Mark runs a plumbing business with two junior plumbers working alongside him. Most of their work comes from local referrals and people searching for a reliable plumber nearby, which means the phone is constantly ringing throughout the day with new enquiries.
For years, that phone number went directly to Mark.
That worked well enough when the business was smaller, but as the workload grew it started to create a familiar pattern. Mark would be halfway through a job — tracing a leak, replacing a tap, helping one of the juniors on site — and the phone would ring in his pocket. Sometimes he could answer it, but often he couldn't.
By the end of the day, those missed calls would still be waiting.
Most evenings finished the same way: sitting in the van or at the kitchen table, working through voicemails and returning calls to see who still needed help.
““You'd listen to the message, try to understand what the problem was, then call them back and hope they still needed a plumber,” Mark says. “Sometimes they did. Sometimes they'd already sorted it.”
It wasn't unusual for that catch-up to take half an hour or more, another thing to juggle alongside having a young family. And when you're running a small team, missed calls often mean missed work for the days ahead.
Mark had no interest in handing his phone over to a call centre. Plumbing jobs are often described in messy, half-finished sentences, and he wanted whoever answered the phone to understand what customers were actually trying to explain.
What he needed was simpler: a way for every call to be answered and recorded clearly so he could deal with it once he was free.
After setting up Clara, the business line stopped going to voicemail. When someone calls, they're greeted by a receptionist who asks a few straightforward questions — what the issue is, where the property is located, and how the plumber can reach them back.
Those details are logged automatically and appear as a summary Mark can review when he finishes the job he's on.
Instead of listening through voicemails to piece together what happened, he can see at a glance who called, what they need, and whether it's urgent.
““Before Clara, the phone was something you had to catch up with later. Every single day.”
For a business that spends most of its time out on jobs rather than behind a desk, that shift has made the phone feel less like an interruption and more like part of the workflow.
“Now everything's already there when I look.”
