Never miss a call with the top contractor answering service
Never lose out on potential customers with Sona, OpenPhone’s AI agent. Answer questions 24/7, take specific messages, and say goodbye to missed calls with the best phone system for growing businesses.
Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Smarter than voicemail, more effective than live call answering services
Sona greets callers, captures leads, and answers questions at a fraction of the cost of traditional contractor answering services.
Why Sona is a better answering service for your construction company
Here’s why Sona is a better option compared to traditional answering services:
1. Integrated with your business phone
OpenPhone is a business phone system designed to help you scale your customer interactions. With OpenPhone, you can make calls and send texts to your customers. You can also track every customer interaction and collaborate on projects with your team.
Personalize customer details by building rich contact profiles using custom properties and contact notes. Tag clients as 'New Construction' or 'Renovation' customers so that you can tailor your conversations with them accordingly.
Since Sona works within OpenPhone, all Sona calls, summaries, and call transcripts appear in your OpenPhone workspace after a call ends. Your team can quickly review Sona’s AI phone calls and call back customers or execute on their requests.
Live answering services are isolated from your systems, which can slow down your business growth. Your team is forced to piece together customer data based on their calls, creating a fragmented customer experience and adding more work for your team.
2. More cost-effective
Traditional answering services for contractors typically charge between $200-$350 per month for basic packages, with additional per-minute charges that can push costs even higher.
Sona costs $49 per month for 50 calls, after which you pay$0.99 per call. Unlike traditional services that bill by the minute, Sona charges per call — meaning a 30-second quote request costs the same as a five-minute project inquiry. Plus, calls under 15 seconds (like spam or wrong numbers) don't count toward your usage.
3. Consistent service
As an AI answering service, you can train Sona exactly to your business's needs with no learning curve required. Share business information like your service offerings, pricing guidelines, and project timelines, then test Sona before going live. Make adjustments in real time based on Sona’s performance, a process that would take weeks with traditional answering services.
Live answering services require weeks of setup and training, yet you never have complete control over how agents represent your business. High staff turnover means constant retraining and inconsistent service quality. Sona delivers the same professional experience every time, whether it's 2 PM or 2 AM, ensuring your company maintains its reputation around the clock.
Handle more calls with an AI virtual receptionist
Train your new AI receptionist Sona in seconds. Assign Sona to your calls in minutes.
Add Sona to your call flows quickly
Don't worry about potential new customers slipping through the cracks. Simply drag and drop Sona into your existing call flows, both during and after business hours. Sona works alongside call routing features like ring order, phone menus, and call forwarding.
Train Sona to answer common questions
Sona can answer common questions on behalf of your team. Upload your key policies and answers to FAQs so that Sona can give the right information to callers.
Collect details for emergency dispatch
Whether it’s a system failure, electrical problems, or air quality issues, Sona can collect emergency information from callers and pass it along to your team. Give instructions to Sona to ask follow-up questions based on specific keywords in a conversation.
Sync Sona's calls with CRM integrations
See Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages in your OpenPhone inbox right after calls end. Sync Sona’s calls with your preferred CRM, including HubSpot, Jobber, and Salesforce with our third-party integrations.
Feature comparison
See how Sona compares to traditional call answering services.
Features
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Sona
Traditional answering services
Starting price per month
$49 for 50 calls, $0.99 per call for additional calls
~5x-7x the cost of Sona
Setup time
Instant
2-4 weeks
Brand voice and tone
Consistent
Highly variable
Monitoring
100% in OpenPhone
Custom solution or daily email summary
Integrations
HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Make, Jobber, and more
Limited integration options
How to set up Sona in four steps
It only takes four steps to get started with Sona:
- Start with a free trial.
- Try our free trial features, including calls and recordings.
- Configure your Sona settings and test Sona in OpenPhone’s call flow builder.
- Once you’ve confirmed it’s a good fit, activate your OpenPhone account and get the Sona add-on.
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“With Sona, I never worry about missing a call again. It’s like having a smart, reliable assistant who always picks up. It’s professional, friendly, and on it 24/7.”
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“Sona has my back. Even when I miss a call, I know it’s handled—and handled well. Total game changer.”
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“Sona has transformed the way I handle my calls. It’s like having a trusted partner who ensures I never miss an opportunity, no matter how busy I get.”
“Prior to adopting Sona, we struggled with consistently capturing after-hours communications, resulting in missed opportunities. We now have absolute assurance that every incoming call is handled promptly.”
Why thousands of teams choose OpenPhone
See why contractors of all sizes — HVAC, electrical, plumbing, roofing, landscaping, and more — run their business communications on OpenPhone.
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Get a phone number for every team member
Scale your construction business with flexible phone number options. Choose local US or Canadian phone numbers to build trust in your service areas or North American toll-free numbers for a professional, nationwide presence.
Every OpenPhone plan includes a dedicated number for each user. Share numbers across departments — like having one number for your electrical division and another for plumbing.
Adding new numbers costs $5 per number per month, making it easy to expand as you take on more projects or enter new regions.
Collaborate better with your team
Keep your entire crew on the same page with OpenPhone's collaboration features. Split responsibility for urgent incoming phone calls and texts with shared numbers. Give your team visibility into customer conversations with shared inboxes, especially when you need to hand off a project to a new team lead.
Work through project updates and assign follow-up tasks to team members with internal threads. Tag specific team members to address inquiries related to their area of expertise and check to see if they’re caught up with inbox viewers.
Call handling made easy
Manage incoming calls with ease using OpenPhone. Create custom call flows with no technical expertise using OpenPhone’s visual call flow builder. Our drag-and-drop interface lets you see exactly how calls move through your system and make instant adjustments as your business grows.
Route calls intelligently to ensure every customer reaches the right person. Set up ring groups so calls go to available team members simultaneously or in a specific ring order. Create phone menus that let callers choose between departments — for example, press 1 for new projects, 2 for ongoing work, or 3 for emergencies.
Forward after-hours emergency calls to your on-call contractor, and use customizable business hours to automatically adjust routing based on your schedule. And with warm transfers, our team can transfer calls with full context, ensuring customers never have to repeat themselves when speaking with different crew members.
Make appointment scheduling as easy as texting
Communicate efficiently with clients with business text messaging.
With our automated text messaging workflows, you can send more messages in less time to clients. Build automated workflows with Zapier or Make to send appointment confirmations, reminders, payment requests, and more — all without manual intervention.
Send photos and videos of project updates or completed work with MMS messaging. Set up SMS auto-replies to acknowledge inquiries when your team is on job sites and schedule texts to reach clients at convenient times with scheduled messages. Use text templates (snippets) to quickly respond to common questions.
Automate repetitive admin tasks
Focus on your ongoing projects — let OpenPhone take care of your administrative tasks.
Automatically record your calls and generate instant AI-powered call summaries and transcripts. Call recordings and transcripts are useful to have for lengthy projects to keep track of your customer requests and resolve disputes that may arise.
Get business insights based on what customers are telling you over time. Use AI to analyze phone calls with AI call tags. Call tags are also a valuable resource to help you prioritize which customers need your attention the most.
Dedicated Jobber integration
Streamline your workflow with OpenPhone's native Jobber integration.
Automatically capture new leads from calls and texts and sync them directly into Jobber, complete with contact information and project details. Call summaries and transcripts sync seamlessly, giving your team full context when following up on estimates or scheduling work.
Call and text from anywhere
Whether your team is at the office, on a job site, or driving between projects, OpenPhone keeps them connected. Available on Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and web browsers, your crew can use OpenPhone to make calls and send texts from any device with just an internet connection.
Field technicians can update customers on project progress without sharing personal numbers, while your office staff can take calls from their computers. Everything syncs in real time, so switching between devices never disrupts your workflow.
Find out how much you’re investing in your business phone solution upfront on our pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Can’t find the answer here? Check out our Resource Center.
An answering service is a solution that handles incoming calls when your team can't answer directly. It can be an in-house tool that operates within your existing phone system, like Sona, or an outsourced third-party service with live receptionists. Most answering services perform two key functions: answering routine questions about your business and capturing detailed messages from callers.
If you’re considering getting an answering service for your contractor business, here are three benefits you should know:
- Capture every lead: A 24/7 answering service ensures you never miss an opportunity when a potential client reaches out, similar to dedicated sales AI tools.
- Take detailed messages: An AI voice agent like Sona can collect specific project details, like timeline, budget, and scope of work. This means your team can prepare estimates and a sample project brief for clients before calling them back.
- Answer common questions: Spend your time on the phone moving deals through your pipeline and projects to completion. Direct callers with questions about service offerings, business hours, and more to Sona.
Every type of contractor can benefit from an answering service. That includes general contractors, home remodelers, roofers, electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, landscapers, painters, flooring specialists, concrete contractors, and specialty trades. Whether you're a solo contractor or managing multiple crews, an answering service helps you stay responsive to customer needs while focusing on current projects.
Traditional contractor answering services typically start at $149-$200 per month for a monthly allotment of 50-100 minutes, after which fees can range from $1.30-$2.15 per minute. As you grow, these fees will continue to mount, so it’s unpredictable how much you’ll actually pay for your answering service.
Sona offers transparent, predictable pricing at $49 per month for 50 calls, with additional calls at $0.99 each. With per-call pricing, your monthly costs are more predictable. And since calls under 15 seconds don't count toward your usage, you’ll be protected from getting charged for spam calls.
Yes, we’re biased here, but we believe OpenPhone with Sona is the ideal answering service for contractors. It combines 24/7 availability with construction-specific customization, allowing you to train it on your services, pricing, and processes. Unlike generic services, Sona integrates directly with your business phone system and CRM, allowing you to track all your calls and texts with your clients.
With instant setup, flexible configuration, and cost-effective pricing, it's designed specifically for growing contractors looking to scale.
Call centers are large-scale customer service operations that serve enterprise clients with hundreds or thousands of daily calls. They offer comprehensive services like technical support, order processing, and detailed troubleshooting but require extensive setup, training, and ongoing management.
Phone answering services focus on essential call handling — answering basic questions, taking messages, and routing urgent calls. They're ideal for contractors who need professional call coverage without the complexity or cost of a full call center. Services like Sona are specifically designed for businesses that receive moderate call volumes but can't afford to miss any opportunities.
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