Property Manager Reports a Burst Pipe

Every enquiry read the moment it lands.

Gmail and Outlook are monitored around the clock. Direct emails, forwarded messages from property managers and agents, leads buried inside platform emails — Hermia reads each one, works out whether it's a genuine plumbing enquiry, and finds the actual person who needs help, even when the email came from a business on their behalf.

The filter is trade-specific — it's trained to recognise what a genuine plumbing enquiry actually looks like, not just scan for keywords. Invoices, alerts, marketing and newsletters are filtered out; so are enquiries that are clearly for a different trade entirely. Real leads never slip through. Attachments are opened and read, not just noted — a PDF work order from a property manager, a photo of a leaking pipe, a scanned job sheet: Hermia extracts the address, the issue, and any reference numbers straight out of the file, so nothing sits unread in an inbox waiting for someone to open it.

The lead receives a clean, branded email within moments — introduced as your digital assistant, under your name — with a unique Customer ID and one-tap buttons to continue on WhatsApp, pre-sorted by urgency.

Your trade's questions. Genuinely answered.

On WhatsApp — Hermia's own Meta-verified business number — the lead goes through a step-by-step qualification built for plumbing work: what's leaking, blocked or not working, where it is, whether water is actively running, whether it's been shut off at the mains or the fixture, since when, and what's already been tried.

If an answer is too vague to act on, Hermia doesn't shrug and move on. "The tap's broken" gets a reply naming exactly what's missing — and when the lead answers, it's merged with what they already said, so nobody repeats themselves. Nonsense and spam are filtered without a human ever seeing them. That same filter is what removes tire kickers: the unserious drop off at the first real question; the serious finish in minutes.

Active flooding, a gas smell, or no hot water at all escalates instantly. Urgency keywords cut through every queue — even a conversation Hermia had already wrapped up reopens itself the moment a customer comes back with a word like "emergency" or "urgent", so a genuine crisis is never left waiting behind a closed thread.

Booked against your actual calendar — not "we'll call you back."

This is where Hermia goes further than any intake bot. With Simpro, when the lead names their availability — "Tuesday morning" — Hermia pulls your actual staff list and your actual schedule from your CRM, scans the next 20 days, and works out which of your technicians is genuinely free at the time the customer asked for. Then it books the closest available match.

Every "today" and "tomorrow" Hermia works out is resolved in your technician's own timezone, not a generic default — so if you run crews across more than one state, a customer in Perth booking "tomorrow morning" is never accidentally scheduled against Sydney's clock.

The job is created, the technician is assigned, and the appointment lands on your CRM calendar as a real scheduled activity — exactly as if your best office admin had checked the whiteboard and pencilled it in. Your customer gets a confirmed time and the technician's name before the conversation ends. Your tech gets a booked job. Nobody plays phone tag. Simply put: with Simpro, we book the lead for you.

And the confirmation does more than name the tech. Your customer walks away with a direct line to the technician handling their job — sent automatically the moment it's booked, so they can reach the person actually turning up rather than chasing an office. If that technician has no mobile on file, it falls back to your business line, so a customer is never left without a way to reach you.

One setup note: Hermia reads that number straight from your technician's record in Simpro, so your staff's phone numbers need to be entered there — a mobile, or a work number at minimum. If a technician's number is missing, Hermia uses the business contact you provide at onboarding; if there's no number available anywhere, that technician simply can't be reached automatically.

A real estimate — from your rates, not a guess.

During onboarding, you set your pricing criteria — what a defect rectification, an inspection, or a callout roughly costs at your rates. When a qualified lead describes their situation, Hermia matches it against your tiers and gives them a real figure before the job is booked. The "how much roughly?" conversation happens without touching your office — and price shoppers reveal themselves before costing you a cent of admin.

If they accept: the agreed figure is logged on the job record — no confusion when the job hits your schedule. If they negotiate: they're handed straight to the negotiation contact you chose at onboarding, and you're told they're reaching out about pricing before they contact you. The job lands in your CRM either way.

Once they're yours, they stay yours.

Every lead keeps their Customer ID forever. The moment someone's been through qualification once, Hermia remembers exactly who they are — which of your customers they belong to, and what they needed last time. No re-qualifying, no re-typing, no duplicate record.

Picture this: six months after her hot water system was fixed, Jessica's kitchen tap starts leaking. She doesn't run a Google search. She doesn't message a competitor. She messages Hermia — the same number, the same assistant she trusted last time. Hermia recognises her instantly, pulls up her history, and within minutes sends the job straight back to you: "Jessica's lead is back." No admin, no chasing, no lost opportunity. That's Hermia acting as your own lead generator — quietly working in the background to keep every past customer coming back to you, and only you.

That's why Hermia isn't just an intake tool — it's an additional channel of leads that gets stronger every month it runs. Repeat business and referrals flow in with zero admin, and the lead stays completely yours: they talk to your assistant, under your name. Hermia stays invisible.

A finished conversation still listens for "emergency."

Once a lead's fully qualified, Hermia closes out that conversation so a customer isn't pestered with follow-up messages for no reason. But that closed thread isn't dead — it's just quiet. The instant that same customer messages back with a word like emergency, urgent, or critical, Hermia reopens the conversation automatically and picks qualification straight back up, no waiting on a human to notice and manually reopen it.

It's a small thing that matters at 2am: a tenant who mentioned a slow drain last week and is now standing in a flooded bathroom doesn't need to find your number again or start from scratch. They just message the same chat, and Hermia is straight back on it.

Who they are — identity and matching.

First name and last name are captured from the very first message, so the customer is greeted properly and matched correctly against your existing records — phone and email are both stored as matching keys, so a returning customer is recognised even if they use a different email or number the second time.

The Customer record stays clean and identity-only — everything about this specific job, including urgency, pricing and billing, is written to the Lead instead, so a customer with five jobs over the years never has old urgency or estimate data overwritten by a new one.

What's wrong, how urgent, and what it costs.

Contact phone and email travel with the job as well as the customer, so whoever's dispatching never has to jump back to the customer card. Asset Type tells the technician what they're dealing with before they leave the office — a hot water system, a pipe, a fixture, an appliance — so the right tools and parts go on the truck.

Urgency — Emergency, Urgent, or Standard — and Estimate Amount are both written to the Lead, per job, so you can triage at a glance and see exactly what was quoted or agreed without it being overwritten by whatever the customer's next job turns out to be. Billing Entity confirms who's accountable for that specific job's invoice. Fault Code is a standardised code for the specific fault type, written to its own field so faults can be tracked and reported on across your whole customer base over time. Defect Status records where the issue currently sits — active, intermittent, or resolved pending confirmation.

Isolations, hazards and how to get in.

Isolations is its own safety question, asked directly to the lead — it captures whether the water has been isolated at the mains or at the fixture before a technician can safely start work, and whether any gas or electrical isolation is also needed for the job. That's the difference between a plumber knowing the mains are already shut off versus discovering an active leak on arrival. It's stored as its own field, separate from general notes, so it shows as a distinct checklist item — never buried in a paragraph.

Hazards covers anything else on site — a dog on the property, restricted areas, awkward access under a house or in a roof cavity — kept distinct from isolations rather than folded into general safety notes. Access Notes covers gate codes, locked rooms, and who to call on arrival, so a technician is never standing at a locked gate with no way in.

Typed loosely. Stored Simpro-clean.

Whatever the lead types — "the place on Collins Street, Melbourne" — is parsed and written into Simpro exactly the way Simpro needs it: street address, suburb, state and postcode as their own fields, feeding a properly structured Site record rather than one messy line of text.

Photos and videos the lead sends are attached to the same job as a permanent gallery link, so a technician can see the fault before they've even left the office — not just read a description of it.

Contact details, filled in for you.

The moment a lead qualifies, Hermia writes their details straight into your AroFlo Client/Supplier record — name, address, suburb, state and postcode, plus a primary contact with phone, mobile and email. There's no retyping from a WhatsApp thread into a form, and no copy-paste between the two.

Matching works the same way it does in Simpro: phone and email are used to recognise a returning customer, so Hermia never creates a second Client record for someone already on file.

The job site, mapped straight in.

Alongside the Client record, Hermia writes the job site into your AroFlo Location model — linked to the right Client/Supplier, with suburb, state, postcode, an on-site contact, phone and email all filled in. Your team opens the job already knowing exactly where they're going and who to call when they arrive.

Same qualification. Minus the scheduling.

Every enquiry gets Hermia's full WhatsApp qualification on AroFlo, exactly as it does on Simpro — same questions, same filtering, same warm and hot leads. The only thing AroFlo can't do is scheduling: it doesn't currently support the live calendar integration Simpro does, so Hermia doesn't book a technician or touch your calendar. You get the fully qualified lead and decide when to book it in yourself.

The answers from qualification don't get written into AroFlo's own fields the way they do in Simpro — instead, the full set of answers is delivered straight to you as a WhatsApp message, alongside the client and location records already filled in.

Put simply: both run the same qualification. With Simpro, the qualified lead lands inside your CRM and is booked onto your calendar. With AroFlo, we hand you the same warm and hot leads directly — client and site details filled in, qualification in your pocket — and the one thing missing is the automatic booking.

Every answer is judged by our system — not by the AI.

Before a single word is written back to your customer, their answer is run through a fixed set of checks built for that exact question. Does the address have a street number and a suburb. Does "pipe" say which pipe. Does the fault description actually describe a fault a plumber can act on.

Those checks are code. They run identically every single time, on every contractor's account, at two in the morning under load, on the ten thousandth job as on the first. The same answer always gets the same verdict. The AI's only job is to turn that verdict into a warm, human sentence — it never gets to overrule it, and it never decides whether a lead passes.

That matters because AI is excellent at writing and unreliable at judging. So we only let it do the first one.

The money still on the table.

Hermia knows which leads accepted your price and which are still negotiating — so your review surfaces the jobs about to walk: “$4,200 sitting in negotiation this week — here are the customers and their numbers.” That's revenue you can go re-close today, not a figure you glance at and forget.

It also proves the thing you can't see day to day: how fast you answered. When you reply to every enquiry in seconds and the other five contractors take hours, that's why you're winning the work — and your review puts a number on it.