Missed-call recovery for UK service businesses

Every call you can't take is a customer somebody else is about to get.

You're up a ladder, under a car, or halfway through a colour. The phone goes and you can't get to it — and by the time you can, they've rung the next name on Google. First Reply texts them back in ten seconds, finds out what they need, and hands you the details.

Live in 7 days · Your number never changes · 4 clients a month

Time since the call 07724 ••• 918
00:00
Missed call
Hi, sorry we missed you — we're on a job. What's the problem and whereabouts are you?Sent automatically · 10s
Slates have come off the back roof and water's coming into the bedroom. Can someone come today?38s
That sounds urgent — I'll get someone to you today. What's the best number?44s
Job: slipped slates, water ingress Urgency: today — water coming in
Built for RoofersHeating engineersElectriciansGarages SalonsDental practicesVetsRemovalsBuilders

See it

Thirty four seconds. That's the whole product.

A customer rings while you're working. You never touch your phone. This is what they see.

0:00The call comes in and you can't take it. Nothing changes about your phone or your number — it stays exactly as it is.
0:10They get a text back before they've had time to open Google again. That ten seconds is the whole game.
0:25It asks what the job is and where they are, and keeps them talking while you finish what you're doing.
0:34You finish what you were doing and come back to a job, an address and a phone number — not a missed call from a number you don't recognise.

The arithmetic

Two missed calls a week is a month of work a year.

Not a projection. Just the multiplication almost nobody sits down and does.

Calls missed a week
8
Never ring back
6
Would have booked
1–2
Over a year
60–100

Multiply that by whatever one customer is worth to you. It rarely comes out small.

How it works

Set up once, on your existing number.

The markers are seconds, because seconds are the only thing this measures.

0 SECONDS

The call goes unanswered

Your line forwards to us only when you're busy, out of hours, or don't pick up. Your published number never changes and nothing about your phone is different.

10 SECONDS

They get a real reply

A text goes out before they've reopened Google. It says who you are, that you're on a job, and asks what they need — in your words, not a robot's.

40 SECONDS

You get the job, not a missed call

It captures the work, the address and the urgency, flags anything that's an emergency, and sends the lot to your phone as one message.

Field data · September 2026

We rang seven independent firms on a Wednesday afternoon.

Not a survey. We rang them the way a customer with a leak would, let it ring out, hung up, and started a timer. Here's what came back.

Firms rung
7
14:31–14:51, midweek
Answered the phone
1
one in seven
Fastest callback
20 min
the best of the day
Never rang back at all
4
still silent hours later

How we did it, so you can check us. Every number came off the firm's own website. One call each, no voicemail left, nothing said. The only thing measured was how long the phone took to ring back. No business is named and none ever will be — the point isn't to embarrass anyone. Every one of them was almost certainly mid-job, which is exactly the problem. This first round was roofing firms; the audit is running across other sectors now and these figures move as we work down the list.

What's included

Set up once, on your own number. Then it just runs.

Pricing

No quote needed. Here it is.

One fee to build and install it. One monthly fee to keep it running. No lock-in, cancel any time.

The full system

£1,500 one-off setup
£300–500 per month, on call volume · starts day 31
  • Built, installed and tested on your own number in 7 days
  • Written to how you actually talk, not a template
  • Unlimited enquiries — no per-message charges
  • Changes whenever you want them, at no extra cost
  • A monthly note of what came in and what it was worth
Book a 20-minute call

What it costs you not to

Six enquiries a week never ring back. Here is a year of them — one mark each.

78 would have booked 234 just went quiet
£500
£39,000 walked to somebody else this year

Drag it. Whatever number you land on, it was work you had already won and never knew about.

If First Reply doesn't capture a single genuine enquiry in your first 30 days, we refund the setup fee in full. You keep the transcripts either way.

Before you buy

The awkward bits, before you have to ask.

We'd rather you walked away now than a month in.

It tells people it's an assistant

It doesn't pretend to be you and it doesn't borrow a name to hide behind. It says it's the assistant, that you're on a job, and that it's taking the details. Customers don't mind a machine answering. They mind nobody answering.

You'd be one of the first

We're new. There's no row of logos on this page because there isn't one yet — the figures further up are our own research, not case studies. That's precisely why the setup fee is refundable and why it's four clients a month rather than forty.

The text arrives from a new number

UK landlines can't receive texts, so the reply goes out from a mobile number we set up alongside yours. Your published number doesn't change and nobody rings the new one — but it's what your customer sees the text come from, and you should hear that now rather than later.

It won't quote, and it won't promise a date

It captures what the job is, where they are and how urgent it sounds — that's the lot. It doesn't price work, doesn't commit you to a morning, and doesn't argue with anyone. Anything that reads like an emergency goes straight to your phone instead of being handled.

We don't record calls

Recording would mean announcing it at the start of every call, which is a quick way to lose the caller. You get the whole text conversation in writing instead — the part you'd actually use — and there's no audio sitting on a server waiting to become somebody's problem.

If you answer your phone, don't buy this

Plenty of businesses do pick up, or have someone on reception who does. If that's you, this is £1,500 for a problem you haven't got, and we'll tell you so on the call rather than take the money. The first thing we do is measure it — if the number comes back good, that's your answer.

Questions

The things every trade asks first.

Who's behind this

The ones who rang your competitors.

DD
Deniz
Duman
MF
Matthew
Fardoe

We're Deniz Duman and Matthew Fardoe, the two founders. Before we built a thing, we sat down with a list of independent firms and rang them one at a time — not selling anything, just timing how long it took somebody to ring a customer back. The answer was long enough that we built this.

We started First.Reply on one idea: no business should lose work simply because it was busy doing the work. A missed call isn't a missed call — it's somebody who needed you, didn't get through, and rang the next name down the page. Every figure above came off our own phones, not a report somebody else wrote.

A person, not a call centre — you get a mobile number and a name, and it's the same name every time you ring
The data is ours — every callback time on this page was rung, timed and written down by hand, and it's still going
We build every one ourselves — that's why it's four clients a month and not forty, and why you get a person on the phone rather than a ticket

Next step

Twenty minutes, on your own number.

No slides and no pitch. We set it up live on your phone so you can ring yourself and watch what a customer would get. If it's not obviously worth it by the end of the call, that's the end of it.