on a screen share, and one forwarding switch. Everything else — the number, the caller ID, the carrier filing, the testing — is ours. This is not software you get handed a login to and figure out.
Then it should hand you a human, and that is designed rather than hoped for. Unsure calls become callbacks; risky bookings become holds; anything the agent can’t answer from your playbook it doesn’t invent an answer to. Human review is a designed outcome here, not an error state. And every time the AI says “someone will call you right back,” a real task is created in the same breath — a promise with nothing behind it is the most damaging thing an AI can say.
Yes — it says so in the first sentence, every call. Then it gets to work. In practice callers stop caring about the voice around the time the visit gets booked. Call the demo line and judge it the way your customers will.
Book the setup call and we'll configure your hours, techs, service area and playbook together — then test all of it, including the emergency drill, before a single customer hears it.