Capturing Missed Leads with Nicole Rivera from Jill’s Office | F&D Mastery Podcast #41

Jill's Office is a US-based (Utah) live answering service founded roughly nine to ten years ago after co-founder Brent saw his contractor brother routinely miss calls; the receptionists are all called 'jills' and the service now runs essentially 24/7.

Their research found the average business owner misses about 2.5 calls a day — roughly 15 a week and around 234 new leads a year — a painful, self-inflicted waste given how much contractors spend on marketing to generate those calls.

Missing calls is a vicious cycle: owners on job sites don't answer, follow up hours later, and discover the lead already hired a competitor, so 24/7 coverage (especially for businesses running ads) is a real competitive edge.

Qualifying leads is built into the call instructions — clients can set hard budget floors or softer qualifying questions (e.g. stating a typical deck project range) so jills weed out $500 repair calls when the contractor only builds large decks.

Jills work from an organized on-screen system of call instructions and FAQs rather than memorization, with account managers and script specialists structuring each account; high-volume clients' details naturally get memorized over time.

Great customer service is trainable, not innate — Jill's Office coaches smiling on every call (they once handed out mirrors), avoiding negative phrases like 'I don't know,' and de-escalating angry callers so clients never have to deal with them.

A new-this-year Lead Zap feature uses Zapier to auto-initiate outbound calls to Facebook and Google ad form leads within minutes, and a beta text-back feature plus AI answering are being added to manage queue spikes and cut costs.

Pricing is package-based on minute usage — the smallest published package is 300 minutes at $810/month ($1.95/minute after) — which is far cheaper than hiring and training a full-time US customer-service employee with payroll taxes.

A key differentiator Alex highlights: because jills answer 24/7, contractors can extend their Google Business hours and avoid losing after-hours leads to competitors who appear 'open' later, so the service often quickly pays for itself.