For services businesses
We install AI chat and voice on your website that picks up every enquiry — nights, weekends, while you're on a job — qualifies it, and turns it into a quote before your competitor has listened to their voicemail.
Two founding places open. Free diagnostic, then 50% off the install and the first 12 months. Until 30 September 2026.
You own the system and the data. Fixed install fee. No lock-in contract.
The problem
Most services businesses don't lose work on price. They lose it on the four hours between an enquiry arriving and somebody getting back to it — and on the fortnight between the site visit and the quote landing.
We grade every number we put in front of you. The three above are the only ones on this page, and each carries its source, sample and date. The much-quoted "reply in five minutes and you're 21 times more likely to convert" is not here, because it doesn't survive checking. We show our working below.
What we install
It bolts onto the website you already have. No rebuild, no migration, no new CRM unless you want one.
A chat widget and a tracked number on your existing site. Every enquiry lands in one place with its source attached, so you finally know which channel actually pays.
Answers instantly, asks the qualifying questions your best estimator would ask, and books the site visit straight into the diary. It never gets tired at 11pm on a Sunday.
Picks up the calls nobody gets to. Same questions, same qualification, same diary. Callers are told at the start that they're speaking to an automated assistant — that's a legal requirement now, and it's the right thing to do.
Turns the qualified enquiry into a priced quote or a full proposal from your own rate card and templates. You review and send. Minutes, not a fortnight.
How it goes in
We check your enquiry volume, whether your process is written down anywhere, and whether your systems can actually be reached by software. If the fit is poor, we say so and you don't spend the money. A well-suited job on ordinary technology beats a badly-suited one on brilliant technology every time, and we would rather tell you that in week one than month six.
We document the qualification your best person does in their head, then build it. Chat and voice go live on your site. The quoting engine gets your rate card, your templates, your rules. Everything is created inside accounts in your name.
We take a baseline before go-live — response time, quotes issued, win rate — and report against it every month. If the numbers don't move, that's a conversation we have with you rather than one you have to start.
Work out the return
Every figure below comes from what you type in. Nothing is pre-loaded from a case study, and you can see the arithmetic. Change the assumption if you think we've been too generous — it's a slider for exactly that reason.
Calls, forms, emails — everything that arrives wanting a price.
Best guess is fine. Include evenings, weekends and anything that sat in an inbox until the next morning. Most owners underestimate this.
Of the quotes that actually go out, how many turn into work.
We report contribution, not turnover. Extra revenue you don't keep isn't a return.
Of the enquiries currently going slow or unanswered, what share do you believe a system that answers instantly would carry through to a quote? This is an assumption, not a finding. We default to 15% because it is deliberately conservative — the controlled research on reply speed implies considerably more, in a different setting to yours.
This is a model built from your estimates, not a forecast and not a guarantee. The recovery rate is the assumption doing most of the work — treat the output as a way to decide whether this is worth an hour of your time, not as a number to put in a budget.
Show your working
Most people selling this will show you a statistic. Almost none of them have read the study behind it. Here is the whole evidence base for what we sell, graded — including the parts that don't help us.
Researchers at UC San Diego, George Mason, Vanderbilt and Cornell analysed 11.6 million real enquiries on a services marketplace and backed it with randomised experiments. A one-hour delay in replying cut the chance of being hired by 46%. A day's delay cut it by roughly 90%. The authors report that delays of just 5–10 minutes already reduce the chance of being hired. Buyers read a fast reply as a signal you'll be reliable later, and there was no evidence that appearing in-demand helps.
One finding matters more than the headline: the speed effect held independently of what the message actually said, and independently of the provider's quality rating. Speed is doing the work on its own.
What it doesn't show — and this one is against us: it's a freelance digital marketplace, not UK trades or professional services, so treat the mechanism as transferable and the exact percentage as not. More importantly, the study never tested an automated reply. Every fast response in it came from a human. Whether an instant answer from software carries the same signal is an open question that nobody has yet measured — including us. We'll know more once the founding installs have run.
VanEpps, Hart, Sezer & Amir, "Speed Is a Signal: When Faster Replies Increase Hiring Likelihood", Management Science, published online 2026. Peer-reviewed. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2024.06185 · Read itThis has been measured repeatedly by mystery shop rather than by vendor platform data, which is why we trust it. 55% of 433 B2B firms hadn't responded within five working days (Drift, 2017). Only 365 of 1,000 firms replied at all (RevenueHero, 2024). 40% of 466 home services firms never responded (Valve+Meter, 2018).
What it doesn't show: all US. The nearest UK equivalents are older and smaller — 213 letting agents in 2014, 85 law firms in 2016 — though both found roughly a third to a half of enquiries unanswered for days.
Multiple independent mystery-shop studies, 2014–202428% of UK businesses with fewer than 10 employees use any AI technology; construction is the lowest sector at 13%. From the ONS Business Insights survey, 38,637 responding businesses, published July 2026.
What it doesn't show: adoption, not effectiveness. The ONS does not measure customer service, chat or sales use cases at all, so this says nothing about whether any of it works.
ONS, Artificial intelligence in UK businesses, 20 July 2026You will see this everywhere. It comes from a 2007 analysis of six companies, using call data supplied by a firm selling lead-response software, co-authored by that firm's chief executive. It has never been peer-reviewed or replicated. It measures the odds of starting a conversation at 5 minutes versus 30 — not conversion, and the authors say explicitly that they did not examine close rates. It is routinely mislabelled as an MIT study; MIT neither funded nor published it.
The detail that settles it: the same company's later dataset — 5.7 million leads instead of 15,000 — produced 8×, not 21×. Their own numbers, at 380 times the scale, more than halved their own headline.
Elkington & Oldroyd, Lead Response Management Study, October 2007There is no independent measurement of this category. None. Every booking rate, containment rate and after-hours figure in circulation traces back to a single vendor's own client book. Claimed after-hours enquiry shares range from 26% to 91% across vendors, which tells you nobody is measuring the same thing.
So we won't quote you one. What we'll do instead is measure yours, before and after, and show you the method.
Assessed across the published vendor material in this category, August 2026We looked properly, across construction, trades and professional services, in academic literature, official statistics and trade bodies. There is no independent study anywhere measuring quote turnaround against win rate. The one figure in circulation comes from a proposal-software vendor with no sample size, no method and no dates attached.
It's a reasonable inference from the reply-speed research above. It is not a fact, and we won't dress it up as one. The only number that settles it is your own: win rate on quotes sent within 24 hours against quotes sent in week two. Most firms have never pulled it. We do that in the fit assessment.
Searched August 2026. If you know of a study we've missed, tell us and we'll publish it here.Pricing
Everyone else in this category makes you sit through a discovery call to find out whether you can afford it. Here it is. Install fee is one-off; the monthly covers hosting oversight, monitoring, monthly measurement and continuous improvement.
For businesses losing enquiries to slow replies.
Adds voice, and gets the quote out the same day.
Quoting, proposals and the operating rhythm around them.
Founding offer, until 30 September 2026: the first two clients pay half of both the install and the first twelve monthly payments, on any of the three packages. Standard rate applies from month thirteen.
What you own. Every account, subscription and phone number is created in your name and billed to you. We hold delegated access. Intellectual property in the workflows transfers to you on final payment. If you stop working with us, offboarding is a half-day handover, not a migration project — and nothing switches off.
Where we are
This is a new product from an established consultancy, and we'd rather say so than imply a decade of case studies we haven't got.
The method behind it isn't new — it's the process work GrowthLift has done with owner-managed businesses for years, which is where the qualification logic and the measurement discipline come from. What's new is packaging it as something we install rather than something we advise on.
So the first two go in at half price — free diagnostic, 50% off the install and 50% off the monthly for the first twelve months — and in exchange we measure everything properly and publish the results. Method, baseline, caveats and all, including the bits that don't flatter us. That's how this category gets its first piece of evidence that wasn't written by a vendor's marketing department.
Open until 30 September 2026. After the first twelve months the price returns to the standard rate shown above — we'll tell you that now rather than at renewal.
Also from GrowthLift
If you'd rather build the capability inside your own team than have it installed, the Academy is the other door. Same method, taught rather than delivered.
The Ceiling Buster is a free assessment that finds where time and money actually leak out of your processes. It takes about twelve minutes and it will tell you whether responding faster is even your biggest problem. Sometimes it isn't, and we'd rather you found that out before you paid us anything.
Straight answers
Yes, and they have to. Since 2 August 2026 the EU AI Act requires people interacting with an AI system to be told, and it applies to UK businesses taking calls from the EU. The voice agent says it in the first sentence. We'd do it anyway — the research on hiding it is unambiguous that it damages trust when people work it out, and they do.
It hands over. The design rule is that the agent handles the predictable eighty per cent and escalates the rest with the context attached, so whoever picks it up isn't starting from nothing. Anything emotionally charged, anything unusual, anything where the caller asks for a person — straight through.
Possibly, and that's the honest answer. If your quoting lives in one person's head and your systems can't be reached by software, the fit assessment will say so. That isn't a sales tactic — a badly-fitted build is worse than no build, because you've spent the money and still have the problem. If we find that, we'll tell you what to fix first, whether or not you buy anything.
You do. Everything is set up in accounts in your name. We're a processor under UK GDPR, with an Article 28 agreement to match, and we'll tell you exactly where each component stores data before it goes in — including the ones that process outside the UK, because some of them do.
No. Anyone who does is either not measuring or not telling you the truth. What we'll commit to is a measured baseline before go-live, honest monthly reporting against it, and a conversation we start rather than one you have to chase if the numbers aren't moving.
Six to eight weeks from the fit assessment for Respond & Quote. Faster is possible and usually a mistake — most of that time is documenting the qualification logic properly, which is the part that determines whether any of it works.
Twenty minutes. We'll look at your enquiry volume, how your quoting works now, and whether your systems can be reached. If it's a poor fit we'll say so on the call — that's a shorter conversation and it costs you nothing.
Book a fit assessmentOr email stephen.waugh@growthlift.ai