How Emergency Hero, one of the UK's largest national emergency call-out services (handling around 30,000 plumbing, heating, electrical and drainage emergencies a year), replaced an expensive overflow call-answering setup with Cloudax voice AI — and gained the confidence that every call gets answered, even at peak times of the year.
Emergencies are reactive — burst pipes, faulty boilers and electrical faults happen when they happen, not when staff are rostered. Emergency Hero had been overflowing inbound calls into a separate call-answering service. The cost of having people manage basic qualification enquiries wasn't delivering ROI, and at the top end of the year the bill spiralled. The team also lacked structured data on which calls were genuine sales leads versus follow-up enquiries.
Cloudax deployed an AI voice agent that picks up whenever the human team can't answer. The agent qualifies the caller, captures the key information needed to dispatch an engineer, and routes self-serve enquiries away from the phone queue. Crucially, the agent integrates straight into Emergency Hero's CRM — every call writes structured data on lead type, intent and outcome.
Every call is now answered, including during the busiest periods of the year. Because the AI handles unlimited simultaneous calls, capacity is no longer tied to headcount. At peak the solution is roughly 20× cheaper than the previous overflow setup, and Aaron rates it 5× more effective at handling calls at scale.
"The Cloudax solution gives us the ability to answer an unlimited amount of calls at the same time and still capture all the data we need as a business. It's given me the confidence that even during the busiest periods, everyone will get a call answered." — Aaron McWilliam, Managing Director, Emergency Hero.