The contractor answering service that qualifies the lead and books the walkthrough
Most bids are decided before anyone walks the property. The $40k-kitchen homeowner calls three companies, and whoever answers sets the expectations. Iris picks up 24/7, qualifies budget, timeline, and scope, and puts the walkthrough on your calendar.
A missed call is a five-figure project
Nobody calls a general contractor by accident. The person on the line has a project, a rough budget, and a list of other companies to try. Federal consumer guidance even tells homeowners to get multiple estimates before hiring, so your voicemail is a reason to move to the next name.
The whole crew is on a pour.
There is no office. The "front desk" is a foreman's pocket, and the foreman has both hands on a screed when the phone rings.
Answered in seconds under your company name.
Iris is the office you never had to build. It picks up mid-pour, answers the common questions, and starts qualifying instead of taking dictation.
The call comes at 7 p.m.
Homeowners plan remodels after work and on weekends. Your competitors' voicemail greets them too. Somebody eventually answers.
The evening call gets the same treatment as a Tuesday morning.
Sunday evening, weekday morning, a site chat at nine: Iris responds in seconds, so you start the morning with qualified leads on the calendar instead of voicemails to return.
The message you cannot bid from.
A name and a number tells you nothing about the project. You call back cold, days late, and start from zero.
A project brief, not a phone number.
Scope, property, budget signal, timing, and the walkthrough already on your calendar. You decide which walkthroughs deserve your truck.
The tire-kicker tax.
Too many callers want a free education or a price you would never take. Chasing them costs the hours you should spend on real bids.
Filtered before it costs you an hour.
Robocalls never reach you. Callers fishing for a lowball number get courteous answers and a clear next step, without a walkthrough slot. Your screening rules decide the bar.
Taking a message is not the job. The job is
Iris runs your screening questions on every inquiry: what kind of project, what kind of property, what budget range, what timeline, how the caller found you. You choose the questions; Iris asks them the same way every time, at any hour, without sounding like a form. Vague callers get a polite path to more information. Spam and robocalls get filtered out entirely. Serious projects get a walkthrough on your calendar.
What Iris does for contractors and construction companies
Work starts before a lead is a lead. Iris answers, qualifies, filters, books, follows up, and files every inquiry across phone, SMS, and web chat, with no office staff. A pipeline holding all six is an AI growth system.
Iris picks up in seconds, weekday mornings, Sunday evenings, mid-pour, as an AI receptionist for contractors working over the voice layer. It greets callers with your company name, answers the common questions, and starts qualifying instead of taking dictation.
The same homeowner comparing three companies is on your site at 9 p.m. AI web chat meets them there, asks the same screening questions, and turns a silent visit into a qualified inquiry.
Iris plugs into your calendar and puts the estimate visit on it before the caller hangs up. No phone tag, no "someone will reach out." The slot is held, the address is captured, and the confirmation goes out.
Walkthrough confirmations, reminders, reschedules, a nudge when the caller goes quiet: AI SMS keeps the thread alive automatically, so a slow-moving remodel decision does not go cold on your side.
This is where contractors get more from Iris than any other trade. A remodel decision takes weeks; a commercial award takes months. Iris logs every call, chat, and text into the AI CRM with full context, so your open bids live in one visible pipeline instead of a message pad, a windshield notepad, and your memory.
How Iris handles a contractor call
Answer first, qualify hard, book the visit. The same loop on every inquiry, ending with a brief in your hands.
What you can
Message-takers record that someone called. Iris finds out whether the job is worth your truck, and you walk in knowing more about it than the contractor who called back cold.
Every bid in one place, from first ring to
The lead does not end when the walkthrough is booked. On most job sites the trail scatters across a truck, a text thread, and whoever took the call. Iris files all of it against one project record, so a bid that took four touches across six weeks reads as one story instead of four fragments.
Qualified and booked
The homeowner calls at lunch or opens your site chat on a Sunday. Iris asks the screening questions, books the walkthrough, and the brief lands with you before you arrive.
The spouse who was not home
A second conversation, a late-night chat with a follow-up question, filed to the same project record instead of a different notepad.
The quote you promised
Contracting businesses rarely lose a bid at the first ring. They lose it in week three, when somebody else still has the details. AI SMS keeps the thread alive so a slow remodel decision does not go cold on your side.
The caller resurfaces
When the project comes back around, you open the record instead of rebuilding the conversation. We built the CRM into the answering layer for exactly this reason.
The parts you keep
You have been sold software before. Here is what we will not do to you.
Iris sits in front of your existing stack, not in place of it. The lead arrives qualified, booked, and documented, ready for whatever you already use to price and run the work.
You decide what counts as qualified, what gets filtered, and which callers, say, a commercial developer breaking ground next quarter, get routed straight to your cell with context attached.
One working session, no developer, no downtime between jobs. You set the bar a project has to clear; Iris holds every caller to it.
Every contact, conversation, and project detail Iris captures belongs to your business, logged where you can see it and export it.
Built by dotfun.
dotfun's Run Good practice handled the engineering. Our Feel Good growth marketers made sure it stayed pointed at revenue rather than gadgetry. Need something beyond the product, like a workflow wired into a specific estimating stack or a bespoke bid-tracking automation? Our AI Solutions practice takes that on as custom work.
The businesses that live and die by the bid
Iris fits contracting businesses where the phone call starts a sales cycle, not a siren. One truck or twenty, the pattern is the same: answer first, qualify hard, book the visit. In an emergency-driven trade instead? Start with Iris for home services, which is built for the repair trades.
General contractors
Iris qualifies residential and light-commercial inquiries, screens scope and budget, and books walkthroughs while you run the jobs you already won.
Construction companies and builders
Iris handles the wider mix, new-build inquiries, commercial RFP calls, subs and suppliers looking for the right person, and routes each one by your rules.
Remodelers and design-build firms
Iris answers the evening research call, captures the project vision in concrete terms, and keeps the long decision warm by text until the design meeting is booked.
Simple Pricing That Pays For Itself
Most teams compare Iris to a $3k–$5k/month receptionist hire. We prefer a simpler benchmark: one saved job can cover the month.
Contractor answering service, in plain terms
Expect $135 to $450 per month for typical live-answering plans, or around $1.50 a minute when billing is metered. Those are published market figures, and one worked example prices 250 billable minutes at $375 before overages. Watch the model, not the sticker: per-minute billing punishes exactly the long qualification conversations a contractor wants. Compare flat-rate AI options against per-minute plans using your real call volume.
A traditional service usually cannot go past a message. Iris is built for qualification: it asks your screening questions (project type, property, budget range, timeline, decision stage) on every call and chat, then scores the inquiry against your rules. What you receive is a project brief and a booked walkthrough, not a message to chase.
Iris is the office you never had to build. When the crew is mid-pour and the phone rings, Iris answers in seconds, qualifies the project, and books the visit. The 7 p.m. homeowner call gets the same treatment, so you start the morning with qualified leads on the calendar instead of voicemails to return.
Yes. Robocalls and solicitors never reach you. Callers shopping for free advice or fishing for a lowball number get courteous answers and a clear next step, without a walkthrough slot. Your screening rules decide the bar, and you can loosen or tighten them anytime. Your attention stays on inquiries with a real budget and a real timeline.
That is the core loop. Iris books the estimate visit directly on your calendar, confirms it with the caller by text, and sends you the full brief (scope, property, budget signal, timeline, contact details) before you arrive. You spend the walkthrough measuring and closing, not asking the questions a phone call should have answered.
All three. General contractors get qualification and walkthrough booking. Construction companies and builders get an answering layer for new-build and commercial inquiries plus routing for subs and suppliers. Remodelers get evening-call coverage and long-cycle text follow-up. If your trade is emergency-driven, urgent repairs rather than bids, the broader home-services page is the better starting point.
Every week spent scoping a custom build is a week of bids going to whoever answered. Cover the phone with Iris now. If you later want bid tracking wired across entities, or a direct line into one estimating platform, that is AI Solutions work, scoped and built by dotfun on top of what Iris already captures. Nothing you set up first gets thrown away.