When someone's safety switch keeps tripping, or they need a new switchboard before settlement, they don't shop around for long. They call the first electrician they find, and if that electrician doesn't answer, they call the next one.
This is the reality of trade work in Australia. The customer's decision window is short — often minutes, not hours. The business that answers first gets the job. The business that calls back an hour later gets told "we've already sorted it."
The data on response time
Research from the Harvard Business Review found that businesses that respond to a lead within five minutes are 100 times more likely to convert it than businesses that respond within 30 minutes. In the trades, the window is even shorter — because the customer has a problem right now and wants it fixed.
Most electricians don't answer within five minutes. They're on a job. Their phone is in their pocket. They'll call back when they get a break.
By then, the customer has already booked someone else.
What happens to the calls you miss
The calls don't wait. A customer who gets voicemail during business hours will typically try one or two more businesses before giving up or booking online. If your competitors answer and you don't, you've handed them the job.
The jobs most likely to be lost this way are also the most valuable: urgent fault-finding, safety switch issues, pre-sale compliance inspections. These are the calls where the customer has a deadline and no patience for a callback.
The after-hours problem
Electricians also lose a significant share of work to after-hours calls they never know about. A homeowner who loses power at 7pm, or a property manager dealing with a tenant emergency, calls the number they have. If it goes to voicemail, they either find an emergency electrician (who charges a premium) or they wait and call someone else in the morning.
Either way, you didn't get the job.
How Turnless Field works for electricians
Turnless Field is an AI job line for trade businesses. When a customer calls, it answers in a natural voice, asks the right questions — what's the issue, where are you, is it urgent — and creates a job in your system with all the details.
You get an SMS notification immediately. You can call the customer back when you're ready, with the full context already captured. No missed calls, no lost details scrawled on a piece of paper, no jobs that fell through the cracks.
For urgent jobs, the AI flags them as priority. For routine enquiries, it captures everything and queues them for follow-up.
The customer gets a professional experience. You get every lead captured, even when you're mid-job.
Turnless Field is built for trade businesses. Book a demo to see how it works.