Take every emergency call with an HVAC answering service
Never lose out on potential customers 24/7 with Sona, OpenPhone’s AI agent. Answer questions, take specific messages, and say goodbye to missed calls with the best phone system for growing HVAC businesses.
Trusted by over 60,000 businesses
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Smarter than voicemail, more cost-effective than HVAC call centers
Sona greets callers, answers questions, and captures messages at a fraction of the cost of traditional phone answering service call centers.
Why Sona is a better answering service for your HVAC business
Here are three ways Sona outperforms traditional call answering services:
1. Integrated directly in your business phone
OpenPhone is an intuitive business phone system built for team collaboration. Make calls, send texts, and build stronger customer relationships with our platform. You can also personalize every conversation with your customers by building rich contact profiles using custom properties and contact notes. For example, you can tag whether a customer is a ‘Residential’ or ‘Commercial’ customer and tailor your conversations with them accordingly.
Sona is directly integrated in OpenPhone. That way, Sona’s call recordings, summaries, and transcripts appear in your OpenPhone workspace minutes after a call ends. You can see calls Sona handled within your existing conversation history so your team has the right context.
Traditional call answering services don’t integrate with your business, and they force you to track conversations in a custom app. It’s a fragmented experience that adds more work for your team.
2. More cost-effective
Professional answering services charge businesses a flat monthly fee for a fixed number of minutes and a per-minute fee on top of that. It’s a pricing model that can quickly get expensive for small and growing businesses. Many HVAC phone answering services are 4x-7x more expensive than Sona.
Sona charges a flat fee for the first 50 calls it handles on behalf of your business. After that, it charges a fixed fee for every call, not for every minute. Calls that run for less than 15 seconds aren’t included, so you can have Sona take spam calls without worrying about whether it’s charging you. It’s designed to give you the most value from your answering service.
3. Consistent service
Imagine a virtual receptionist service that answers caller questions accurately at any time of day. Or someone who asks the right service questions when a new lead calls in to your business, giving your team the context they need to assign the right technician to the job. Sona can accomplish both of these tasks for you in minutes.
Train Sona on your company’s documents in seconds. Test it before it handles calls for you and make edits based on its ongoing performance.
With live answering services, you never have full control over how their teams represent your business. You can spend weeks onboarding and training a third-party answering service, but there is always room for error. While live receptionist teams constantly face staff turnover, Sona always shows up for work and delivers the same level of service.
Handle more calls with an HVAC virtual receptionist
Train Sona in seconds. Assign Sona to your calls in minutes.
Add Sona to after-hours call flows
Don't worry about potential new customers slipping through the cracks. Simply drag and drop Sona into your existing call flows, during and after business hours. Sona works alongside OpenPhone’s call routing features, like ring order, phone menus, and call forwarding.
Train Sona to offer customer support
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 issues, or air quality issues, Sona can collect emergency information from callers and pass it along to your team. Give instructions to Sona on how to ask follow-up questions based on specific keywords in a conversation. If an emergency is time-sensitive, Sona can refer callers to dial 911.
Sync Sona's calls with CRM integrations
See Sona’s call summaries, transcripts, and messages in your OpenPhone inbox right after its AI phone calls end. Sync Sona’s calls with your preferred CRM, including HubSpot, Jobber, and Salesforce, using 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.”
“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.”
Why HVAC contractors choose OpenPhone
See why HVAC contractors of all sizes run their business communications on OpenPhone.
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Get local and toll-free numbers for your HVAC company
Sign up for as many numbers as your business needs with OpenPhone. Choose between local US and Canadian phone numbers and North American toll-free numbers.
Build trust with your customers by choosing phone numbers with local area codes. Assign dedicated numbers to each of your team members. Your technicians can keep their personal numbers private and use a separate number to communicate with customers. If you operate in multiple locations, you can use a toll-free number for customer support or a vanity number to stand out from the competition.
All OpenPhone plans include a phone number for every user who joins your workspace. Your team members can have individual numbers, or you can share numbers for specific departments. Additional numbers cost just $5 per number per month.
Call handling made easy
Manage incoming calls smoothly with OpenPhone. Create custom call flows in seconds with our call flow builder. See how calls are routed during and after business hours and make adjustments in our drag-and-drop visual canvas. By seeing your call flow at a high level, you can make edits to accommodate any call volume.
Use our business phone features to create the ideal call experience for your customers and your team. Choose how your team receives phone calls, simultaneously or in custom batches, with ring groups. Give callers options to reach different departments in your business with phone menus. Direct repair emergency phone calls to a secondary number with our call forwarding options.
Need to transfer customer calls to a colleague? Warm call transfers help you share the right amount of context with your team when you transfer live calls.
Built for team collaboration
Collaborate with team members more efficiently with OpenPhone. Split responsibility for inbound calls and texts with shared numbers. View all your customer interactions in one place — calls, texts, voicemails, call recordings, and more — with shared inboxes. If your on-call technician needs to take the lead on a repair job from another team member, they can review the details that were shared with the team by reviewing the call recording or call summary in your OpenPhone workspace.
Troubleshoot customer issues in real time and assign follow-up tasks with internal threads. Check whether a teammate has caught up on a particular interaction with inbox viewers.
Customize your schedule in OpenPhone and choose when you want to receive notifications during or after business hours. With Do Not Disturb forwarding, you can mute your phone and focus on the job at hand so you aren’t distracted when you’re servicing a customer’s air conditioning unit.
Text smarter with advanced messaging features
Send SMS and MMS messages with OpenPhone. MMS messaging is a great option to show customers when a project is complete or to share updates for ongoing repair work.
OpenPhone’s automated text message features make your text capabilities highly scalable. Automatically reply to messages after hours with SMS auto-replies. Schedule messages to reach customers at a convenient time with scheduled messages. Quickly answer common questions with pre-written text templates, also known as snippets.
Go even further with automated text workflows. Automatically schedule appointments, send reminders and notifications, and request reviews after providing service to a customer with our Zapier and Make integrations. You can set them up in minutes — no code required.
Get repetitive admin tasks done faster
Help your team focus better on your customers by automating admin work for them.
Automatically record your calls and generate AI-powered call summaries and transcripts so your team doesn’t have to spend time taking notes on their calls. Use AI to analyze phone calls and gain business insights with AI call tags.
Sona is an in-house, 24/7 answering service that helps you turn missed opportunities into qualified leads. Handle HVAC emergency service requests at any time of day and improve your customer satisfaction.
Call and text from anywhere
Whether your team members are at the office, at a job site, or on the go, OpenPhone can travel with them. Our apps are available on every platform, including Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and the web. Your team can use their preferred devices to communicate with customers — all they need is an internet connection to get started.
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 system that manages incoming calls on behalf of a business or an individual. It can operate in a company’s tech stack, like an AI voice agent, or it can be delegated to an external provider, like a virtual receptionist service. Most answering services offer two functions: they answer common questions or take down messages from callers.
Here are three reasons why HVAC businesses should use an answering service:
- Eliminate missed calls: An after-hours answering service helps HVAC companies answer every call and capture every customer that comes their way. Answering service providers can set expectations for callers and inform them of next steps related to their reason for calling.
- Answer common questions: Businesses in the HVAC industry can receive many types of calls, with callers often asking similar questions about pricing, business hours, and service times. With an AI answering service, you can quickly answer your most common questions and provide a better customer experience in the process.
- Take down detailed messages: An AI receptionist takes down detailed messages on behalf of your team. For example, if a prospective customer asks to schedule a service appointment, Sona can collect details regarding their AC equipment.
Live HVAC answering services have a wide range of prices, from $49 to $600 per month plus additional per-minute calling fees, making them quite expensive.
On the other hand, Sona costs $49 per month for 50 calls; additional calls are $0.99 each. It’s a more cost-effective option because we bill you based on your calls instead of by the minute. We also don’t bill you for calls that last less than 15 seconds, which means your spam calls or wrong numbers won’t be added to your Sona bill or go toward the monthly allotment of 50 calls.
We’re biased, but we believe OpenPhone is the best HVAC answering service. It’s available 24/7, flexible and customizable, and easy to set up. It can answer questions and take down messages on behalf of your team, and it’s 100% integrated in your business phone. Finally, it’s a cost-effective solution compared to traditional call answering services.
A call center provides customer service operations and manages customer inquiries over the phone, usually on behalf of large-scale enterprises. Call centers can differ in terms of service quality; many companies choose to outsource these operations internationally due to the higher costs associated with US-based teams.. They also require a lot of effort to set up because call center reps undergo extensive training and evaluations on the company’s policies.
Phone answering services, on the other hand, aren’t designed to offer full-service customer support. These services can address basic customer questions, take messages, and relay communications to appropriate departments. They’re designed for businesses with lower call volumes or with occasional surges in calls, typically in small businesses or fast-growing companies.
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OpenPhone was issued a successful SOC 2 report and is actively monitored by Vanta.