We called 11 San Antonio plumbers. Seven could come out, five of them today, and one named a price.

How to read this

Six phrases carry the piece, and the first two are the ones a reader is most likely to swap.

• Recorded as completed: the status on the call row in our own database. Nine of the eleven calls carry it. It is not a human count, and one of the nine is a voicemail box that took a message.
• Reached a person: a human at the provider’s end spoke, read from that call’s own summary. Eight of the eleven. This is smaller than the status count above, and it is the number that describes the job.
• Held the conversation: the person stayed on the line long enough to answer the two questions. Seven of the eight people who spoke did. The eighth (call 4) picked up the phone and the call ended in nineteen seconds, before anything was exchanged.
• Said they could come: the product’s availability field was set to true because the provider said so during the call. Seven calls, and they are the same seven that held the conversation. That is a coincidence this post has to explain, because a reader will read two identical rows as a mistake.
• Same-day window: a provider gave a time they could be there on that Friday. Five of the seven who could come did. The other two offered Monday.
• Named a figure: a provider said a dollar amount out loud. One of the eleven did. It is not a price for the job and this post does not average it against anything.

The claim being tested

The search phrase for this job was emergency plumber toilet clog, and the job was marked as soon as possible. That is the most demanding request the product takes: a homeowner with a blocked toilet who wants somebody today, searching with the word emergency in the query. The two questions underneath it are always the same, and only one of them turned out to be answerable over the phone. What follows is what eleven emergency plumbing listings on the north side of San Antonio actually answered at 8:27 on a Friday morning.

Twenty listings came back from the search. Eleven were dialled, which is a choice rather than a limit: this job did not dial the whole list. The nine that were not called are part of the denominator here and appear in the funnel and the arithmetic, because “eleven called” means nothing without “twenty found”.

The eleven calls, one by one

Everything below reconciles to this table. No provider is named: the recordings carry business names, the homeowner’s street address and a callback number, so the call numbers are the identifiers here. The “Confirmed” column is the product’s own availability field, not our reading of the transcript: Yes is a provider who said they could come, and None is a call that never produced an answer either way. In the price column, None means nothing was said about money at all and No figure means a provider addressed the price without naming one, which is not the same answer.

Two things to note before the summary. There is no No in the Confirmed column: nobody refused the job, and nobody who held the conversation hedged. And the six No figure cells are not six silences. Every one of those six addressed the price directly and said a plumber has to see the job first, which is a specific answer, not an evasion.

The nine calls our own records called completed

This is not the headline finding, but it is the first trap in the numbers. Nine of the eleven calls carry a status of completed in the Boocki database. Eight of those nine reached a person. The ninth was a voicemail box that accepted a message, and it counts as completed because the call had a result and something was delivered on it, which is what that field is for.

Nine decomposes exactly: eight calls where a person spoke, and one voicemail box that took a message. Call 4 is the one to read twice. A person answered, said their name, and the call ended nineteen seconds in, before the agent had asked either question. A board that counted that as a conversation would overstate this job by one; a board that counted the voicemail as one would overstate it by two.

The funnel

The same eleven calls, narrowed eight times. Every row is the sum of rows in the master table above, and the “Calls” column says which, so nothing here is an orphan number.

Read the two rows that are identical. “Held the conversation” and “Said they could come” are both seven, and they are the same seven calls, because every person who stayed on the line long enough to answer the questions said yes to the first one. That is a real coincidence of this job rather than a copy-paste, and it will not hold on the next one. The only person who spoke and did not confirm was call 4, who was gone before the question was asked.

The seven who said they could come

All seven people who held the conversation said they could come out. That is not the same as seven appointments: nothing was booked, and what a provider offers on the phone is an intention, not a slot on a calendar. What makes the seven useful is the second half of the answer, the time they attached to the yes. Five put that Friday on the table. Two said Monday.

Five of seven is the useful number for a homeowner who searched with the word emergency. It means a majority of the local lines Boocki reached could put somebody on the job before the end of the day, even though asked on a Friday morning with no notice. The two who could not were not refusing the job, they were describing a full schedule, which is the honest failure mode of a good provider rather than a bad one.

The one figure anybody named

One provider of the eleven said a dollar amount out loud. Asked what it would cost to clear a toilet, and told that the homeowner could come that afternoon at the earliest, the person on call 6 looked at the schedule, gave a window of 1 to 3, and then said:

Looks like two hundred. To start.

That is a starting price and not a price for the job. It is the first number on a bill whose total a provider cannot know until they see whether the clog clears with an auger or needs the toilet pulled, which is exactly what the other six said when the same question reached them. Call 8 put that rule into a sentence better than we could:

We do not ballpark. Plumbers will give the free quote.

Six of the seven who could come answered the price question by moving it to the visit. Two said the estimate itself is free. One said the office cannot quote at all. One said an on-site look is the only way to price a job whose size nobody can see from a phone. They are not six ways of dodging, they are the same structural answer, said six ways: for an emergency clog, the number a homeowner wants does not exist until somebody is in the room. Which makes call 6 the outlier, and makes the $200 a starting point rather than the price of the job.

The arithmetic

The job cost less than the one price it was quoted, which is the arithmetic of a search where six of seven price answers ended in “on site”: eleven calls, twelve minutes and fifty-seven seconds of talk, and a single figure that turned out to be a starting point.

The eleven durations sum to 777 seconds, which is the 12 min 57 s in the table: 2:00 + 0:00 + 0:02 + 0:19 + 1:42 + 2:19 + 1:24 + 1:20 + 0:54 + 1:50 + 1:07. The $3.88 is the ledger row this job settled to, not a sum of per-minute estimates, and it covers the nine calls a person or a voicemail answered rather than all eleven. The other three rows are that same money divided by eleven calls, by the eight calls that reached a person, and by the five calls that offered a same-day window.

What we would change next time

• Dial the whole list. Twenty listings came back and eleven were called, so nine providers were never asked. The denominator of this post should have been twenty, and the same-day count is the number that would have moved most if the other nine had been dialled.
• Ask “what does the visit cost if nothing clears?” The one figure that arrived was on call 6, and it came with a “to start” attached. A sharper script would ask for the floor, the service call itself, rather than the open-ended price of the repair, because the floor is the only number that can be compared across providers.
• Report the human count, not the status count. Nine calls are marked completed and eight reached a person. The gap is one voicemail picked up by a status field that was built to record a delivered message, not a conversation, and a board built on the status column is measuring our own bookkeeping.
• Say the window before the price. Every provider who could come led with availability and only addressed money when asked. For an emergency request, the arrival time is the answer that decides whether the job is solved, and price is a detail that lands at the door.

Why publish the whole funnel

A summary that said “seven of eleven San Antonio plumbers said they could come” would be true and would hide the two facts that matter. The first is that only five of the seven could actually get there that day, which is the difference between a promise and a plan. The second is that six of the seven, asked the price, said the same thing: it is not knowable until a plumber is standing in the room, and the one number anybody said was a starting point, not a total. The value of calling eleven plumbers in one burst is not the single yes at the end of it. It is knowing how many lines were open, how many of the people on them would commit to a time, and how carefully a spoken price has to be read before you treat it as the price.