How have home services customers changed their behavior?
They research on their phones and act immediately. A homeowner who notices a pest issue while making dinner doesn't wait until morning to Google pest control companies — they look it up right then, at 7pm, and start reaching out. If they don't hear back within minutes, they move to the next company.
75% of consumers now prefer texting a business over calling it (SMS Comparison). Among homeowners under 45 — an increasingly large portion of the home services customer base — that preference is even stronger. They don't want to call. They want to text, get a fast answer, and get on with their evening.
A phone-only business in 2026 is invisible to these customers. Not because the business is bad — because the channel doesn't match how the customer communicates.
What channels are home services customers using to reach businesses?
In priority order for new customer inquiries:
- Google search → phone call or text (still dominant for discovery)
- Google search → text directly from the listing (growing rapidly as Google integrates SMS)
- WhatsApp (essential in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking markets)
- Facebook Messenger (particularly for referral-based inquiries)
- Email (declining, especially for urgent service requests)
The businesses capturing the most leads in 2026 are present on all of these channels — or at minimum, SMS, WhatsApp, and voice.
See how home services businesses are unifying their communication channels. Try our demo →
What's the real cost of being phone-only in the home services industry?
Research from Invoca found that home services businesses already miss 27% of inbound calls even when they're trying to answer. Add the customers who never called at all — who texted and got nothing, who sent a WhatsApp message that wasn't monitored, who clicked a contact button and received no response — and the actual lead loss is significantly larger.
Each missed inquiry in home services represents approximately $1,200 in lost revenue (Invoca, 2024). Being phone-only multiplies that loss because it excludes an entire population of potential customers who simply won't call.
How does a home services business add texting without adding workload?
This is the right question — and the answer is AI.
Polu.ai gives home services businesses a single number for SMS and WhatsApp. An AI handles the incoming conversations: answering common questions, quoting general pricing, checking availability, booking appointments. The business owner or dispatcher gets a clean handoff for anything that requires personal attention.
You don't add hours to your day. You add a channel that was previously closed to an entirely new population of customers who are ready to hire you — they just needed a way to reach you that wasn't a phone call.
See how it works →
Get started → polu.ai/register
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Sources: SMS Comparison, Invoca (2024)