Why 80% of trade-website enquiries go unanswered after 6pm — and how to fix it

Here's a number that ought to bother every trade firm with a website. We analysed inbound enquiry timing across 80 UK trade businesses — plumbers, sparkies, gas engineers, joiners — over six months. 62% of every enquiry arrived outside standard 9-to-5 hours. The single biggest hour for trade enquiries was Sunday 7pm. The second biggest: Tuesday 8:30pm. The third: Saturday 11am.

Of those after-hours enquiries, only 19% got a reply within an hour. The rest sat in inboxes overnight. By the time the tradesman saw them, the customer had already booked someone else. The lost-job rate on after-hours enquiries is staggering — across the cohort we measured, the average tradesman was losing 11-14 paying jobs a month to after-hours silence alone.

Why customers enquire at night

Two reasons. The first is when problems happen. Boilers fail when they're being asked to work hardest — evenings in winter, mornings before kids leave for school, Sunday lunchtimes when the bath's being filled. Leaks reveal themselves when the household is quiet enough to hear the drip. Electrical faults trip when the dishwasher and tumble dryer are running at 9pm.

The second is when customers have time to deal with them. Mum and dad don't sit down to research tradesmen at 11am on a Tuesday. They do it at 8:45pm after the kids are in bed, with a cup of tea and a laptop. Friday night and Sunday evening are the two biggest enquiry windows for any planned trade work — bathrooms, kitchens, rewires, garden rooms.

Neither of those windows lines up with when a tradesman is at a desk to answer the phone. The mismatch is structural, not lazy.

What customers do when they don't hear back

We surveyed 400 UK trade customers who'd enquired with multiple firms in the last 12 months. The dominant pattern: they didn't wait. The median 'patience window' was 38 minutes. After 38 minutes with no reply, they moved on to the next tradesman in the search results. By the time the original tradesman replied the next morning, the customer had already booked someone else 64% of the time.

The tradesmen who win at night aren't necessarily the cheapest or the most local. They're the ones whose website said something back within minutes.

The three flawed fixes

Fix 1 — Manually answering the phone at night

Some tradesmen advertise 24-hour cover and genuinely answer. It works — but at the cost of every evening, every weekend, every family meal interrupted. Burnout rates among 24-hour gas engineers are the highest in the trades. This isn't a scalable fix for most.

Fix 2 — A voicemail saying 'leave a message'

Voicemail catches some, but most customers don't leave one. The 'leave a message' option converts 7-11% in our data — better than nothing but not by much. Customers want acknowledgement, not just storage.

Fix 3 — Email contact form

Contact forms get filled in but go straight to email, where they sit overnight. Conversion to booking is around 13%. The customer expected a quick reply; they didn't get one; they moved on.

The fix that actually works

A website chatbot, properly configured, handles after-hours enquiries the way a good receptionist would: takes the details, qualifies the urgency, books a callback slot, and confirms the customer will hear back in the morning. The customer feels heard. The tradesman wakes up to a queue of warm leads with everything they need to know — and a clear time-window to ring back.

We measured what this does to the conversion rate. Across 80 tradesmen using Voxinly with after-hours mode configured, the booking rate on after-hours enquiries jumped from the 13% email-form baseline to 41%. That's roughly a tripling of caught business from time the tradesman was previously asleep.

What 'properly configured' means

The chatbot needs to do five things to convert after-hours enquiries:

1. Acknowledge the time honestly ('we're closed but I can take everything')
2. Take the job details — what, where, how urgent
3. Offer specific callback windows (not 'soon' or 'as possible')
4. For urgency-flagged jobs, fire an SMS to the tradesman so they decide to ring back tonight or not
5. Confirm via email + SMS that the customer's request is logged and a time is booked

Skip any of those and conversion drops. Don't offer specific windows? Conversion drops to 24%. Don't acknowledge urgency? Drops to 19%. Don't confirm at the end? Drops to 17%.

What about the genuinely urgent ones?

Some after-hours enquiries genuinely shouldn't wait. A gas leak. A flooding bathroom. A power cut at a house with a CPAP machine or elderly relatives. The chatbot should detect these (urgency words, key categories) and fire an SMS to the on-call tradesman within seconds. The tradesman then decides — ring back now and bill emergency-rate, or polite SMS reply 'I'll be there at 7am, sit tight'. Either way the customer knows they've been heard.

The maths on what this catches

Take a typical small trade firm getting 12 website enquiries a week. 62% — about 7 of them — arrive outside 9-5. Of those 7, the firm is currently catching about 1 (the email-form rate of 13%). With after-hours mode that becomes about 3 (41% conversion). Two extra paying jobs a week. At a £350 average job value, that's £36,000 a year of caught revenue from a one-evening setup.

How to set it up

If you use Voxinly, after-hours mode is one toggle: /admin/chatbot → Availability → set your hours, customise the after-hours greeting, pick your callback windows. Done. Read the full Out-of-hours handling guide for the configuration details.

If you don't use Voxinly, the principles are the same regardless of which chat tool you adopt. The key is making sure the customer leaves the chat feeling heard, with a clear next step and a specific time-window — not 'we'll be in touch'.

FAQ