20× cheaper. 5× more effective.
Every emergency answered.
How Emergency Hero replaced an expensive overflow call-answering setup with Cloudax voice AI, and gained the confidence that every call gets answered, even at peak.
Numbers worth framing
~20×
cheaper than overflow at peak
5×
more effective at scale
~30,000
emergency call-outs a year
Unlimited
concurrent calls answered
Who we partnered with
One of the UK's largest national emergency call-out services, where every missed call is a customer in crisis.
Client
Emergency Hero
Industry
24/7 emergency home services: plumbing, gas heating, electrics, drainage
Scale
~30,000 call-outs per year · Nationwide UK · 24/7/365
Use cases
Inbound voice AI, overflow handling, lead qualification, self-serve routing, structured data capture
Integrations
CRM, call analytics, internal workflows
Featuring
Aaron McWilliam, Managing Director
The short version
Challenge
Emergencies don't schedule. Overflow call-answering was getting expensive at peak, and gave no structured data on what was a genuine lead.
Solution
AI voice agent picks up after five rings, qualifies callers, captures dispatch info, routes self-serve enquiries, and writes structured data into the CRM.
Result
~20× cheaper at peak. 5× more effective at scale. Every call answered with unlimited concurrent capacity, decoupled from headcount.
Emergencies don't schedule
Burst pipes, faulty boilers and electrical faults arrive without warning, not when staff are rostered.
Emergency Hero is one of the UK's largest national emergency call-out services, handling around 30,000 plumbing, heating, electrical and drainage emergencies a year. Call volume is impossible to schedule for, especially at peak (winter, weekends, public holidays).
The team had been overflowing inbound calls into a separate call-answering service. But peak-season bills kept climbing, and the team had no structured data on which calls were genuine sales leads versus follow-up enquiries, leaving staffing, marketing and capacity decisions as guesswork.
“With the nature of what we do, we can't really schedule people in. Emergencies are reactive, they happen when they happen. The cost of having someone to manage basic enquiries wasn't really delivering ROI, and it was getting quite expensive.”
Aaron McWilliam
Managing Director · Emergency Hero
Picks up where the team can't
A voice agent on the inbound line, self-serve routing for follow-ups, and structured data straight into the CRM.
Cloudax deployed an AI voice agent that picks up after five rings 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, so live agents stay focused on the calls that genuinely need a human, and the business never drops an emergency.
Onboarding took a few weeks, followed by a two-week window where the team tuned questions, responses and even the voice itself. The agent now plugs directly into the rest of the Emergency Hero stack rather than sitting to the side of it.
“It's been a really collaborative solution build: refined, tweaked and almost completely reinvented since. The whole collaborative way of tweaking things and refining the scope really worked well for us, and now we've got something I think is really unique.”
Aaron McWilliam
Managing Director · Emergency Hero
“Our caller integrates with our CRM, and that's quite an important part of what we do. If every call just came in as an email notification, I'd be reliant on people checking email. The way it's integrated helps us avoid human error and use the data to work out how many calls are sales leads versus follow-up enquiries, and make better decisions on staffing and ROI.”
Aaron McWilliam
Managing Director · Emergency Hero
The shift
Before
After Cloudax
Expensive overflow call-answering service
AI agent picks up after 5 rings, 24/7
Costs spiralled at peak season
~20× cheaper at peak vs. the old setup
Concurrent call capacity capped by headcount
Unlimited simultaneous calls answered
No structured data on lead type or intent
Every call writes structured data into the CRM
Reliant on staff manually checking inboxes
Dispatch-ready handoffs with zero human error
Roughly 20× cheaper, 5× more effective
Capacity is no longer tied to headcount, and the spiky, un-rosterable parts of the year stopped being a staffing problem. Emergency Hero now also has the structured CRM data to make smarter decisions on staffing, marketing spend and ROI.
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 team is now extending the agent's capabilities into other areas of the business to support continued growth toward becoming a UK household name.
As Aaron puts it: “It's definitely given me the confidence that even during the busiest periods, everyone will get a call answered.”
“From a call-answering perspective, you need a certain number of people to answer a certain number of concurrent calls. 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.”
Aaron McWilliam
Managing Director · Emergency Hero
Aiming for household-name scale
Cloudax is now being extended into other parts of the business as Emergency Hero pushes for nationwide household recognition.
Emergency Hero is already extending the AI agent into additional workflows, supporting continued growth and a stated ambition of becoming the UK's go-to emergency call-out brand.
“We're already, in my opinion, the largest call-out business in the UK for what we do, and I have ambitions to grow even further, to a household name. Cloudax is a key part of that.”
Aaron McWilliam
Managing Director · Emergency Hero
“Their solution is really collaborative, and the way they price it is really good. It makes AI available to anyone, which is why I've referred them to loads of people.”
Aaron McWilliam
Managing Director · Emergency Hero
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