How do I answer every lead within an hour?

Why this happens

Most leads are not lost on price. They are lost because nobody answered while the customer was still looking. You are on a roof, under a sink or with another customer, the email sits, and by the evening they have booked whoever got back to them first.

Checking email between jobs does not fix it. Every enquiry interrupts the work in front of you, so replies get rushed or put off until tonight. And a caller with an urgent job who hits voicemail often does not leave a message. They ring the next company on the list.

There is a fair worry about AI here too: customers dislike bots that pretend to be the business. This setup does not do that. It does not answer your phone and it does not talk to anyone as you. It reads your inbox, writes drafts and tells you who to call. You still send every reply.

How to fix it in 20 minutes

All you need is a paid Claude plan and the email account your leads already arrive in. No new app, no new inbox.

1. Write down how you answer today. The three or four questions you always ask, how you sign off, and the link or number people use to book. That is what Claude copies.
2. Connect Claude to your work email. It reads your mail and saves drafts. It never sends on its own.
3. Show it what a lead looks like. Website form notifications, quote requests, referrals, people asking if you do a certain job. Tell it what to ignore too: suppliers, invoices, newsletters.
4. Ask for a one-line summary of each lead. Some enquiries run long, especially ones a customer wrote with an AI tool. One line on top (who, what job, where, how urgent) lets you decide in seconds.
5. Have it draft every reply in your voice and flag the ones that need you. An emergency, a big job, an unhappy past customer, or anything it is unsure about gets flagged for a call.
6. Run it every hour and approve from your phone. Open the draft, fix a word if you need to, press send.

Here is the kind of instruction the agent runs on each hourly check:

Check my inbox for new enquiries from the last hour. For each one, give me a one-line summary, then save a draft reply in my voice that asks my usual questions and includes my booking link. Flag anything urgent or unusual for me to call. Do not send anything.

One exception: leads from marketplaces like Thumbtack or Angi go to several pros at once, and the others reply fast. An hourly check is too slow for those, so keep that app's notifications on and answer them as they come in. Let the agent cover everything that lands in your inbox.

Do it with a free kit

The lead agent kit is one of our five free kits. You walk out with an agent that finds the leads already sitting unanswered in your inbox, then checks every hour and has a draft reply waiting for you on each new one.