Renovations and home extensions · Brisbane
AI lead qualification for a Brisbane renovation builder
A renovation and extension builder was getting enquiries that went nowhere — the wrong jobs, and not enough detail to tell the good ones apart. We rebuilt the website and put an assistant on it that has the first conversation, works out what the project actually is, and passes it on.
Where this project is up to
Built, deployed and creating real enquiries. The new site has not replaced allhandson.com.au yet, so the comparison below is between two sites that exist at once rather than a switch-over that has already happened. There are no before-and-after enquiry figures either: that needs a full quarter of live traffic, and the numbers will go here when there are some.
What was actually wrong
The business does good work and had a website that showed it. What it did not have was a way to tell a small one-room job from a full extension before someone had spent half an hour on the phone finding out. Enquiries arrived as a name and a sentence, so every one of them cost the same time to sort, and the small ones crowded out the large ones.
- Enquiries arrived without enough detail to rank them
- The larger projects the business is best at were not the ones it attracted
- Sorting them took the owner’s time, which is the scarcest thing in a trade business
The assistant that has the first conversation
A visitor who is thinking about a renovation now talks to an assistant instead of filling in a form. It asks what they are planning, which rooms, whether they own the place, roughly when — the questions a person would ask on a first call — and turns the answers into a written brief that reaches the business as a proper lead. This is what "AI lead qualification" means in practice: the job is understood before anyone picks up the phone.
- Collects the project brief in ordinary conversation, not a twelve-field form
- Every conversation becomes a written enquiry with the detail already in it
- The owner opens a lead knowing what the job is and whether to chase it
- It hands over to a person rather than trying to close anything itself
The rules it works under
The reason most business owners are wary of putting AI in front of customers is that it might say something they then have to honour. That is a fair worry, and it is an engineering problem rather than a prompt-writing one. The rules below are enforced in code, so they hold whether or not the model cooperates.
- It never states a price it has not been cleared to state — the approved figures live in one file, and anything else is withheld
- It cannot invent a service, a timeframe or a guarantee to fill a gap in what it knows
- Every enquiry is saved the moment it is made, before any email is attempted — if the mail provider is down, that costs a notification, not a customer
- There is one path for creating an enquiry, so nothing can be captured and then quietly lost
- The spend is capped in dollars per day, not just in messages, because a message count does not bound a bill
Only claims the business can stand behind
The same discipline applies to the website around it. Reviews on the site are the client’s real ones, carried across word for word; a photograph is only presented as the business’s own work if the business took it. Testing enforces both. This is not caution for its own sake — a builder publishes under a licence number, and a claim that cannot be backed is a bigger problem for them than a thin page ever was.
What this means if you are not a technology business
Nothing here required the client to become technical. They did not choose a model, tune a prompt or manage a server, and there is no dashboard they have to remember to check. The work was ours, the rules were agreed in plain English, and what they got back was better enquiries. That is the arrangement we are offering — the build, and then someone who keeps improving it as the business changes.
Before and after
Captured while both sites were up, so these are two things that existed at once. They show a difference in the work, not a result — the numbers come later. Select any image to see it full size.
Before
After
The old page opened on a photograph with the business name over it. The new one leads with what the business does, and puts the licence number, the suburb and the rating where someone deciding whether to call can see them.
Before
After
The heading now says what the page is about in the words people search for. Beside the copy is what the job typically includes and how long it takes on site — the questions that otherwise arrive as an enquiry.
Before
After
The old form collected a message. The new one asks what is being renovated and what stage the project is at, so an enquiry arrives already sorted — and the phone number sits beside it for anyone who would rather just call.
Before
After
The same four reviews, carried across word for word. What changed is that each one now shows what the job actually was, which is what a reader is looking for.
After
There is no “before” for this: the old site had nothing like it. Worth noting what the panel does not show. It has the whole brief and still quotes no figure, because it has not been cleared to — that is the guard working, not a gap.
After
A visitor describes what they are planning and gets a question back about whether the plumbing is moving — the thing that changes the job. It opens by telling them it cannot price work or commit to anything, which is the first thing a cautious owner wants said.
Questions we get asked about this
- What does AI lead qualification actually do?
- It has the conversation you would otherwise have on the phone. It asks what the job is, how big, where and when, and writes that down as an enquiry you can act on. You stop spending your evenings working out which of ten messages is worth a call.
- Will it quote prices to my customers?
- Only figures you have approved, and nothing else. Prices live in one file that you sign off; anything outside it is withheld rather than guessed. If you would rather it quoted nothing at all, that is a setting, and it is how this build currently runs.
- What happens when it does not know something?
- It says so and hands the enquiry to a person. It is built to stop rather than to fill the gap, because a confident wrong answer about a quote or a timeframe is a promise you then have to deal with.
- Do I need a new website to have one?
- Not necessarily. An assistant can go onto a site that already works. The rebuild happened here because the site was also attracting the wrong kind of job — that was a positioning problem, not a chatbot problem, and the two were worth fixing together.
- Does this only work for builders?
- No. The mechanism suits any business where enquiries vary a lot in size and the owner is the one sorting them — trades, professional services, anyone quoting bespoke work. Renovation was the first one; nothing about it is specific to construction.
Want the same thing pointed at your enquiries?
Tell us what kind of work you want more of, and what you are spending time sorting. That is where this one started.