Customers Want a Reply Within an Hour. Only 1 in 5 Home Service Pros Deliver.

Jobber, the field service software company founded in Edmonton, publishes some of the most detailed research on how trades and home service businesses actually operate. It rarely gets coverage outside the industry's own circles. Its 2026 Home Service Trends Report contains a finding that every plumber, electrician, HVAC tech, cleaner, and contractor should see, because the owners surveyed are describing their own blind spot.

The Gap, in the Owners' Own Words

Jobber's 2026 Home Service Trends Report is based on a survey of 1,050 home service business owners across cleaning, HVAC, roofing, plumbing, electrical, lawn care, tree care, and general contracting, conducted through Conjointly in December 2025. Owners were asked how quickly their customers expect a response. Their answer: over 55% of customers expect a reply within the hour, including 28% who expect one immediately, and more than 70% expect to hear back the same day.

The same owners were asked how fast they actually respond to leads. Only 20% said within the hour. Jobber reports that 60% reply to leads the same day.

It's worth being precise about what this is. The expectation figures come from the owners, describing what their customers want; the report doesn't include a separate survey of customers on this question. That makes the gap more striking, not less. This isn't an outside critic saying trades are too slow. It's more than a thousand business owners saying, in effect, "most of my customers want an answer within the hour, and most of the time I can't give them one."

Why "Speed Doesn't Win Jobs" Is the Wrong Conclusion

Here's the part that explains the gap. When the same owners were asked what customers weigh most when choosing a provider, speed of initial response came in at 25%, far behind competitive pricing at 62% and positive reviews at 51%. Read quickly, that suggests a slow reply isn't a big deal, because customers are really choosing on price and reputation.

But that ranking measures how customers decide between businesses they've already heard back from. Speed decides whether you make that shortlist in the first place. A homeowner with a leaking water heater who calls three plumbers will compare the quotes they receive. A plumber who doesn't call back until tomorrow afternoon isn't losing on price. They're never in the comparison. We've looked at this before in how long customers wait before calling a competitor, and the cost of it adds up quickly when you run the numbers on slow response.

What Homeowners Experience on the Other Side

A separate Jobber study looks at the same problem from the customer's side. In a survey of 800 people who had bought a single-family home within the previous two years, conducted by Coleman Parkes in May 2026, 75% had hired a home service professional since moving in. Of those homeowners, 15% had to repeatedly follow up with a service provider, and 9% never received a response at all. Jobber's summary notes that homeowners' experiences shape what they expect from the businesses they hire, pointing to clear communication, transparent pricing, and fast responses.

Nearly 1 in 10 homeowners reaching out to a business and hearing nothing back isn't a rounding error. Every one of those is a job that went to someone else, and a customer who now has a story about the business that never called.

AI Is Already in the Business, Just Not at the Front Door

Home service owners aren't avoiding technology. In Jobber's report, 52% of owners said they now use AI. The most common uses among those adopters were quoting (54%) and invoicing (52%), both back-office work that happens after a customer is already engaged. The first response to a new customer is where the gap in this data sits, and it's not among the leading uses Jobber reports.

Closing the Gap Without Hiring a Dispatcher

For most trades businesses, the reason for the slow reply is simple: the person who would answer the phone is on a roof, under a sink, or driving between jobs. Hiring someone just to answer calls is expensive, and it still leaves evenings and weekends uncovered. This is where automation helps directly.

• Calls you can't take still get answered. An AI voice agent picks up when you can't, answers the caller's questions about your services and service area, and books the job or estimate straight into your calendar.
• New leads get a call back in seconds. Our speed-to-lead system calls new leads from your website forms, Facebook lead ads, and other sources in as little as 30 seconds, well inside the hour that most customers expect.
• It works with the tools you already use. Bookings and lead details flow into the software you already run your business on, including Jobber.

The point isn't to replace the personal relationship a good tradesperson builds with customers. It's to make sure the customer gets an answer while they're still deciding, so that the relationship has a chance to start.

A Note on the Data

Both surveys are American. Jobber is a Canadian company, but these studies surveyed U.S. business owners and U.S. homeowners. We've used them because they're the most detailed recent data on home service response times we could find, and nothing about a burst pipe or a broken furnace works differently north of the border. The customer expectation figures are owners' reports of what their customers want, not a direct survey of customers, as noted above.

Sources

• Jobber, 2026 Home Service Trends Report. Survey of 1,050 U.S. home service business owners, conducted through Conjointly in December 2025, plus aggregated Jobber platform data. Source for the response expectation figures, the 20% within-the-hour and 60% same-day response figures, the 62% / 51% / 25% decision-factor ranking, and the AI adoption figures.
• Jobber, Recent Homebuyer Report press release (June 24, 2026). Survey of 800 U.S. homeowners who bought a single-family home in the previous two years, conducted by Coleman Parkes in May 2026. Source for the 75%, 15%, and 9% figures.