AI phone assistants in trade software: a reality check at four plumbing and heating companies

Over the past few months, many software vendors for the German plumbing, heating and air-conditioning trade (known in Germany as SHK) have stepped up. An AI phone assistant is now available as an add-on module or as a connected partner solution. The marketing promise: switch it on, done, never miss a call again.

I wanted to know what that looks like in everyday life. So I did two things. First, I researched what today’s common trade software can actually do. Second, I called four plumbing and heating companies that verifiably have an AI phone assistant. I talked to their staff about how they use it.

The result surprised me. At three of the four companies, the assistant is just a better answering machine. The fourth one switched it off again.

Key takeaways:

Most widely used software for plumbing and heating businesses now offers an AI phone assistant, either built in or through a connected partner.
Of the four companies I talked to, one has switched its assistant off again. At the other three, it answers calls and notes what the caller wants. Every caller still gets a call back.
The reason is rarely the technology alone. Mostly, nobody has had the time to set the assistant up properly.
Whether your assistant really takes work off your plate comes down to a single number: how many callers does your office still have to call back afterwards?

Software for plumbing, heating and HVAC: which programs have an AI phone assistant

The overview below is based on public vendor information and trade press, as of October 2026. The market is moving fast right now. What’s missing today may be there in three months.

Software	AI phone assistant	Detects emergencies
pds	connected via partner	yes
Label (Labelwin)	own add-on module	not publicly documented
KWP (bnWin)	connected via partner	depends on partner
mfr	connected via partner	depends on partner
Taifun	via partner from the same group of companies	yes
M-SOFT	connected via partner	yes
HERO	own module	yes, by rule
ToolTime	own module	yes, forwards to an emergency number
plancraft	own module	not publicly documented
Das Programm	not found	–
STREIT V.1	none of its own, vendor refers to external providers	–
Sander & Doll	not found	–

“Connected via partner” means: a specialized provider supplies the phone assistant, and an interface links it to your software. The best known in the German trades are Hey Telo and HalloPetra. HalloPetra lists more than 20 connected trade software programs.

In short: the technology is there. The interesting question is how much of it actually reaches the businesses.

I called four plumbing and heating companies: how the AI phone assistant is really used

I found these companies through vendor reference pages and trade press reports. So these are businesses held up as good examples. I’m not naming the companies. I’m not trying to expose anyone. It’s about the pattern.

Company 1: An answering machine with a friendly voice (M-SOFT and Kiki). The company works with the trade software M-SOFT. Calls are answered by the AI assistant Kiki, a small provider’s product. It isn’t connected to M-SOFT. It answers calls and writes down what they’re about. The office then calls back. The employee was convinced there’s no connected phone assistant for M-SOFT. But there is. HalloPetra explicitly lists M-SOFT as a core integration, and HalloPetra belongs to the same group of companies as M-SOFT.

Company 2: Switched off again. This company is named as a customer on a provider’s website. On the phone, I was told: no longer in use, they weren’t satisfied. The person I spoke to didn’t want to go into detail.

Company 3: The connection is glitchy, and nobody has time for it (Taifun and HalloPetra). The company uses the trade software Taifun and the AI assistant Petra from HalloPetra. Both belong to the same group of companies. Even so, Petra basically runs as an answering machine here. The connection to Taifun is causing problems. Petra could do more, I was told. But nobody has gotten around to it yet.

Company 4: Built right into the software, and still everyone gets a call back (Labelwin and IDA). This company works with Labelwin from Label. The phone assistant IDA is built right in, as the vendor’s own add-on module. It recognizes existing customers by their number and takes down the address. That’s already a lot more. Even so, the staff still have to call every caller back afterwards. The assistant can’t make outgoing calls on its own.

Four conversations aren’t a study. But the pattern is clear: available doesn’t mean it’s working.

Why the AI phone assistant often stays an answering machine in trade businesses

From my experience with my own phone AI projects, I see three main reasons. This is my assessment, not the result of a survey.

Switching it on isn’t setting it up. A phone assistant needs decisions only the business can make. What counts as an emergency for you? Can the assistant book appointments, and if so, which ones? What does it say when someone asks about prices? What happens when it doesn’t know something? As long as nobody decides this, the assistant can only do one thing: write it down and pass it on.

It’s nobody’s job. In the office of a plumbing and heating company with ten people, there’s no IT person. The office staff have enough on their plate with quotes, invoices and the phone. The owner is out on a job site. So the assistant keeps running the way it was switched on on day one. A 2025 study by HERO and Statista fits this picture: more than half of the construction trade businesses surveyed name a lack of technical know-how as the biggest obstacle to automation.

Nobody checks what the assistant does. A phone assistant makes mistakes you can’t hear. It notes a wrong number, files an emergency under the wrong category, or spells a name differently than the caller spelled it out. I described how such errors happen in my post on AI phone agents making up data. If nobody ever reads the call logs, you only notice when a customer complains.

What an AI phone assistant for a plumbing and heating business should at least be able to do

An assistant that only takes notes is an expensive answering machine. To really take work off your office, in my view it should be able to do at least six things:

Answer questions about services and products. Do you install heat pumps? Do you also come after hours? Do you do complete bathroom remodels? The assistant should answer questions like these itself, without anyone having to call back.
Take callback requests along with what the caller needs. If a person is needed after all, there’s a clean note in the system: who, which number, what it’s about, how urgent.
Transfer calls to a person and take them back. If the caller wants to speak to a human, the assistant puts them through. If nobody picks up, it takes the call back and keeps looking after the caller itself. The technical term is warm transfer. That way, the caller never ends up in a void.
Book appointments. The assistant puts the maintenance or site-visit appointment straight into the calendar. No callback, no back-and-forth.
Call customers proactively to book appointments. For example, all customers whose heating maintenance is due.
Follow up on quotes. A short call after a week or two to see if there are any open questions.

Answering questions, taking callback requests and booking appointments are covered on paper by many of the solutions in the overview. The question is whether that’s set up at your business. Some solutions can transfer calls, at least in emergencies. Whether the assistant takes the call back when nobody answers isn’t publicly described by any of the vendors. Ask about it before you decide. Calling customers proactively and following up practically isn’t offered by any trade software so far. More on that below.

How to tell whether your AI phone assistant really takes work off your plate

There’s one simple number that tells you. How many callers does your office have to call back after the assistant has talked to them? If the answer is “almost all of them,” the assistant is just shifting your work. People can reach you more easily. But you’re hardly saving any time.

A well set-up assistant handles part of the calls itself. It puts the maintenance appointment straight into the calendar. It answers the question about opening hours. It recognizes the real emergency and puts it through. The office then only has to call back in the cases that really need a person.

If you already have an assistant, go through these questions once:

Can your assistant book appointments, and is that switched on at your business? For several programs, booking appointments is part of the feature set. Whether it’s being used is another question.
What counts as an emergency for you, and does the assistant know that? A heating failure in January is something different from a dripping faucet.
What does it say when someone asks about prices? You should set the answer here rather than leave it to chance.
Does it say at the beginning that it’s an AI? Under EU rules, that has been mandatory since August. What exactly applies is in my post on AI labeling rules.
Who reads the call logs regularly? If the answer is “nobody,” you don’t know what your assistant is telling your customers.
What actually ends up in your software after the call? Check the saved record, not just the conversation. Are name, number and request correct?

If you don’t have an assistant yet, ask your software vendor first. There may well be a solution for your program that you don’t know about. That’s exactly what happened at one of the four companies.

What no plumbing and heating software can do yet: maintenance calls, quote follow-ups, job status

For all the progress, there are tasks I didn’t find in any of the solutions. All the assistants in the overview answer calls. Practically none of them can make calls on their own. Yet that’s exactly where the tasks are that pile up in the office:

Booking maintenance appointments: calling customers with a maintenance contract and scheduling the appointment right away. One vendor has announced this. It wasn’t available yet when I did my research.
Following up on quotes: checking in with the customer after two weeks to see if there are any open questions about the quote.
Confirming appointments the day before: so the technician doesn’t end up in front of a locked door.
Giving job status updates: “When is the technician coming?” is one of the most common questions in a plumbing and heating office. No vendor advertises that its assistant can answer it from the job data.

If you want to handle these tasks today, you need an assistant that isn’t tied to the limits of a software module.

Your own AI phone assistant instead of a software module: the advantages

There’s an alternative to the software vendor’s module: your own phone assistant, set up for your business and connected to your systems. That’s how I work in my projects. A software module is a product for thousands of businesses. It can only do what the vendor has planned for everyone. Your own assistant can do what your business needs.

The advantages in detail:

You decide how the conversation goes. Which questions does the assistant ask, in which order, in what tone? What does it say about prices, emergencies, your service area? You decide, not a vendor for all its customers.
It can do more than answer and take notes. Warm transfer with take-back, booking maintenance appointments by phone, following up on quotes, confirming appointments the day before. Everything the modules can’t do so far can be set up.
It connects several systems. Not just the trade software, but also your calendar, your email inbox and the inquiries from your website. For example, the caller gets a confirmation by email right after the call.
You can step in when something isn’t right. An answer sounds clunky, a follow-up question is missing? With your own assistant, that gets adjusted the same day. With the module, you wait until the vendor ships an update.
You see what it does. Every call can be read back and analyzed. How many calls did it handle, how many did it pass on? Where do callers hang up? Which questions keep coming up? These numbers make the assistant better month by month.
Errors get caught before they end up in your data. Your own assistant can get checkpoints. If a real callback number is missing, for example, no record is created. Why that matters is something I describe in my post on AI phone agents making up data.
You stay independent. If you switch trade software at some point, the assistant stays. It just gets connected again.

But there’s also a catch, and it belongs here. Your own assistant needs an interface to your trade software. Cloud programs like HERO offer such an interface openly; ToolTime and plancraft have one in beta. For the classic programs like Taifun, Labelwin, M-SOFT, pds or Sander & Doll, I didn’t find a publicly documented interface. There, your own assistant tends to work through the calendar, the email inbox and tasks instead of writing directly into the software. Whether that’s enough for your business is something to clarify together beforehand.

And one more thing: your own assistant takes more setup than one click in the software menu. It needs someone who sets it up and checks in regularly. But that’s exactly why, in the end, it gets more done than an answering machine.

How a phone assistant can handle incoming calls at a plumbing and heating company in general is covered in my post on the AI phone assistant for HVAC and plumbing.

My conclusion

My take: I advise every plumbing and heating business owner to use the full range of what their phone assistant can do. Only then do you get the real value out of it: noticeably more time in the office and better service for your customers.

The good news from my conversations: at many plumbing and heating businesses, the technology is already there. It’s paid for, it’s connected, it picks up. What’s missing is the step from answering machine to an assistant that actually gets things done. That step isn’t about new software. It’s about whether someone takes the time to tune the assistant to the business and to check now and then what it’s doing.

If you’d like to know what your phone assistant really does today and what it could do, let’s take a look together. We’ll also figure out whether your software’s module is enough or whether your own assistant is worth it for you. Send me a message and we’ll set up a time.

Sources (as of October 2026): Vendor information from Label, HERO interface, ToolTime, HalloPetra and pds; trade press in Handwerksblatt and at Für-Gründer.de; study by HERO and Statista; STREIT; interface overview at Förster Digital.