Agent 01 · Voice agent and missed-call text-back

Answering the phone

Every call you cannot answer gets picked up. If it is not you, it is an agent that takes the name, the number and the job, and texts them back inside a minute.

Drawing NS-01. Answering the phone. Your mobile rings first; the agent only answers when you do not. TRIGGER WEBHOOK Inbound call to your number ROUTING Rings your mobile for twenty seconds VOICE AGENT Answers if you cannot. Asks three questions TEXT-BACK Text to the caller inside a minute SWEEP CRON Catches anything the webhook missed JOB SHEET One row: name, job, postcode, urgency ALERT The same thing to your phone and inbox
NS-01Answering the phone. Your mobile rings first; the agent only answers when you do not.

Most of the work a small firm loses, it loses at the phone. Not to a better quote. To whoever picked up second.

You are on a roof, under a sink, or driving. The phone rings out. The caller has three more numbers on the same search page and no particular reason to prefer yours. By the time you hear the voicemail — if they left one, and most do not — the job belongs to somebody else.

This is the agent that stops that. It rings your mobile first, because if you can answer, you should. If you cannot, it answers, takes the details in a plain voice, and writes them down where you will see them. The caller has a text from you before they have dialled the next number.

What happens, in order

  1. 01

    The call comes in

    It rings your mobile for twenty seconds, exactly as it does now. If you pick up, the agent never runs and you never hear from it. Nothing about your day changes on the calls you can take.

  2. 02

    The agent answers

    It gives the firm's name and asks three things: what the job is, where it is, and when they need it. It does not pretend to be a person, and it does not quote. Quoting is yours.

  3. 03

    The details get written down

    Name, number, postcode, job, urgency. One row on the job sheet, one line in your inbox, one text to your phone. The same five facts in all three, so there is nothing to reconcile later.

  4. 04

    The caller gets a text

    Inside a minute, in your name. We missed you, here is what we do, reply here and we will ring back. Most people answer that text rather than carry on down the list.

  5. 05

    You ring back knowing something

    You are not returning a blank missed call. You know the job, the address and whether it can wait until Thursday.

  6. 06

    Nothing gets quietly lost

    A sweep runs every five minutes and picks up anything the telephony provider failed to hand over. A call that neither of you answered appears on the sheet as a miss, rather than not appearing at all.

What it is built from

Named parts, not a black box.

  • Docker

    One compose file per client, version-controlled. Everything below runs inside it.

  • n8n, self-hosted

    The drawing above, as nodes you can watch run. You get a login on day one.

  • Python 3.12

    The workers: the five-minute sweep, the tidy-up of what the agent heard, and the writes to the sheet.

  • cron

    Two schedules on this workflow. The sweep, and the Monday morning summary.

  • Telephony

    Twilio, or your existing provider if it has an API worth the name. The number, the twenty-second fork to your mobile, and the text-back all sit here.

  • A voice model

    Answers, listens, asks its three questions, stops. Not a chatbot with a phone line attached.

  • Google Sheets

    The job sheet. Anything a person needs to read during the working day lives here, because everyone can already read a spreadsheet.

  • The warehouse

    Still to be chosen — product name to be confirmed. Every call, every miss, every callback, kept with its history so the monthly figures are countable rather than remembered.

How it is built, in order

From a bare machine to a live agent.

First line to last. Someone competent could follow this. That is the point of printing it.

Drawing NS-00. The box every agent runs in. The same host, the same compose file, the same n8n — which is why the fifth agent costs less to run than the first. HOST A spare PC, a NUC in the office, or a VPS DOCKER One compose file, version-controlled N8N WEBHOOK The drawing above, as nodes you can watch PYTHON 3.12 Workers for the jobs n8n should not do CRON CRON Anything on a clock rather than a trigger DATA LAYER Sheets to read, warehouse for history YOUR TOOLS Phone, email, diary, accounts, ads HEALTH CHECK CRON Heartbeat out every two minutes
NS-00The box every agent runs in. The same host, the same compose file, the same n8n — which is why the fifth agent costs less to run than the first.
  1. 01

    The box it runs in

    Docker on the host. That host is a spare PC in the office, a NUC on a shelf, or a VPS at about five pounds a month — whichever you already have. One docker-compose.yml per client, kept in version control, brought up with docker compose up -d. If the machine dies, the same file on a new machine puts everything back.

  2. 02

    Inside the container

    Python 3.12, and only the libraries this workflow actually needs: requests for the telephony API, gspread for the job sheet, and python-dateutil for the working-hours logic. cron goes in the same image for anything that runs on a clock rather than on a trigger.

  3. 03

    The cron jobs

    This workflow needs two. */5 * * * * sweeps for calls the webhook did not deliver, because telephony webhooks fail quietly and a silent failure here is a lost job. 0 7 * * 1 sends the Monday morning summary: calls taken, calls missed, callbacks made. The full list we run on an agent, and what breaks when each one is missing, is written up in the cron jobs worth setting up for an agent.

  4. 04

    n8n

    Self-hosted, in the same compose file. This is where the drawing above stops being a drawing: every box is a node, and every arrow is a connection you can click. You get a login and can watch a call move through it in real time. We would rather you looked than took our word for it.

  5. 05

    Credentials and accounts

    Every account is opened in your name, on your card, with us added as a partner. Not ours with you as a guest. If you want us gone, you remove us in one click and everything keeps running. That is the arrangement, and it is a selling point rather than a footnote.

  6. 06

    The data layer

    Google Sheets for the job sheet, because a person has to read it between jobs. The warehouse — to be confirmed — for anything with history: every call, every miss, every callback, every recording reference. Sheets is for today. The warehouse is for the question you will ask in March about last October.

  7. 07

    Wiring the phone in

    In this order, because each step needs the one before it. The number first, ported or new. Then the fork to your mobile with the twenty-second timeout. Then the voice agent on the far side of that timeout. Then the text-back on the same number, so the message comes from the number they rang. Then the write to the sheet. Then the alert to you. Testing the text-back before the number is live tests nothing.

  8. 08

    Testing on real calls before hand-over

    We ring it ourselves from four or five different phones, including one with a bad line, and we get somebody who is not us to ring it too. It has to answer in under six rings, get the postcode right, write one row rather than two, and text back inside sixty seconds. It has to do all of that on ten consecutive calls. Until it does, it is not finished and we do not invoice.

See it working

  • Recording of a real call

    A thirty-second clip of the agent taking a job, with the client's permission and the caller's.

  • The job sheet

    A screenshot of a real week, with names removed.

  • The text as the caller sees it

    A photograph of the phone, not a mock-up.

What this one costs

Installed Built, connected to the tools you already use, tested on your real jobs, handed over working. £500 one-off
Maintained Monitoring, fixes, and changes as the business changes. A named person to ring. £50 per month

You get that number before anything starts, not after. If it is not the number you were expecting, say so then — it is a much cheaper conversation than the one at the end.

Book the survey Everything else it costs