01
What is an AI receptionist for Fergus?
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Software that answers your business phone in a natural voice and works inside your Fergus account. It recognises customers from your Fergus contacts, writes new enquiries into Fergus, raises quote requests for you to price, books visits into your Fergus diary and files photos the customer sends onto the job. Talkify is an AI receptionist for Fergus, built in Christchurch for trades in New Zealand and Australia.
02
Is this the same as Fergus Assistant?
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No, and they are not competing with each other. Fergus Assistant is built into Fergus itself: you type at it and it helps you get through the admin, the jobs, the scheduling, the quotes and the invoices that are already in your account. It is very good at the paperwork and it is not a phone line. Talkify is the other half: it answers the call from the customer who is not in your account yet, works out what the job is, and writes it into Fergus for you. One helps you deal with the work you have got. The other makes sure you hear about the work you nearly missed. Plenty of businesses will run both, and nothing here asks you to choose.
03
Do I have to change my phone number?
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No. Talkify works by call forwarding from the number your customers already have, so nothing is ported and no hardware is installed. You choose when it picks up: always, only when you are already on a call, only when nobody answers within a few rings, or only outside your hours. On an Australian mobile the divert codes are set by your own provider rather than by us, and they differ between carriers, so ask yours for its call forwarding codes (the "busy" and "no answer" diverts are the two you want). It takes a few minutes and you can turn it off just as fast.
04
How does it connect to my Fergus account?
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Through Fergus's own API. You press Connect in Talkify, sign in with your usual Fergus login and approve the connection, the same way you would connect any app. We never see your Fergus password, there is no developer work and nothing to install, and you can revoke us from inside Fergus at any moment to cut the connection off at your end.
05
What actually lands in Fergus after a call?
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A new enquiry with the caller's name, phone number, the site address and a description of the job in the customer's own words, marked as having come from the phone. If the caller is already one of your customers, the agent recognises the number and greets them by name rather than treating them as a stranger. Where you switch them on, a quote request comes through as a job ready to price, and a booked visit goes onto your diary. A note of the call goes onto the customer record either way.
06
Can I pick which bits it does?
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Yes, and it is one question rather than a page of switches: what should the agent do when a caller wants work done. You can say always lodge it as an enquiry for the office, always book the visit in, always take it as a quote request, or let the agent work out which of those the caller actually needs. Whatever you pick is a rule the agent cannot talk itself out of, so a business that wants every job to come through as an enquiry gets exactly that, even when the caller pushes for a time. Recognising callers, answering "when is someone coming" and writing call notes back are separate from it and run either way. Change your answer and your agent is updated within a minute or two.
07
Will it double-book my team?
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No, because it reads before it writes. The agent reads what is already on your Fergus diary, keeps the travel time you set clear either side of an existing job, and offers only times inside the working hours and days you choose. It cannot invent a slot. Before it writes anything it re-checks that the time is still free, so a slot someone in the office took while the caller was still talking gets caught rather than double-booked.
08
Can customers send us photos of the job?
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Yes. When a photo would save a wasted trip, the agent offers to send the caller a link once the call has finished. If they say yes, it arrives by text or email a minute or two after they hang up and stays open for a week, so they can take photos or pick PDFs like an old invoice whenever suits them. Whatever they send lands on the enquiry, quote or job the call created in Fergus, and comes to you by email with the photos attached. Nobody gets a link they did not agree to: whether they said yes is read off the finished call, not left to the agent to remember.
09
Does it give people prices over the phone?
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No, and it is told in as many words not to. When someone wants a price, the agent takes the scope in detail and raises it in Fergus as a job with an unpriced quote on it, ready for you to price and send. Nothing goes to the customer until you send it.
10
Does it only answer after hours?
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That is the assumption most people start with, and the numbers say otherwise. In the call reports our trades customers have shared with us, the clear majority of calls the agent answers arrive during ordinary business hours, because the phone rings while the person who would pick it up is already on another call or up a ladder. One electrical contractor takes its heaviest volume at nine in the morning. It covers both: the overflow during the day and the calls that used to hit voicemail at night.
11
Can it deal with an emergency?
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It triages first and takes details second, which is the right order. On a leak it establishes whether the water is still running and whether the caller can isolate it. On a gas smell it tells them to leave the property and ring the emergency line before anything else. You set the rules for what counts as urgent, and those calls get warm-transferred to whoever is on call, with the context already gathered rather than starting from scratch.
12
What does it cost?
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Talkify business agents are $129/month at the founding rate for your first 3 months, then $199, including 200 minutes of calls, with extra minutes from 10c each. There is no setup fee, no per-call charge and no lock-in, so a flat-out week costs the same as a quiet one. That sits alongside whatever you already pay Fergus; we do not touch your Fergus subscription.
13
I use Tradify or ServiceM8, not Fergus.
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Talk to us anyway. The phone side is identical no matter what you run your jobs in, and what changes is only how the job gets across. Tradify, for example, gives every account an enquiries email address, so we can send the job straight into your Tradify enquiries inbox off the back of the call. Tell us what you use and we will tell you honestly what we can and cannot do with it.
14
Do you actually cover Australia, or is this a New Zealand product with an Australian page?
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We are a New Zealand company and we will not pretend otherwise, but the Australian side is real rather than a label. Your agent answers in an Australian voice on an Australian number, calls to it are handled in Australian data centres, and your plan is priced in Australian dollars. We run trade pages for Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide, the Gold Coast, Canberra, Newcastle, the Sunshine Coast and Hobart. Fergus itself runs trades on both sides of the Tasman, which is exactly why this connector does too. What you do not get from us is an Australian office, so if somebody in the same time zone as you is the deciding factor, that is a fair reason to buy elsewhere.
15
Where does my call data live?
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Calls to your Australian (+61) number are handled in Australian data centres and the recordings and transcripts stay there, under the Australian Privacy Principles. Audio, transcripts and call details are encrypted at rest with AES-256. There is no single trans-Tasman data residency law covering both countries, whatever you are told; what makes running across the two lawful is that each country's privacy law recognises the other as providing comparable protection. Those recordings are your customers' personal information, which makes them your responsibility rather than your supplier's, so ask any provider for the country in writing.
16
What if I am not on Fergus yet?
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Then none of this is a reason to switch. Talkify answers your phone, books into Google Calendar or Outlook, and texts you the summary regardless of what job software you run, or whether you run any at all. The Fergus connection just removes the retyping for the businesses that do use it.
