Electricians: You're Paying for Leads That Go Cold Before You Ring Back

Not every Checkatrade lead is the same value, and knowing the spread tells you exactly what you lose when you miss one.

As a rough guide to UK domestic work: socket or switch repairs might be £80–£200; a fault-finding call-out £100–£250; a new dedicated circuit £250–£600; an EV charger install £800–£1,200 depending on the consumer unit and cable run; a consumer unit upgrade £500–£1,000; and a full rewire £3,500–£7,000. These are illustrative figures, and your own prices will differ.

That's a wide spread between the cheapest job and the most expensive. One recovered consumer unit upgrade covers nearly two months of fees. One rewire covers the monthly fee for most of a year or more.

The high-value end of that list (consumer units, rewires, EV chargers) shares one thing: homeowners shop around for those jobs. They post on Checkatrade or MyBuilder, they ring two or three electricians, and they book the first one who responds with a competent intake. If you're the second callback, you're up against someone who already has the appointment in the diary.

A homeowner posts a consumer unit upgrade on Checkatrade at 7pm on a Tuesday. By 7:05pm, they've sent the same request to two other electricians. By 7:30pm, if nobody has replied, they've moved on, waiting until tomorrow, when whoever rings first gets the quote visit.

Consumer unit and EV charger leads go cold fast for two reasons. First, these jobs need a site visit to quote properly, so the homeowner knows they're inviting an electrician round, not just getting a price. They book the one who sounds worth letting into their home. Second, EV charger installs follow a purchase that has just happened (the homeowner bought the car), so urgency is high and patience is low. EV sales kept growing, according to the IEA's Global EV Outlook 2024, which means steady demand for home charger installs.

The electricians winning these jobs aren't necessarily the most skilled or the cheapest. They respond in minutes, ask one or two questions that show competence ('How old is your fuse board?'), and lock in the quote visit before the homeowner scrolls to the next tradesperson.

Speed plus a smart intake question beats price at this stage of the lead every time.

The first job of automated lead qualification is separating notifiable electrical work from minor jobs, because how you handle each one is completely different.

When a Checkatrade or MyBuilder lead comes in, the automated response goes out within 60 seconds and starts by classifying the job type. The list we set up for electricians covers: consumer unit work (upgrades and replacements), new circuits, rewires, EV charger installation, socket and switch repairs, lighting, and emergency or safety calls. The first three categories are notifiable under Part P of the Building Regulations, should be done and certified by a competent person such as an NICEIC or NAPIT registered electrician, and need a site visit before pricing. Leads in those categories are routed to you with an alert for personal follow-up and quote booking.

The second filter is scope. 'Replace a single socket' is not the same job as 'add three sockets in my garage conversion.' The conversion likely needs a new circuit, is notifiable, and needs your eyes on the consumer unit. The automated intake asks enough to tell the difference before anything lands in your calendar.

Simple repairs, such as like-for-like socket and switch replacements where no new wiring is needed, get booked straight into your calendar with a confirmed time slot. These are the jobs where speed to appointment is the whole competitive edge: the homeowner wants it fixed, price is secondary, and whoever books first wins.

The notifiable-work logic keeps you on the right side of the regulations while making sure you never miss the £1,000 job because the intake wasn't built for trades.

After-hours electrical emergency calls are triaged on two tiers: safety hazards go to you immediately, everything else is captured and scheduled.

When a homeowner rings after hours about an electrical problem, the automated response starts with safety screening. If the caller describes a burning smell, sparking sockets, visible arcing, or loss of power to the whole house with no clear cause, the system flags it as a possible safety emergency and alerts you immediately, by text and call, with the caller's name, number and what they described. You decide whether to attend. Those situations should not wait.

Single-circuit faults ('my garage sockets stopped working', 'the RCD keeps tripping and won't reset', 'half my kitchen has no power') are higher in volume and lower in immediate danger. These calls get a full after-hours intake that records the issue, confirms the address and postcode, and offers the first available morning slot. The homeowner gets a response, feels heard, and doesn't ring your competitor while you're asleep.

The distinction matters for two reasons. First, you don't want every 11pm call waking you up, but you do want the ones that could be fire hazards. Second, tripping circuits are often the way in to consumer unit or wiring work. A £150 fault-finding visit can turn into a consumer unit upgrade. Capturing those at midnight instead of losing them to voicemail adds up fast over a year.

Automated 60-second response converts platform leads at a meaningfully higher rate than manual follow-up, because the window to book an electrical lead is measured in minutes, not hours.

Here's the maths with stated assumptions. Say you get 10 paid leads a month from MyBuilder, Rated People or Checkatrade. With manual follow-up averaging three to four hours, a realistic booking rate for electrical work is around 20–25%. That's two to three booked jobs from the same lead spend.

Lead response research shows that responding within five minutes outperforms a 30-minute response by multiples, not percentage points. Assume automated 60-second response pushes booking rate towards 40–45%: four to five jobs from the same leads.

Applied to an average job value of £600 (a cautious midpoint across a typical mix of work), two extra recovered jobs a month is £1,200. Plans start from £497 a month, depending on your business size, so a starting plan is covered by one mid-value job. The second is extra margin.

These are stated assumptions, not promised outcomes. Your job mix and lead volume will vary. But the direction holds: the first electrician to respond wins a disproportionate share of every high-value job type.

The intake we set up for electricians isn't a generic 'describe your problem' form. It's a job-type list built for the electrical trade, because the right next step for a consumer unit upgrade is completely different from the right next step for a tripping RCD.

Job type is the first question in the automated response: consumer unit, new circuit, rewire, EV charger, socket or switch, lighting, or emergency. That single answer routes the lead correctly before anyone gets involved.

For notifiable categories, the intake confirms the address, asks how old the consumer unit is if the homeowner knows, and records what prompted the call. That context arrives in your alert so you're briefed before you ring back.

For EV charger leads, the intake asks the age of the consumer unit, the main fuse rating if known, and whether the homeowner knows an upgrade might be needed. This pre-qualifies the scope and surfaces the extra work before your first conversation.

Service area settings limit automatic booking to your postcodes. Opening hours settings decide when calls go to emergency triage and when they go to next-morning booking.

You don't set any of this up yourself. We build it, test it against real incoming leads, and adjust after the first two weeks based on what's actually coming in.

Let's keep this direct.

A consumer unit upgrade at the middle of a typical range is around £750. Two of those in a month is £1,500 in revenue. Monthly plans start from £497 a month, depending on the size of the business. At the starting price, those two jobs cover the monthly fee more than three times over.

Over a year: if the system books one extra consumer unit upgrade a month that you would otherwise have lost to slow follow-up, that's 12 × £750 = £9,000 recovered against a year of monthly fees, with plans starting from £497 a month. We confirm the exact price after a free call. You don't need to be a maths person to see the return.

And that's only counting consumer units. EV charger installs, rewires and the steady flow of socket and circuit jobs add up on top.

You're live in 48 hours, and we set it up and run it for you. You don't touch dashboards or settings; you just get the booked jobs and the alerts.