Home-service lead follow-up glossary
Twenty-five terms you’ll meet when you fix how your company answers calls and follows up leads, each defined in two or three sentences with the number that matters and a link to the page that goes deeper.
Terms, A to Z by topic
Grouped the way owners meet them: answering calls, following up leads, reviews and repeat business, and the rules.
Missed-call text-back
An automatic text sent to a caller within seconds of their call going unanswered, from the business’s own number, usually with a name and a question (“it’s Dave at Lone Star Plumbing, what’s going on?”). It keeps the caller from dialing the next company; under 3% would have left a voicemail. Cost $0–$97 a month inside most CRMs. Read more.
AI receptionist
Software that answers inbound calls with a synthetic voice, asks the questions a dispatcher would, books into the business’s calendar and texts a summary to the owner. Priced $49–$300 a month in 2026, usually per minute. Distinct from a live answering service, which uses human operators and usually takes messages rather than booking. Read more.
Live answering service
A company whose human operators answer your calls under your business name, take a message and relay it by text or email. $100–$1,000+ a month in 2026, with overage at $9–$11.50 a call or $1.75–$3 a minute. Most do not book into your calendar. Read more.
Speed to lead
The time between a lead arriving (call, form, Angi, LSA, message) and the first response from the business. The industry target is five minutes; 74% of service businesses miss it and 58% take over 30 minutes. Response within an hour versus over an hour roughly halves reported lead loss. Read more.
Shared lead
A lead sold to several contractors at once, typically three to five, by marketplaces such as Angi, HomeAdvisor and Thumbtack. Close rates run 10–20%; the contractor who responds first wins most of them. Read more.
Google Local Services Ads (LSA)
Google’s pay-per-contact ad unit for licensed, insured, background-checked local service businesses, shown above regular results with a “Google Guaranteed” or “Screened” badge. You pay per call or message, the lead is not shared, invalid leads can be disputed, and ranking weighs proximity, reviews, responsiveness and hours. Read more.
Cost per booked job
Monthly spend on a channel divided by the jobs booked from it. The metric that compares Angi, LSA, Google Ads and fixing follow-up on equal terms; a $50 lead at 15% close is $333 per booked job, at 30% it is $167. Read more.
Cost per booked appointment
The same idea applied to appointments rather than completed jobs; the number Skill Up Experts reports on for every client system. Read more.
Missed-call audit
A 30-day log of every inbound call: answered or not, after hours or not, voicemail left, texted back, booked. Used to measure the missed-call rate (typically 20–35% for small shops) and the revenue tied to it. Read more.
After-hours calls
Calls arriving outside posted business hours, 25–40% of home-service calls and more in summer and storm weeks. The segment most often lost to voicemail and the usual first job for an AI receptionist. Read more.
Emergency routing
A rule set that sends true emergencies (active water, no power, no cooling above a temperature threshold, elderly or infant at risk) to a human within 60 seconds while booking everything else into the next window. Read more.
Quote follow-up sequence
A fixed series of touches after an estimate is sent, typically five over 14 days (same day, day 2, day 5 call, day 9, day 14), each with a different purpose, stopping the moment the customer replies. 63% of companies follow up a quote only once or twice. Read more.
Review gating
Asking customers to rate you privately first and sending only the happy ones to Google. Prohibited by Google’s policy since 2018 and by the FTC’s 2024 rule. A service check-in before asking everyone is allowed. Read more.
Review request (by text)
A short text from a named person 1–2 hours after a repair (2–3 days after an install) with the direct Google review link. 83% of customers asked for a review leave one; a generic ask from a short code gets 10–20%. Read more.
Database reactivation
A campaign to past customers who have not booked recently, usually two or three texts in a season with a specific offer and a booking reply. Requires consent on file; a clean list of 1,000 typically books 3–8% within 30 days. Read more.
Consent (texting)
A record that the customer agreed to receive marketing texts: a checkbox on an intake form, a signed work order, or a text reply saying yes. Required federally (TCPA) for automated marketing texts and, in Texas, what exempts a programme from SB 140 registration. Read more.
SB 140 (Texas)
The 2025 Texas law, effective 1 September 2025, that added text messages to the definition of telephone solicitation, bringing marketing texts under state registration, quiet-hours and private-right-of-action rules. A November 2025 settlement confirmed consent-based texting is exempt from registration. Read more.
TCPA
The federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act, which requires prior express written consent for automated marketing calls and texts and sets quiet hours (8 a.m.–9 p.m. local). Replies to someone who contacted you are not covered; marketing texts are. Read more.
A2P 10DLC
Carrier registration for application-to-person texting from standard 10-digit US numbers. Without it, carriers filter business texts. Registration takes about a week and is required before any automated texting from a business number. Read more.
One-party consent (call recording)
A state rule under which a call may be recorded if one party to it consents. Texas is one-party; a business or its AI counts as a party. Some states require all parties’ consent. Read more.
Overage
The per-call or per-minute charge once an answering plan’s included allowance is used up. The number that decides a contractor’s busiest-month bill: $9–$11.50 a call on live services versus $0.25–$0.50 a minute on AI. Read more.
Storm switch
A roofing-company setting that flips answering from office-first to AI-first the night of a hail event and back about ten days later, with inspection batching by neighbourhood and claim questions in the script. Read more.
Appointment reminder sequence
Confirmation at booking, a reminder 24 hours out with reply-to-confirm, and an on-the-way text with a tight window, plus running-late and no-show rebook texts. Cuts locked-door visits to a handful a month. Read more.
GoHighLevel
The CRM and automation platform Skill Up Experts builds on: pipelines, calendars, workflows, two-way texting, Voice AI and Conversation AI in one account, billed per usage for AI minutes. Read more.
Voice AI (GoHighLevel)
GoHighLevel’s built-in AI phone agent, billed per minute on the account, which answers calls, qualifies and books into GoHighLevel calendars; the engine behind the AI receptionists described on this site. Read more.
Next pages
Need one of these built, not defined?
Thirty minutes on Central Time. Bring the term you keep hearing about; we show you what it looks like running on your number.